That's true, but you see, on USEnet, predominately found on Unix systems, you had to have an IQ a tad higher than that found in most "point-n-click" environments.

Many of the larger USEnet hubs just blocks the binaries newsgroups too.

It is like all things about piracy - it is a question of scale and how much money is involved. Piracy has been around a long time - when people were making copies of their CD's on cassettes for their car, no one cared. The people had bought the album at least once anyway, so there wasn't a complete economic loss, the economic loss was pretty small in the grand scheme of things. Was it illegal? Yes, according to the letter of the law. Did anyone care? No.

From Napster onwards, the music and movie industries have figured they're losing $USD billions per year. I've even read of movies being made available on the P2P networks 10 days before the movie hits the theaters. The counterfeiters in the PRC are said to use the P2P network MP3 distro's as a fast way of getting content for their fake CD/DVD pressings.

The bittorrent, gnutella, morpheus, limewire et al networks really get the studios into a tizzy because there is no one "server" to serve with a cease & desist letter. This has resulted in such nonsense as "digital rights management" efforts clear down into the BIOS specifications for upcoming systems. In the end, what will kill most user's computer privacy will be the outlandish efforts made by the MPAA/RIAA, and the Congress doing their bidding.

One of the things in Vista that will rile up many users will be the DRM crap MSFT has jammed into Windows.