Usenet service providers and search engines have taken most of the legal heat[1][2], presumably because they're easier targets than anonymous usenet users.

[1]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/17/big_record_labels_fi...

[2]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/30/usenet_search_engine...

But they're not anonymous, they pay a credit card subscription. This enables prosecutions for child porn offences, even if the offence was carried out in another jurisdiction.

Most major NNTP providers purportedly don't track user downloads. Some of them even claim to not retain upload logs.

It's also somewhat difficult to determine, given a file on Usenet, which provider it came from.

BitTorrent requires you to give up your IP address to join a swarm of users downloading a file. Usenet doesn't. That's what I meant by anonymous.

The Usenet server is centralized though. They could sue the provider to get the names of everyone that downloaded a set of posts. This is made much easier by the fact that most popular Usenet servers are paid for nowadays (especially ones that carry alt.binaries.*).

They would first have to pass laws to force Usenet providers to log their customers' viewing and download history.

Many Usenet providers make a 'will not track' promise to their customers. This is from Giganews' homepage, for example: "We will never sell your information to third parties or track what you download." http://www.giganews.com/

Has anyone ever been prosecuted for downloading something? Every case I have seen is about uploading, otherwise you can't even safely browse youtube--someone might have used a copyrighted song in their cat fart video.

They could. The answer they'd get is, "it's too expensive to store everything people downloaded, and our paying customers don't want us storing that information anyway."

A law could be passed requiring Usenet providers in country X to log downloads, but then you could just use a server hosted in some other country.

Preventing people from copying information is like preventing water from being wet. You fail.

I don't know why anyone would use a real credit card tied to their name & SSN for Usenet. That's just asking for trouble, considering how more and more people are mentioning it on public boards. The day I saw a post on how to download nzbs from Usenet from Lifehacker complete with detailing how to setup sab and sickbeard + couchpotato, I almost had a heart attack.

Usenet is protected by "common carrier" legal immunity, not by secrecy. I am sure the MPAA and RIAA know what Usenet is... but consider how flaky their "we have proof of you uploading the video to us" cases are, and then consider how they would go after people who didn't even upload anything.