[pyre]

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.*).

[modernerd]

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/

[cma]

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.

[jrockway]

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.