I really thought I'd upgrade from xp to 7 but MS seems to be hell bound to piss of their customer base. My kubuntu install will get even more usage then it already does. Nobody owns my own files but me.

No but, I live in the Netherlands that has the same tax scheme, here downloading is legal and uploading is not. So you have to be carefull with the software you are using. In emule I set an empty directory as shared. I'm not sure how things work with bittorrent since the software downloads and uploads at the same time. I do however remove the torrent when the download is finished. Someone might get pieces of a song but never the entire file. I don't know how tracable that is. Can you identify a song when all I'm sending is 10% of the file?

Here politicians have suggested everybody pay a small extra overall tax in return for legal free downloads. This tax would then be distributed in the same way the levy is now. I wouldn't mind that if it makes the downloads legal.