The most serious crime regarding piracy in Portugal (and UE for that matter) is distribution. This means that if the IGAC has permission to distribute, then the downloads are perfectly legal and no one can be charged. If they don’t, well, then they’re the ones committing the crime.
It’s the same as buying stollen goods. Here no one is guilty, unless they can prove the buyer was aware that the goods where stollen. If anyone happens to buy a stollen computer, the only thing they can do is take that computer back.
That’s why in europe they go after trackers, like PirateBay or BTtuga/BTNext (portuguese trackers) and not after downloaders.

There are also laws about negligence that say that if you don’t try to protect your assets, then your are also partially guilty and becomes much more difficult to sue others.
I.e. if you willingly give your car keys to someone you think is a thief, without any kind of threat from him, then you cannot sue him, not even file a complaint against him.
So, if they give music away to be stollen, then they are neglecting their rights.

Finally, the only ones that can legally use “traps” to get to criminals are the police. No one else, not even the government, can do that. And even the police needs a court order, clearly stating what they can and can’t do. And to get that court order they have to obtain previous evidence against a person, a group or an entity.
That’s why even recordings of politicians talking about their crimes where orderer to be destroyed by the court itself. Because the police didn’t have permission to tap their phones.

As you can see, even the law is not on their side. The only people that can actually be arrested are the ones that distribute with intent of profit, like selling copies of DVDs on the streets. And even them have to be caught red handed by the police.

So tough luck!

PS: If they really try to come after my IP adress, I hope they enjoy the trip to Seychelles. :p

I doubt they’re so naive as to believe that they’d be able to contain distribution. They don’t care about that. They’re just out to punish downloaders of specific content from IGAC agents. This, and the fact that the ‘punishment’ is merely the threat of terminating the downloaders’ ISP accounts, undermines their moral position; they’re effectively admitting that the content has no monetary value in this marketplace, and that it’s not about the money. Also clearly it’s ridiculous for them to think that disconnecting even a few thousand downloaders is anything more than pissing into the wind.

Anyway, their plan is doomed to fail for many reasons, but not because of the soundness of the argument that “it was OK for the agents to upload, therefore it must be OK for me to download.” As much sense as that excuse makes to you, it’s not taking into account the letter of the law, which is what matters in court. How many buyers of drugs from undercover cops would love to get off the hook with the argument “the cop was authorized to give it to me, so I must be authorized to receive it!”

And of course I’m speaking of the law. You expect to go into court and argue a case without taking into account the letter of the law? I can only guess about the peculiarities of the Portuguese system, but copyright law is pretty similar in most countries, because they’re all party to the same international conventions (Berne, etc.) which commit those countries to enacting legislation that embodies certain principles. Naturally, there are differences in both statutory and case law from country to country, some of them significant (e.g., exemptions for private copying, and how long works are protected), but for the purposes of determining whether infringement has occurred, they’re mostly the same: there’s a reproduction right, and a separate distribution right. If a copy of an original work was made without ‘license’, and it wasn’t an exempted situation (Fair Use, non-first-sale, exempted work, whatever), then whoever made the copy has infringed the reproduction right, period. If they distributed the copy without license, then they infringed the distribution right. The AFP probably granted both rights to the IGAC. They haven’t granted any such rights to any other parties, and from their point of view, the law is on their side in saying that the downloaders didn’t have explicit permission for their role in infringing the reproduction right. You and the PPP are claiming that the technical requirements of P2P services prevent the separation of the distribution right from the reproduction right, that an upload can’t occur without a download, so authorizing one means authorizing both. AFAIK, the law doesn’t say that; instead, there’s a body of case law (in countries where that matters) where judges and juries have come down on one side or the other for specific situations. Nothing’s impossible, but it’s foolish to assume that a court would hear your argument and would have no choice but to opt for a loose interpretation of the law, when the default is a strict interpretation.

As for “because this authorized distributor made it available, I thought I had permission” implying “that I knew that if anyone else had made it available, I wouldn’t have had permission to download” is both nonsense and irrelevant.

How would I assume that?

If they stuck a label on it saying “Only this torrent, from here, is a legal distribution” then maybe you might have a point, but that in itself is implicit authorisation to download.

If the authorised distributor made it available then they made it available. If I get it from them, then they gave it to me. Simply as that.

“So you’d have to prove that you knew it was coming from the honeypot at the time you started the download” is also false. I’d only have to know that they’d started the distribution, after that it’s out in the wild, with implicit permission.

Really, have you and they not thought this through. People from *all*over*the*world* will be on these torrents, not just the Portuguese. What is their plan for containment? As far as I can see it would be impossible to restrict the data transfer to only those in Portgual. Even if the initial seeder did manage to do so, which is technically feasible, all the other peers will simply distribute the data between themselves and outside of the control of the ‘honeypot’.

This project has FAIL written all over it.