As the party rages on Sentosa and we roll into 2005, the new, ill-conceived copyright laws come into effect, making piracy a criminal instead of civil offence and extending the already ludicrously long duration of copyrights further still.

Of course, the 368,000 households which subscribe to broadband aren't all just checking their mail, visiting the Straits Times website, discussing Singapore Idol and donating money to help the Tsunami victims.

They are acquiring copyrighted material commercially unavailable in Singapore, material that otherwise would be monstrously censored/mutilated/cut, or material sold at ridiculously inflated prices (eg $80 for the Extended Edition of Return of the King on DVD).

As has been opined in a more elegant fashion: "I download tv shows only and this because Singapore takes a) ages to show, b) when they do show its at some terrible time c) the way our tv programming is done, u think they were hiring monkeys to just randomly slot shows.. (enough reality crap already) and can someone tell me why downloading tv shows is illegal? we're not selling it.. its the same as the vcr."

It is reasonably sure that the laws are targeted mainly at your run-of-the-mill neighborhood pirates (who ironically will probably see at least a temporary boost in sales from frightened erstwhile copyright infringers) and businesses; after all, just like the law on Unnatural Sex, the new laws threaten to criminalise a hefty segment of the populace, but most I've spoken to want to play it safe. In any case, there seem to be 4 broad courses of action:

1) Adopt a "wait and see" attitude - home users will hold up on the downloading and see how many chickens are slaughtered in the first month or two before resuming their activities.
2) Continue on as before - those who adopt this path will throw caution to the winds. After all, they reason, jaywalking is illegal too - just don't get caught
3) Continue with precautions - routing P2P applications through proxy servers, for example, or using a ban list to screen out "evil" IPs
4) Switching to less risky ways of getting what you want - eg Freenet, Share

What is your preferred course of action?