They have enough lawyers to find out a way but even if they know they can't win, they can ruin people by just suing. It costs money to form a defence, sometimes more than what the people have. This is the bit that's meant to scare them but this is all just a guess, like you say, maybe they won't bother.

Decriminalised doesn't mean legal or even "effectively legal". What this part here is saying is that it's not a criminal matter anymore - you aren't going to go to jail for filesharing or piracy.

That said, companies would still be able to sue you for copyright infringement, etc, unless I'm mistaken (which I could be - I'm no lawyer).

Good to know the U.S gov't isn't the only one doing stupid shit.

lel.

just lel

All consumers?  In economics, the definition of a consumer is someone who contributes to the economic system by paying for a product.  This is more like a huge victory for those who want things for free.

How does this benefit those who do pay?

The US can find these guys anywhere. Megaupload wasn't even run from the US and they still managed to hunt the guy down and shutdown his website. In fact if someone wants to create such a website the UK would be the worst place to do it because more so than any other government in the world they would likely turn those people over to the US.

Makes sense. It's an unwinnable fight, so why bother doing anything other than try?

It's one of those things that the industry has to co-opt, rather than destroy. You can beat the file-sharers at their own game, just like the fight between websites and adblock will one day be resolved by websites adopting ad standards that are non-intrusive enough for adblock to let them through. You can't beat it, you might as well get out ahead of it.

Should see some interesting developments in digitally distributed content in the UK soon.

I was just going to use that example. Basically, Nintendo sued modders for modding Wii and copying games, and lost. Court said that they have no control over their product past the point of sale. They got their money. In this case, modders were even allowed to make a profit, because they were adding to the value of the console.

Modded X360 consoles were always legally sold in Croatia, as long as the modification was billed and VAT paid for.

On very shaky legal ground that anything that is not registered with a country's specific domain (like a .co.uk) is an American domain by default (so all .org, .com, .edu domains count as American domains, so America can do what they want with them).

The fact that they haven't managed to stick anything to Dotcom yet shows the limits of America's overreach in that case.