Yeah, because OBVIOUSLY the only people who might possibly have a chance to run afoul of this would be those trying to download things "illegally" since OBVIOUSLY bittorrent has no real "legal" use, right?

*eye roll*

First of all, not all uses of BitTorrent are illegal. I've downloaded many Linux distros with BitTorrent.

Second of all, if you're having bandwidth problems, blame your ISP. If I'm paying for unlimited high-speed internet, I'm going to use it!

Your comment is supremely fallacious. You've made the following two incorrect assumptions, among others:

1) The only things down/uploaded through torrents are unauthorised copies of copyrighted works.

Wrong - torrents are a primary distribution source for large files of all natures - latest Linux ISOs, freely-available video and audio content, open-source binaries.

There are also a few companies using torrents to distribute their copyrighted works, with users purchasing the licence and activating it separately.

2) Torrents are the only high-bandwidth consumers.

How about the BBC iPlayer? YouTube?

There's quite a few very high-bandwidth consumers out there.

Peer-to-peer transfer makes economic sense for many large-sized transfers, as it saves huge amounts on hosting costs.

BT do that anyway, it's in their T&Cs, they're happy for their customers to torrent, but at busy times they will throttle their speed back. Anyone torrenting does so over a 24 hour period so it doesn't much matter if the speed is throttled back during the evening, utorrent actually has a setting for the user to do this too. So, whilst downloading the latest Oblivion user created uber mod (torrents have a huge game modders section as well as all the illegal stuff), I'm quite happy for it to trickle down in the evening.

If you're having slow speeds in the evening when you're 'legally' using the internet, maybe you should take that up with your ISP.