The only time the downloader gets in trouble is when the government wants to scare the public into not downloading stuff anymore.
Well if any of this passes, you'd get in trouble just for searching in Google without even downloading anything:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=18815
QUOTEThe White House's vision is perhaps a prelude to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which will go before Congress later this year. The bill would make
P2P or BitTorrent client development a criminal offense if the distributed software was used for infringement. It also implements an interesting provision called
"imminent infringement", which allows the government to charge people who they think might be about to infringe with a civil offense (for example if you searched "torrent daft punk"). This is among the first official "thought crime" provisions to be proposed by the U.S. government. The bill also makes it a criminal offense to bypass DRM.