I highly recommend
utorrent to any and everyone. It's simply a fantastic program. Feature packed, very lightweight.
I suggest enabling encryption on traffic and randomising the port it's operating on. You can even push the traffic through a proxy if you want, although that might reduce speeds quite significantly.
Where i live there's an element of legal ambiguity in the whole thing, the Privacy Act protects your data being examined by a third party without your consent. There is one isp that i know that will take action if the RIAA requests it, but apparently when people have called them up, they've re-connected them without issue. Most others tell the RIAA to, politely of course, stick it. My isp is one of them.