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It's good opsec to have a VPN when torrenting but thats largely due to the risk of being identified commiting a crime.(Or at the very least, having your ISP send you an angry letter about copyright infringement)
If thats not part of your threat model, then you dont need to worry.
Or you live in a country that purelly doesn't care about it to the point you can have a seedbox running 24/7 throught your network.
Bonus points if it also shows your "location" to be 100km away. To the point that it sometimes shows you to be in another country next to your.
Another point when it changes your public ip address dailly.
The general philosophy: they can't prosecute the entire populous.
If everyone is pirating, they focus on the ones who pirate the worst shit or the ones who pirate the most shit for profit.
In a sea of pirates, you don't get tagged.
If people stop pirating, the bar for too extreme or too much lowers.
They do pirate the most extreme and the most prolific pirates, however.
A story as old as time.
dont give 'em anything to fuck with you down the road. seems a no brainer. "Mrs. TheHooligan95? ahh yes we are here to confiscate your home because your son TheHooligan95 illegally downloaded Ninja Kods 3 back in 2001. No, you cant talk to your son. He was already executed for corporate treason this reason."
Use I2P guys. The more the better. It is Foss and is 100 times better then any VPN. It is only a bit slower sometimes.
Just use I2P? Can you access public trackers via I2P or do you have to use the crap internal ones?
Recent qbitorrent update supports cross sharing between public/i2p users.
But people have to enable the option, most public trackers aren't aware off and most private trackers are not into sharing their well builded closed piracy club money making scheme
I just pirate media I like
In other words, your computer is downloading stuff from other computers, that's potentially receiving stolen property, but a potential argument might be that you didn't know that it was stolen. It's not a good argument, but it's an argument. So you're an individual who potentially broke the law. Depending on how much money you have, you might get a knock on your door.
But then, you also distribute that potentially stolen property to other computers, because that's how BitTorrent works, and now you're part of a distribution network dealing with stolen property. The chances that once you've discovered you come away with just a slap on the wrist are slim to none.
How do they find you?
Through your IP address.
How?
By figuring out who owns that address, who loaned it to you to get online at that specific time. One packet at a time the research will bring them closer to knocking on your door.
So, is it a big deal that your public IP address is linked to torrenting? Yes it is.
Is this the whole story? Not by a long shot, but it's not my job to teach you how to break the law.
but it’s not my job to teach you how to break the law.
It sounds like it's literally not against the law where this person lives. Like The Pirate Bay when it began, they responded to US lawyers sending them takedown requests by pointing out that US law didn't apply to every country on the planet.
That could change in the future, sure, but I think that this person probably has a better idea of whether that's a possibility in their home country than we do.
I accidentally turned off my VPN for like a few minutes while torrenting and Comcast immediately wagged their finger at me. Cover your ass.
Assuming the government defs doesn't care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.
Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you're buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.
If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren't expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you're using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.
If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it's not much of a risk.
If you do use a VPN for torrenting, ensure it supports port forwarding. You won't be able to seed if the provider doesn't allow port forwarding. Sharing is caring :)
AirVPN is currently one of the best VPNs that support port forwarding, but there's some others that do, too. NordVPN doesn't support it. There's an old list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/s9f36q/list_of_vpns_that_allow_portforwarding_2022/
Is the legal environment tomorrow going to be the same for you as it is today? Are they going to change the law, (or the interpretation of it) tomorrow? Have they already done so, but that news hasn't reached you yet? If they have changed it, does a hostile entity have your information already logged?
To answer your question, yes, you should be concerned about exposing your public IP address.
is your country a member state in WTO? are your copyright laws compatible with that of the US? does your country recognise foreign copyright claims from the countries that your pirated media comes from?
your worst risk as someone who just pirates safe media for personal consumption is getting a letter from your isp and that only happens if there are laws against it on the books and your isp feels threatened. if your country simply doesn't enforce its copyright laws it's unlikely you'll be chosen to be punished to set an example (they'll most certainly target notorious distributors) and your chance of getting sued by a media company amongst thousands of potential defendants in what i assume is a third world country is almost non existent.
Oh man, normally I don't respond to these kinds of posts because I'm always worried I'll just be helping someone that does CP. BUt, since you 100% definitely don't, which I think is really cool that you don't btw, I'm going to give you the advice that you shouldn't be concerned about IP exposure.
they could still be recording your IP, with intent to build a case against you, even if that requires one day in the future that your government randomly decides to bend the knee to the US. I still think that's a long shot though.
I'm in the same boat. There have been numerous copyright lawsuits that have been thrown out by the courts in my country; however, I pirate because I'm poor AF so I can't afford a VPN anyway.
inb4 someone recommends a cheap VPN: No.
Cheap VPNs typically are cheap for a reason, and those reasons typically make them not worth the savings (like logging data and selling it)
Of course if your country doesn't care then sail away brother and be sure to seed
My country unfortunately cares a lot so a VPN is mandatory for me
VPN: Don't go online without it.
VPN’s are the rubbers of the internet
If you actually need privacy you should use something like tor, or a box which you have access to that can't or wont be traced to you (e.g. you have access to someone else's by covert means, you bought a server with cash in the mail, you bought a server in a nation that will never cooperate with the nation you're antagonising) which you tunnel to and use as a proxy.
A VPN is not necessarily very secure and doesn't mitigate the most serious threats like phone home programs that will ID you over the clearnet later. Trusting a VPN is extremely dicey and should absolutely not be relied upon to keep you out of gaol. It's better than nothing, but shouldn't be over emphasised.
It's a security risk but it's not a legal problem
I lived in Cambodia and the gov doesn't really care about pirating media and games so I can pirate as much as I wanted but ironically they arrested one of the pirate bay founder here and deported him back to Sweden