I don't use a VPN, and haven't got a letter from my ISP in all the years I've been pirating.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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This!
I haven't had one since an idiot roommate decided they wanted to fuck around. I fixed the problem (no more roommate).
Been 20 years now.
VPN seems a way to screw up decent performance when all you need is to stay away from public trackers.
What happened to your roommate? That sounds kinda scary... :o
It was one of a few stupid things and I wound up just telling him to leave.
Kinda wish it was more dramatic and/or gory, but I usually am just too tired to turn to violence.
Besides, I'd never admit to owning that chipper shredder anyway.
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Were you using a public or private tracker?
Public I assume, I'm pretty new to torrenting and haven't really dove into private trackers yet. Any resources your recommend on reading up on that?
It can be tough to get an invite to a private tracker, but that's all I've been using in my 20 years of torrenting and I've never received an ISP letter. I don't use a VPN. Just keep an eye out for open sign-ups. Once you're in, it's essential to keep a good ratio.
Tormenting? That sounds a bit extreme
Lmao Oops, fixed
~~/r/opentrackers~~ /r/opensignups to find openings and read the rules of wherever you're joining. Typically, they just want you to seed for X amount of time within Y days. I've also been temporarily banned once for not having any activity several days after joining on one of the more popular sites.
That sub was banned. There is r/OpenSignups though. You can monitor the rss feed if you don't want to go on reddit.
I'll take a look at this. Is there any downsides to private trackers?
Mainly just that you need to maintain a fairly high seed ratio to keep access. A lot of trackers will limit how many concurrent torrents you can have, based on your seed ratio. And depending on the tracker and the media that you want to download, you sometimes run into situations where just nobody else wants what you're seeding, or where the torrent has so many seeds that you barely get to contribute.
Last time I was on a private tracker, I was one of only like 3 other users who were downloading episodes of Doctor Who. I could seed those for months, and never go above 1.0 because there just wasn't interest in that.
I'm not sure if this is considered a good practice or not, but what I ended up doing was occasionally torrenting something that was really popular, even if I had no interest in it, just so that I could seed something. It definitely helped to keep my ratio up, and as far as I can tell it's overall a net benefit to the network as a whole, so I don't think tracker admins would have issue with it. But it just felt weird, to me.
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Copyright warnings are fairly common in developed nations like much of western Europe and say, US right? Do they result in prosecutions as well( would it be worth it for an ISP to take an individual user to court and spend time and money on it?)
Copyright warnings are almost unknown in my country or much of the underdeveloped / developing world.
No prosecutions in many many years.
But, with the new oligarchy dictatorship in progress... I would not be surprised to see Sony get some bills passed to have ISPs cut you off permanently.
Mostly us stuff, never heard of one in Europe
I got one a few years ago (Europe), but you just throw them out, they're meaningless threats without action behind and to my knowledge no one has been convicted based on one ever in my country. But if you torrent copyrighted material without a VPN here, you'll definitely be getting them.
France put in a place the Hadopi in 2010 (now part of the Arcom) specifically to target people torrenting copyrighted stuff.
I don't believe the ISP would have legal standing to take you to court, as they don't hold the copyright.
They're in the middle, being told hy copyright holders that someone using their service is violating copyright, and they must "do something".
Eventually they may shut off your service, but I haven't heard of it happening since the early 2000's.
In my experience in Canada, no, not at all. I've only had two but the impression I got was the ISP is legally obligated to pass the notice along and nothing more. The companies complaining are likely American and the ISP want to keep me as a regular paying customer.
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I have hundreds of those. I'm in Canada though so I don't care.