BitTorrent Pirates Won’t Receive ISP Warnings (It Will Be Something Worse)

Cuscuz@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 204 points –
torrentfreak.com
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I have downloaded dozens of terabytes in Germany and I’m doing fine buddy.

2 friends got sued for around 3000 each here in germany, but they "only" had to pay 1600.

You mean they got a shock letter that says "pay us, or we'll take you to court"? Just throw that junk mail away.

If you do that in Germany, they'll take you to court and win. You have to pay their legal fees too.

Do they actually do that in the majority of cases, or just a few to scare people? Germany is really weird on IP law...

It's really easy for a law firm in Germany to find out who the IP belonged to, if they have proof that the IP infringed on their copyrighted media.

The law firm looks at torrents and downloads a bit. With the IP, time and media name they can send a cease and desist letter with a fine of hundreds to thousands of euro. Ignoring the letters is not possible.

This is possible because the law firm has contracts with many big copyright holders (Disney, ...).

But most of the time the fine is too high, so it's possible to pay half by getting a lawyer. Basically the copyright holder overestimate how much damages they can get for the distribution of copyrighted material. If I understand it correctly. IANAL.

It's simple to avoid by binding the torrent client to the network interface of a VPN, but not everyone knows that.

Not if you use a VPN though. Also, modifying the letter, so it doesn't include you admitting to the crime has proven effective for me (I was young once and didn't use a VPN)

The letter is also pretty toothless since in a household with more than one person the actual infringer cannot be identified solely by IP, still better to just use a VPN though, avoids that entire can of worms

Yeah you would still get these letters, so having a VPN saves you the hassle

I've heard a few times that people managed to dodge the letter, but I've also heard of multiple people who had to pay.

It's also very easy to avoid this little problem by not being the only adult in the household. Unless one of the at least two adults snitches they can't sue because there is reasonable doubt about the actual infringer (not legal advice, better option is to just get a VPN)

For now...
No need to risk your savings over Avengers Endgame 4K...

I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years. I know what I am doing. I have several layers of security.

If you however are a tech illiterate then of course you’ll get fined. I have friends who got fined too.

Would it be possible to reveal what you did to increase security?
I always (want to) try to improve mine.

I have two containers, qBittorrent and the VPN:

  • VPN is fully tunneled and encrypted.
  • qbt only ever sees the VPN as its network. It is logically isolated from my main gateway.
  • there are healthchecks running, so if the VPN fails qbt enters in a restart loop until the VPN is back to a healthy status.
  • I use private trackers for 99% of my torrents.

You also have to know that these scummy law firms use honey pot attacks, where they advertise themselves as leechers and record your IP if you upload to them. Technically a proxy to another country would just be enough here, but hey, this works too and I sleep better.

Since you use a torrent container and a vpn container I am interested in how you manage to communicate with the torrent container.
Do you utilize the *arr stack? Also with a docker?
If the answer is yes, how did you achieve the communication between the containers?

Reason I am asking is, that I want to connect to my other container but when I bind my container to the service I am unable to let it communicate directly with it.
By that logic, I'd need to access the container through the vpn container, right? (*arr <-> vpn container <-> downloader container)

You have to expose the qbt http port in your VPN container. All API communication (arrs etc) goes through here.

After much thinking I managed it myself and found that out as well. What I also needed was the environment variable FIREWALL_OUTBOUND_SUBNETS so my other containers could connect to the container.