Recently, my wife and I had a shouting match over piracy which went nowhere other than making me realize I couldn’t back up my positions on anything other than the higher-level ethics stuff.
The argument went something like this:
Wife: piracy is federal crime, federal crimes mean federal prison, i don’t want you going to federal prison
Me: thats not how that works
Wife: how do you know? What if they got a court order against you and you had to supply all your files to them
Me: incoherent monkey tantrum noises
To clarify, she is fine with piracy, she just is scared of me getting caught. And my position was “nuh uh!”
My understanding is that the biggest point of risk (of actual legal consequences, specifically) is when you are the one propagating files (because the feds will go after uploaders when able) and when using public torrents (if i forget to use a VPN, dmca snitches might send a “stop pirating” notice to my landlord who owns the router our internet goes through). Not 100% percent sure why these are the risky things, though, and I’m not sure if there’s other things i need to be on my toes about.
The argument i have more trouble with figuring out how to answer is the question of “what if the feds change their strategy for some reason and start playing whack-a-mole with individual pirates like me?” What do I do to future-proof myself? Is just using a VPN across all my devices enough?
Single person piracy is almost always a civil offense, not a criminal one so even caught you’d get at most a fine and maybe banned from the internet. This is assuming you’re in the US.
Seeding will get you caught because that’s the actual violation of the DMCA. Just downloading isn’t a violation for the downloader.
My advice is get a vpn or seedbox and use those to not have to worry about it.
Or move to a piracy method that is download only like newsgroups.
Noob here: whats a seedbox
A torrent client on someone else’s computer. You’ll find them called seedboxes but they are also called application hosts.
Seeding will get you caught because that’s the actual violation of the DMCA. Just downloading isn’t a violation for the downloader.
This argument is unlikely to hold up in court.
It likely would, crime is distribution not viewing.
Heres the thing if your in the US. The federal government no longer follows its own laws when it comes to due process and the constitution or really law in general. Of course the problem with that is it goes way beyond piracy. But pointing to your piracy would likely play well with their base.
Excellent questions. Additionally, I want to add “how good a seedbox is protecting you ?”
Is there really some seedbox providers not collaborating with the authorities?
Even if this is the case, aren’t some authorities doing Deep Packets Inspection, trying to break secure connections to check if some IP payload is fingerprint and copyrighted ?
Seedbox protections are alright for majority of cases. Most seedboxes probably aren’t collaborating with us authorities. Unless there is a lot of money in your case nobody would care.
DPI is hard, requires hardware either close to you or close to your seedbox, payload itself is not copyrighted and nobody could tell what data is transferred.
Tap for spoiler
Held seedboxes in Romania, Moldova and a few other countries.
I’m not aware of anyone ever facing federal criminal prosecution unless they were like part of an international organized crime ring, or someone doing it for significant profit. Even for civil suits, the only one I’ve ever heard of is that time they used a child and grandmother for like $20 trillion or something absurd.
If you think the government might change strategy and come after you, then you should stop pirating. But I don’t see that happening.
As someone else already said, it greatly depends on where you live, which you didn’t mention.
Some random third world country: They most likely could not care less. Even if they have anti-piracy laws, there is no one to try to catch you or enforce those laws. They don’t produce the overwhelming majority of the movies, TV shows or other files that are down/uploaded, so piracy doesn’t affect them.
The U.S.: Use a VPN whenever torrenting, like Mullvad, Proton, or IVPN - https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/. Use qBittorrent and make sure to BIND your VPN to qBit. Do not solely rely on a killswitch, they can fail. If you’re caught uploading files without a VPN, you’ll most likely just get a letter or email from your internet provider. Don’t respond. If you do respond (like if they shut off your internet until you contact them), you’re only answer should be is that you don’t know anything about it, and maybe your neighbor hacked your wifi or into the main line. However, you mentioned the landlord owns the router (so I assume that means the landlord also pays for your internet?), which means don’t be an idiot and put yourself in the position of trying to explain to your landlord (and your wife) why you were downloading / uploading some shitty music or porn. Use a VPN. I prefer Mullvad for anonymity, but Proton has some great Black Friday and holiday sales sometimes. There’s a little more to it than this, but this is the basics. Also, the majority of ISPs don’t care at all that you’re down/uploading files, until they are contacted by someone connected to the file you were uploading. Then, they are obligated to contact you. Eventually, if you keep doing it, your ISP will get tired of dealing with the letters in regards to you and may just cancel your account.
Germany, or somewhere similar: I’d suggest using Usenet. It’s a bit more complicated to setup, but it’s an overall better experience in my opinion. Get 2-3 good indexers and put their info into Prowlarr for searching, get a good provider and put their info into SabNZBD for downloading. Make sure the SSL connection is enabled in SabNZBD (which it already should be by default) and then you technically will not need a VPN, because whatever you’re downloading is automatically encrypted. Obviously, there is no uploading back to the hive while using Usenet. I’d still use a VPN though, so your ISP doesn’t even see what you’re searching for and what websites you’re going to. If interested, Radarr and Lidarr can track movies and TV shows for you. The three apps I mentioned that end with “arr” are part of a group of apps known as the “arrs”. https://wiki.servarr.com/
We’re not in the 2000s where the RIAA/MPAA spent hour after hour, individually going after individuals whom they suspect is pirating.
They’ve changed up tactics all throughout the 2010s and into today. Where, they’re holding ISPs accountable and are targeting owners of services and pirating sites instead. They’ve actually got some victories under their belt through this, which is a damn shame, so it’s telling them that it is working. Not to mention we’ve had the misfortune of dealing with ACE, their little treehouse club and lots of copyright trolls that act as copycats who take it upon themselves to operate similarly as to how they did in the 2000s.
You have far greater risk being an owner, being the uploader and being the source of pirating than you are these days, just downloading it. Your ISP decides when they want to take action against whatever files you’ve downloaded.
As people have said, your best tools are with VPNs and figuring out which VPN has your back, most importantly. That’s what pirating has come down to and that is trust.
But blah blah, we get it, the feds will say copyright is a crime and blah blah. We got that decades ago, we just don’t care because consumer rights have been thoroughly fucked over which in turn, causes us to pirate. A lesson these idiots refuse to learn.
She just has to get over it.
If everyone sits around fearing the authorities using force until the authorities use force, the authorities automatically use force on everyone and we are all dead or imprisoned before long.
The only way to function as an adult is to understand that they can’t get all of us without us helping them do it. We have to make using force as hard as sending men with guns and feeding us in a cage, not just saying scary stuff.
