I’ve been torrenting without a vpn for over 3 years

VPN
1

I live in Germany, a friend of mine taught me how to do all this a while ago, but he never told me to use a vpn(in retrospect, I should’ve done my own research when he taught me). I’ve done this on 2 separate computers over the years, over 130 repacks downloaded. I’ve never gotten any letters about this, emails from my ISP, or any interactions with anyone/anything federal.
How fucked am I? Or am I just extremely lucky?

I realized how stupid I was last month when another friend asked me why the fuck I wasn’t using a vpn in Germany.

2

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3

lol, start using one from now on. you prolly got lucky but I would not push it any further :smiley:

4

I live in Germany too and have also used torrent without VPN in the past. So we both simply were lucky. Use Direct Download from now on, no risk of getting sued. VPN is also possible, therefore you maybe need a paid service as the free ones are usually crap. Your ISP would only contact you if you have extreme high traffic load on specific ports, very unlikely.

5

Lol, I’ve been doing it for 20 years…

6

Doesnt Germany usually fine uou for piracy ? Also ISP can only tell if its torrenting,

7

Maybe you’re not using the popular open torrent trackers or popular torrents that are often monitored by the authorities

8

Well, i have been torrenting since atleast 2007 without VPN and i still haven’t had any legal letters or anything and well, in a years time i have approximately 6T in seeds, not sure what that makes it by im sure next year should be about double that as my speed increased this year. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Living on the edge is my jam.

9

Third world countries laughing in corner

10

Direct Download and ur safe torrent be careful in the US you get like 3 strikes before no internet

11

Is it worse in Germany?
I have been pirating mostly movies and not so much games from open torrents forever.
I heard other pirates got letters, warnings, and got sued/fined, but that was 10 years ago, it feels like. I’m in Sweden…

12

Telekom once locked my DSL because of torrents, this was 13 years ago tho. They told me to stop whatever I was doing and enabled it again.

I’d guess that today’s amount of traffic makes it near impossible for them to check everyone.

13

Someone has to actually try to catch you. It’s not like police is gonna patrol torrents for illegal downloads lol

14

Same here and I’m in America. Comcast doesn’t seem to care.
Using free vpns like Proton VPN makes the downloads go so obscenely slow that I can’t stand it, and I don’t feel like paying for a VPN because I have no clue which ones actually care about privacy and don’t have that whole “we will cooperate with authorities and give up any and all information to aid in investigations” thing or whatever, which means they hold onto all your information.

15

there’s you and there’s my friend that visited Germany pirated once and got a letter lmaoo

16

It’s a lot more practical to just get a seedbox, you can get them for cheap depending on your needs, and just FTP from said seedbox to your machine.

17

I’ve been torrenting without a vpn for over 15 years. Lots of games, movies, softwares. Even my university said (indirectly) to pirate matlab (a software needed for some programming). My primary & secondary school had cracked windows in our labs.

Nobody cares in Romania about piracy. Illegal? yes. Everyone does it? surely. Should the police arrest everyone? too much work for them. There are more cracked windows pc here than bought license ones.

18

Wie 80 % halt auch. Am Ende ist es für die Anwälte bzw. die Firmen eine Kosten-Nutzen-Rechnung. Du musst beim Provider die Daten abfragen, was wohl schon mal Geld kostet, dann die Leute anschreiben. 90 % ignorieren das Schreiben einfach, ein paar schreiben irgendwelches Unterlassungszeugs, und einer zahlt halt. Das hat sich vor ein paar Jahren noch mehr gelohnt. Hat mit Streaming, Steam bzw Live Games auch enorm abgenommen. Vor 10 Jahren hatten die halt echt Angst, das keiner mehr die Musik/Filme bzw. die Games kauft.

Ach am Ende wollen die natürlich auch gerne ihr VPN verkaufen, da wird dann natürlich auch dramatisiert.

19

It Turkey, no one cares ahaha

20

I’ve been torrenting without VPN for 20 years now. I still don’t get the danger, who is gonna say something? Are they effectively doing something somewhere in the world? Really? I’m in Spain btw.