https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pirating-streaming-movies-in-germany
I didn’t know how Germans pirated and how they got caught, so I tried to do some research and found the article above, which is quite nice.
To summarize, your IP is visible to your ISP (internet service provider) and a law company can basically send a legal letter asking your ISP to identify you and you will be identified and your address and details will be given to the Lawyers. Now, you can either pay up or hire a lawyer and pay a lesser amount.
Now, the solution the article provided was, just use a VPN bro. But yes, VPNs can fail and not all VPNs allow you to torrent. So, how do these Germans pirate and not get caught?
PS: I obviously don’t condone pirate, asking for a friend who is an author.
a law company can basically send a legal letter asking your ISP
It’s the same in France, and I guess also all over Europe. Those companies mostly look at who is seeding torrents, and that’s why you can safely use direct-downloads like Uptobox (DD) or Usenet.
VPNs can fail and not all VPNs allow you to torrent
You’re pretty safe if you use the application given by the VPN, and most don’t care about torrents. Also e.g. Mullvad has a page to make sure that you are not leaking info (https://mullvad.net/en/check) and other VPNs should have this too.
You can stream movies
The article is wrong here: you either download or you torrent. “Streaming” is not a technical concept. You mostly get caught when you seed.
do you think Europe cracking down on piracy is why Usenet is becoming more popular or has it been a long time coming?
I only used usenet in the past to talk about programming and I’m not knowledgable about it. I guess it never really died but it was hidden because it’s difficult to use: you need to pay for both an indexer AND binaries, it’s weird. I’m still not sure it’s popular. Its usage may increase in some circles due to having some tutorials and applications like Sonarr, but I could be wrong.
all Europe
Nope, here in italy there is no need for vpn or whatsoever
Also Sweden should be fine iirc
Belgium is often very friendly to pirates, but it is inconsistent. Like others, they get you for distributing, but I haven’t heard od anyone getting busted after 2012 or so.
tbf in italy it’s legal only for yourself but not if you do it to earn money; tnt village was closed cause of the many donations they got, it was abit of an edge case (maybe they had rewards for donators)
the only persecuted are the iptvs for football, cause they are paid and also they touch Serie A earnings, don’t try to touch calcio in italy ^^
explaining this just to be more informative, but ye for the most majority of scenarios, no issues downloading and seeding
haven’t tried to host a torrent myself tbh
