The biggest risk is when you upload content, which makes torrenting dangerous. But using a VPN is really enough.

For things like pirate streaming sites or DDL sites, a VPN is definitly recommended, but I used those for years without one and nothing ever happened.

I obviously don’t condone pirate

It's fine if you do, this is a piracy community.

I use a seedbox from abroad and sync to home

Hey lawyer, please don't sue me :)

Using i2p for torrenting

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.

That's pretty much how it works in the US, FWIW. From my understanding there are torrenting clients that have a killswitch that stops the download immediately if your VPN fails.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy

Thank me later

OCHs were way more common in Germany than in other countries. Biggest boards like boerse and gulli used only OCHs. My guess is its because of those laws that torrenting was risky. But the truth is that for one pirate who used vpns, torrents and OCHs, there probably are a hundred people using streaming sites.

If you are interested in the German piracy history, there is a book anout the gulli board: http://gulliwars.com/

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.

I'm from Germany. In theory a VPN with a Killswitch is enough. In reality, I am so paranoid about Waldorf frommer that I only pirate using one click hosters.

I don’t live in Germany but it seems like a seed box or a Debrid service would fix that up nice and easy.

A vpn?

Like mullvad

They dont use torrents. Never. Any fellow german i know that got busted used a torrent. There are lawfirms specialized sending letters to torrent users. In theory you could still get in trouble with streaming and one click hosters but in practice the chances are really slim. Lets just say i never got a letter from a lawfirm since i never used a torrent.