Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Don’t go tormenting without a VPN.

On behalf of whoever is paying for your internet connection, do not torment without a VPN.

If you ignore this advice, be aware that the aformentioned person will get a nastygram in the mail, complete with the exact title of the torment you downloaded. They have no qualms with outing your darkest perversions to the breadwinner(s) in your household.

Save your lunch money for however long it takes to be able to buy a year of VPN like Mullvad in your country.

You aren't paying for your internet so you'd be an asshole to put the account holder under scrutiny for torrenting without protection. Especially when they are also covering your rent, elecricity, gas, food, clothing, etc. Don't be a selfish asshole.

If you can't get VPN don't be entitled and go off torrenting because other people say it is fine. You aren't paying for internet so you don't get the privilege to decide if it is fine or not.

Private trackers.

In the USA when you are caught torrenting copyrighted material it is because a firm hired by copyright owners sits in the public swarm logging IPs. They then send a warning to your ISP, who in turn sends you a warning.

Private trackers are by their nature a club that tries their damnedest to prevent people working for those kind of companies from joining the site to begin with.

It is still smart to use a VPN but your ISP isn't generally targeting your data in transit itself. It's usually a third party company hired out who cannot see your data streams directly. Thus a private tracker reduces the need for such measures since you are less likely to run into a hired hand logging your IP from a private tracker swarm.

All I'm going to say is that my ISP used to send me notices from the MPAA about what I was downloading and that I should:

1. Cease and desist
2. Remove the content I downloaded.

Since I setup a VPN, I do not get those notices.

Do I need to say more?

If you are broke and cannot afford a VPN, I suggest you use I2P.

https://geti2p.net/en/

I2P is basically an internet protocol that treats all kinds of internet activity in the manner a torrent works.

Basically, you run a local node.

Traffic is routed around in a bunch of anonymized, encrypted chunks, from many different users, which are then bunched up together into packets and encrypted again.

As a client, you can only decrypt the parts of a packet that pertain to you...

But as a node, you help move packets along to every other person who is running a node, in a sort of meshnet like fashion.

The result is a free, but very slow, but also pretty well anonymized way of passing net traffic around...

...and it is also arguably more private/secure than a VPN, which can simply hand over its server logs if legally asked to...

...and it is also arguably more private/secure than TOR, which can have de-anonymization attacks run on it if enough onion nodes, or your entry/exit nodes, are either comprimised or just outright run as honey pots, which is a thing various law enforcement agencies do.

However, another downside to I2P is that it is... considerably more technically complex for most users to actually set up and use properly, than just a basic VPN for switching your geoip to watch Brazillian netflix or w/e.

But, it does allow torrenting and portforwarding, and is totally free.

Don't expect to be able to stream any media with it though, it is again very slow.

I'm in a country where there's no legal precedent against torrenting, so it's somewhat safe, but it's still better to use one anyways. You never know when the laws might change, and it's best if there's no record of your IP/timestamp torrenting.

Either way, there's a risk-reward tradeoff of not using one, but the risk is much higher in the US, and if you're made an example of, it could be life ruining. You'll have to decide for yourself if it's worth paying to mitigate the risk.

Jail probably not... however you will probably get a sternly worded letter from your ISP saying "We know you were torrenting (name of one show or movie you torrented"), This is your first warning.

In short, you won't go to jail, but your ISPs will usually give a few warnings, and then cut off your internet.

Use i2pd with qbittorrent

Its not zero-effort, but you can safely torrent without a VPN using I2P. You'd have to have an I2P router running on the backend and use something like i2psnark to connect. Out of the box, I2P won't work, you have to adjust the config, but after that you could go VPN-less. Two things to consider though: 1. Torrents will run slower. 2. Only trackers inside the I2P network would be reachable.

If you use only private trackers you can skip the VPN. If you use public ones, your ISP might take issue

Stick to private trackers, the risk of being caught is dramatically lower (harder to get it, smaller user base, companies target the big public ones)

So here's the deal is you "really" can't afford $30 a YEAR:

I use a VPN called windscribe. You can buy this 1 year VPN for $30. You can buy it through the Google play store.

I also have the "Google Rewards" app that pays you in Google play store credit for taking short surveys or taking pictures of receipts.

I get $50 to $100 per year in play store credits to spend on Google play.

See where I'm going with this? I pay for my yearly subscription with my "free" play store credits I get.

=Free VPN. Like right now I've got almost $40 in play store credits (the free credits you earn have to be spent in a year. It spends the oldest credits first) and I have like 4 months left before I have to renew my VPN subscription. Since I never enjoyed any pay to win styles of games, at this point I practically run out of things I even want to buy with my credits before they start to expire. I've bought probably a thousand dollars worth of apps and games over the years and haven't ever spent a single cent of my own money on any of them. Nothing but the reward app credits. I buy the "pro" versions of apps I use to remove ads, even if the ads don't bother me or I don't use that particular app very much.

OK, so what is a VPN?

A Virtual Private Network is a virtual network that lives on top of a physical network. In the case of the Internet, basically what happens is that your network traffic goes into the VPN on one side and comes out of the VPN provider's network somewhere else, rather than out of your ISP's network. All this really does is move any privacy concerns from your ISP to your VPN, which may or may not protect you from any legal inquiries.

For a more thorough explanation look here: https://www.howtogeek.com/133680/htg-explains-what-is-a-vpn/

Is it possible to use torrent without a VPN?

Certainly, however your torrent traffic will be visible to and inspectable by your ISP. If a copyright holder chooses to, they may sue your ISP for the personal information of the person whose IP address matches the illegal traffic that they found. After they have your personal information they can prosecute you directly. A VPN might shield against this by changing the apparent IP address associated with your torrent traffic, but then you are at the mercy of the VPN provider and the government of whichever country they operate in.

It should be noted that if you are not paying the bill for the Internet, and you use it for illegal activity, then the person you are putting at risk is the person who pays the bill. It's their name attached to the ISP records.

If you are caught, or if they just don't like torrent traffic on their network, the ISP may decide that you are simply too much trouble and it's not worth keeping you as a customer, and just cut off your service (for your whole house).

You can get a vps for $5/month or less. Installing vpn software with one of the automagical scripts takes 30 minutes at worst.

Yes, I ignored it for a while but then got walled off by charter until I acknowledged I’d fix the torrenting issue with my account. Got a von and never had a problem again

Like most things, it depends on your jurisdiction and the policies of your ISP. But as a general rule, yes, you should take steps to hide your IP.

Probably a good case example is to look at how many people in your area were sued for torrenting. For example, the rights holders to Dallas Buyer’s Club famously went nuclear on torrenters, so maybe start by searching that. Of course none of this is legal advice.

PIA is pretty reliable in my experience and their three year plan is quite affordable.

The reason i cant get a vpn is because im just broke and im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.

I don't know your situation (and age) but small jobs like delivering newspapers can usually be taken up at relatively you age. They should easily cover a VPN subscription.

E.g. I was delivering newspaper biweekly for a few hours at the age of 13. Even today, the monthly pay would've been enough to pay for a year of my current VPN. Your guardians will have to approve the job but legally it shouldn't be an issue.

If you torrent without a VPN the conversation about a warning by the internet provider on behalf of some rights holder will be way worse than asking about ideas for a small (summer) job.

I've never used a vpn while torrenting in the US. Unless utorrent has one built in. Been doing it for 25 years and never had a problem.

People probably won't like that answer, but whatever. It's true.

If you convert a magnet link to a .torrent file (there are many sites that can do that) and then upload the .torrent file to archive.org, they'll download the files to their servers as part of their archival process, then you can just download the files via standard https, you ISP will only know you downloaded from archive.org.

But archive.org isn't really meant to be used this way, so this is probably unethical. But I think section 230 protect them (for now), so its not like they'll get shutdown or anything (correct me if I'm wrong).

Just use ProtonVPN. They have a free tier. No credit card required. Its slightly slower speeds, but it will keep you from getting in trouble while sailing the high seas 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️