I’ve noticed many people promote VPNs for torrenting to evade legal troubles in some places. But I wonder how do VPN companies get away with legal complaints? Especially if their servers are located in Germany or Japan, where piracy is heavily penalized.
p.s. I have never used a VPN for piracy, and I have never received any DMCA emails.
FWIW, at least Nord and Express explicitly put on their terms and conditions that you’re not allowed to use their services illegally, Nord mentions a few usages including unblocking content that should not be available in your region.
They also give influencers like YouTubers and Twitch streamers scripts telling them to show how you can unblock content, but apparently the T&C weighs far heavier in court.
8.2 You agree that you shall not yourself and/or enable others to:
•use, assist, encourage, or enable others to use the Services/Websites for any unlawful, illicit, illegal, criminal, or fraudulent activities, including … digital piracy … which might negatively affect provision of our Services to other users;
In using our Services, you agree not to: … Send, post, or transmit over the Services any content that is illegal, hateful, threatening, insulting, deceptive, or defamatory; infringes ExpressVPN or third parties’ intellectual property rights; invades privacy; or incites violence or any unlawful behavior.
I feel like that’s a lot of boiler plate stuff. It reminds me of Tom Scott’s video on VPN sponsorships not admitting they can be used as tools for piracy
Its simple really. If you have an IP address on a torrent network, contact its owner. The owner of the IP will then be forced to contact the user… But if the owner doesn’t keep logs… Then they don’t know who the user is… And the claim can’t progress any further. But not all VPNs are created equal. Some keep logs. And that’s not good for privacy.
For you not getting DMCA, you may use private trackers only. If not, maybe you got lucky, or you just ignored the emails from your provider or your provider doesn’t follow up with complaints.
But it’s VPN providers who rent the servers that have downloaded the torrents. So they can basically say it’s not done by us, but the users of our service, and thus they don’t bear any consequences? It seems like such a good business model.
VPN providers do not bear any responsibilities for providing services for piracy.
The DMCA’s principal innovation in the field of copyright is the exemption from direct and indirect liability of Internet service providers and other intermediaries.
So technically if VPN providers do not keep logs, you are fine. But since it’s impossible to know how VPN providers servers are implemented, still there are risks.
I mostly use public trackers. Maybe it’s just my ISP doesn’t care.
The barrier to entry into private trackers is high enough that it’s not worth it. Soon after they started sending DMCA letters the admins would be alerted and it would take about 5 minutes to identify the preparator and ban them, and whoever invited them, and their whole invite tree. People complain about it being difficult to join private trackers, but it’s really a security feature.
Private trackers are no more “secure” than public aside from the barriers to entry… However, it’s not like someone working for the MPAA couldn’t pass an interview or whatever it is they do these days…
I’d still use a VPN if I were still on private trackers.
Okay … All of that could be true, and then some, and it still wouldn’t give the DMCA any legal jurisdiction in Germany, or Mexico, or anywhere else that isn’t America…
Is this thread about some moral invective? Or is it about the DMCA?
ISPs turn off connectivity out of fear from lawsuits. Cox is contesting this, saying it’s too much of a burden (which it is) for both them and customers to turn off internet.
Its also fucking dangerous to do that in this day and age.
Very dangerous because at that point you could see trolls connecting to any network and getting it at minimum temporarily shut down due to them deciding to do illegal stuff. I imagine they wouldn’t care what damage they cause until they get arrested, too.
If you are just torrenting and using it for downloading some stuff and nothing more, use the cheapest as NordVPN or Cyber ghost these are good for this, BUT NOT FROM A PRIVACY POINT OF VIEW
PIA is the best for torrents. It is $79 for 39 months which is $2.03/mo and they have port forwarding. That’s less than half of pretty much every other provider.
I have had 3 clients (one for a specific tracker, one for everything else, and an extra seedbox) going 24/7 for years with no problems. No complaints about the speeds either. I frequently saturate full gigabit on both downloads and uploads.
I have 4 seed boxes I run on pia. My only issue is that the port changes from time to time. I have to check on them every week or so. It’s also one of the only court tested Vpns, though it did change hands after that
Edit: Turns out the pia client has a bash accessible command to get the active port. And Qbittorrent has a curl-able target to set the value. One bash script and a crontab… and now I don’t ever have to deal with the port changes anymore. You’re welcome leechers!
Mullvad semi recently closed it’s port forwarding service.
Afaik AirVpn is (one of) the only ones remaining that allows you to expose ports through there service
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FWIW, at least Nord and Express explicitly put on their terms and conditions that you’re not allowed to use their services illegally, Nord mentions a few usages including unblocking content that should not be available in your region.
They also give influencers like YouTubers and Twitch streamers scripts telling them to show how you can unblock content, but apparently the T&C weighs far heavier in court.
Great comment. Here is an excerpt from Nord VPN’s TOS
A Snippet from Express VPN"s TOS:
I feel like that’s a lot of boiler plate stuff. It reminds me of Tom Scott’s video on VPN sponsorships not admitting they can be used as tools for piracy
You can’t comply with a request for something you’re not logging.
You can be ordered to log however.
Zero-knowledge protocols are important.
I have never heard of a government forcing a company to implement logging. Which one did?
Appeal to ignorance
Why do you think you’d hear about it?
Its simple really. If you have an IP address on a torrent network, contact its owner. The owner of the IP will then be forced to contact the user… But if the owner doesn’t keep logs… Then they don’t know who the user is… And the claim can’t progress any further. But not all VPNs are created equal. Some keep logs. And that’s not good for privacy.
For you not getting DMCA, you may use private trackers only. If not, maybe you got lucky, or you just ignored the emails from your provider or your provider doesn’t follow up with complaints.
But it’s VPN providers who rent the servers that have downloaded the torrents. So they can basically say it’s not done by us, but the users of our service, and thus they don’t bear any consequences? It seems like such a good business model.VPN providers do not bear any responsibilities for providing services for piracy.
So technically if VPN providers do not keep logs, you are fine. But since it’s impossible to know how VPN providers servers are implemented, still there are risks.
I mostly use public trackers. Maybe it’s just my ISP doesn’t care.
Correct. That’s also why it’s important to find providers thatchave passed many independant audits. Like ProtonVPN or Mulvad.
Plot twist: RIAA and MPAA own all the major VPN providers, and/or the data centers they rent from.
/ConapiracyTheory
How come private trackers are considered secure, wouldn’t the same approach to IP logging work once you obtained access to a tracker?
The barrier to entry into private trackers is high enough that it’s not worth it. Soon after they started sending DMCA letters the admins would be alerted and it would take about 5 minutes to identify the preparator and ban them, and whoever invited them, and their whole invite tree. People complain about it being difficult to join private trackers, but it’s really a security feature.
Private trackers are no more “secure” than public aside from the barriers to entry… However, it’s not like someone working for the MPAA couldn’t pass an interview or whatever it is they do these days…
I’d still use a VPN if I were still on private trackers.
That said, I use a VPN always, so… 🤷🏻
Who do you send the complaint to?
you could live in a 3rd world country that doesn’t care if individuals pirate. eg New Zealand
If NZ is a 3rd world country then my country probably categorized in 10th world country
I actually live in the US. And New Zealand is not a third world country.
No, but the US is.
We don’t know if you may be too stupid to have good reading comprehension, but here you go.
Show us where in there it says any North American country? We’ll wait.
DMCA is an American law with American jurisdiction.
And America controls all of the fucking Internet. Especially all main social networks and search engines.
Americans, especially after 9/11 happened, feel entitled to catch criminals (or at least what they deem so) all around the world and beyond.
Okay … All of that could be true, and then some, and it still wouldn’t give the DMCA any legal jurisdiction in Germany, or Mexico, or anywhere else that isn’t America…
Is this thread about some moral invective? Or is it about the DMCA?
In a just world where everyone minds their own business, it would be true.
It’s the fault of people who live there for not fighting for abolishment of this hellhole of a law.
But America is the world?
Every time the spaceships come, it’s defending the white house, which is the most important house on the planet.
I’m sorry, is this about Independence Day? Or the DMCA?
Yes
Devil may cry: aliens
Nailed it.
ISPs turn off connectivity out of fear from lawsuits. Cox is contesting this, saying it’s too much of a burden (which it is) for both them and customers to turn off internet.
Its also fucking dangerous to do that in this day and age.
Very dangerous because at that point you could see trolls connecting to any network and getting it at minimum temporarily shut down due to them deciding to do illegal stuff. I imagine they wouldn’t care what damage they cause until they get arrested, too.
Medical emergencies and devices are more important than protecting shittily-protected systems.
If you are just torrenting and using it for downloading some stuff and nothing more, use the cheapest as NordVPN or Cyber ghost these are good for this, BUT NOT FROM A PRIVACY POINT OF VIEW
PIA is the best for torrents. It is $79 for 39 months which is $2.03/mo and they have port forwarding. That’s less than half of pretty much every other provider.
I have had 3 clients (one for a specific tracker, one for everything else, and an extra seedbox) going 24/7 for years with no problems. No complaints about the speeds either. I frequently saturate full gigabit on both downloads and uploads.
This seems to be great as it should works
I have 4 seed boxes I run on pia. My only issue is that the port changes from time to time. I have to check on them every week or so. It’s also one of the only court tested Vpns, though it did change hands after that
Edit: Turns out the pia client has a bash accessible command to get the active port. And Qbittorrent has a curl-able target to set the value. One bash script and a crontab… and now I don’t ever have to deal with the port changes anymore. You’re welcome leechers!
How’s Proton for privacy?
Proton is great but you don’t really need privacy when torrenting
Pretty good. They don’t log and I don’t think there’s been a case where they’ve released info on anybody.
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Just use mullvad. Pay for it with Monero if you’re super paranoid.
I’m completely okay with that but you can find cheaper alternatives if you just want to do torrenting stuff, do not need this extra level of privacy
Mullvad semi recently closed it’s port forwarding service. Afaik AirVpn is (one of) the only ones remaining that allows you to expose ports through there service
Cyberghost is untrustable.
thanks for sharing
For sure NordVPN too, but in the ONLY case of torrenting it’s a good idea to have the cheapest thing to hide his ip