Let’s not turn this into what the Reddit subreddit of Piracy has turned into and that’s an endless sea of questions that are all the same - “Do I need a VPN?”.
And the loud and vocal answer to such a question is - yes. Yes you do need a VPN for pirating. Nobody gets a VPN for casual use and I’m under the impression that VPN services know a lot of people are going to be going to them for pirating and not just accessing content out of their country. And it’s for that reason, is why I’m skeptical on entrusting my activity with the bigger VPN names available.
I use ProtonVPN myself, by the way.
Pirating under your raw IP address, only will set you up to get pegged by your ISP whether it’s in a short time or a long time. I’ve only ever gotten one single ISP letter in my entire 26 years of pirating and it was simply because I downloaded without a VPN. Well I was also downloading off of someone else’s network to take the fall, but I was confronted about it either way.
And I’ve gotten away with so much pirating because of my careful cautiousness when it comes to pirating. That and this applies to the United States, but the statue of limitations is 3 years when it comes to copyright infringement. So, good fucking luck to any ISP or so that wishes to try and nail me for something I downloaded 10 years ago, but I digress.
But a large part of me avoiding so much does contribute to having a VPN. So, yes, VPN is required. Please don’t ask anybody in the pirating community 100 questions that are all just ways to ask whether or not you need a VPN. You do.
I don’t have to worry about any of this because I live in Denmark! It is not possible for me to pirate stuff because it implies that I did not pay, which I did as there is a special piracy tax!
we call it ‘kulturarvsafgiften’ and apparently you can’t google it which I’m not gonna imply any conspiracies about but yknow
I don’t know about your piracy tax specifically, but there’s also a tax on any storage media, printers etc. in Germany.
The “Urheberrechtsabgabe” (copyright duty) is not about paying for pirate copies, but it’s a compensation for the loss due to the right to a private copy. A private copy is e.g. a copy of a CD I own in case the original gets destroyed. It’s explicitly not allowed to share them.
Sadly the right to a private copy gets canceled as soon as it’s necessary to break a “working” copy protection. CD copy protection has been broken for decades, but it still counts as a “working” copy protection. Thus a private copy is practically not possible legally, but we still pay this tax on any storage media… I really hate the copyright lobby.
is not about paying for pirate copies, but it’s a compensation for the loss due to the right to a private copy.
Sounds an awful lot like a piracy tax… We pay this tax on any device which can store bits, it’s not just some storage mediums. If you buy a phone, you’re paying this tax to a “”“non-profit”“” org called CopyDan whose sole job is to make sure a few select fat cat copyright holders get paid. If I don’t break their copyright, I still have to pay as if I did. Therefore, it’s a piracy tax.
Sounds an awful lot like a piracy tax…
It’s pretty similar. The difference is that it only exists for legal private copies, not for generally illegal piracy.
We pay this tax on any device which can store bits, it’s not just some storage mediums.
That’s also the case in Germany (and likely most of Europe). The actual rate depends on the product category.
I live in Denmark (no Dane) and I never heard about it. Interesting to know.
Do you know, is this another tax additional to “blankmedieafgiften” (“blank media tax” or “private copying levy”), or is it the same tax under a different name?
Actually it might be blankmedieafgiften, that sounds far more correct. I was having trouble finding the exact term and ChatGPT was very confident (I know…) when I eventually gave up and asked it.
Private copying levy. In Sweden, it’s called privatkopieringsersättning.
That’s semantics. They’re charging it because they’re afraid you’re copying copy-protected materials, which is piracy. It’s a piracy tax.
No, it’s ackshully a private copying levy. I get what you mean, but it’s a “good” thing, because otherwise 12 § upphovsrättslagen probably wouldn’t exist anymore:
Var och en får för privat bruk framställa ett eller några få exemplar av offentliggjorda verk. Såvitt gäller litterära verk i skriftlig form får exemplarframställningen dock endast avse begränsade delar av verk eller sådana verk av begränsat omfång. Exemplaren får inte användas för andra ändamål än privat bruk.
I don’t get it. You think laws will stop existing if we stop paying some fat cats for sitting on some copyrights?
I also don’t care what I’m allowed to do, I don’t believe in copyrights, so you can’t really argue in favor of it to me.
Think like this: for our sooo beloved politicians and legal systems, everything in life is seen as a transaction. Due to the fact that I’ve paid my “private copying tax” or whatever you want to call it, I therefore have the right to make private copies and share them with limited groups of people. If they want to restrict those rights that I have paid for, they would “need” to remove the tax – but they will never do that because it’s tons of free money.
But if they did get rid of the tax, there’s no longer that “transaction”, and therefore there’s nothing hindering them from criminalizing private copying. Sweden is already USA’s lapdog in all other regards, so you can bet it’d be repealed quickly.
I don’t support copyright laws either, nor follow them, but I can appreciate how it’s currently set up here, simply because it would otherwise become much much worse. At least here, normal people can do what they want without worrying about getting a legally binding order to pay 700€+ in damages like the Germans get.
My torrenting level is very casual and (sry) I only leech. Also my ISP is a small one in the UK. Our Government seems to only force the big ISP to tattle on its users and block pirating sites. At least that’s how it has been for the last 10 years.
I have qbittorrent and Plex on my server. It is tempting to setup a VPN just for qbittorrent just to be sure.
That’s what I do. I’m in a place that really doesn’t give a shit about Piracy (the worst they’ll do is send a letter, one of my friends got one and called up his ISP to complain about it and they told him to stop seeding so much lol) but I still run a VPN 24/7 anyway just to be safe. It costs peanuts and doesn’t slow down the internet hugely so I figure why not.
I hope everything you pirate gets stuck at 99% until the day you start seeding
Do I need a VPN to read this post?
Stop stealing my content by reading it! /s
Not everyone is US based, but ofc it’s an understandable assumption since it’s a very populous and well Internet-connected country (plus we’re discussing in English).
To save one’s behind when torrenting (pirating is a bit generic), a VPN is a great tool, but falling into the privacy/security and legal nightmare of a cheap service installing malware (or getting their proprietary app hacked) and/or stealing residential connections is a big risk (like with those services where a huge budget is spent on predatory marketing on youtube); paradoxically having that unrestricted VPN app installed might mean that a lot more people are torrenting with your residential connection. This point is not a deal breaker, just a “beware”, do your homework and isolate that connection within your OS or even better within your network.
Other counterpoint: within a country where they haven’t started to really crack down on it, you are protected by the impossibility of fining / suing / arresting millions of people at once. More people sign up for VPNs and torrent from outside the country, the more their connationals will also need protection.
Sorry for the wall of text…
Your mileage may vary. 25 years of downloading shit without a VPN and I never had a problem.
No doubt about the same and I have pirated everything.
Amen to that!
Starting an AI company will also allow you to infringe copyrights on a massive scale without punishment
Copyright is whatever a corpo need to fuck the working class
UseNet over SSL?
I know 2 Germans. They prefer Usenet over VPN. USA gives you warning. Germans don’t give warning.
A “great” thing about copyright infringement in Germany is that the statue of limitations only starts after the copyright holder learns from the copyright infringement.
This means, even if I torrented a movie 5 years ago, and the copyright holder finds out my name only now, they’d still have another 3 years to sue me.
Anyway, there’re private torrent sites in Germany. It’s only public sites that don’t exist.
DDL and streaming sites are really big in Germany. Usenet too, but until a few years ago I don’t think there were Indexers with API’s, so it’s been either manual downloading or streaming.
Or I2p
Not every country has firms that send warning letters/lawsuits for torrenting. Research whether your country does that before getting a VPN. In my country, I never had to get one.
Not everyone lives in the so-called first world. Here the ISPs don’t care about pirating.
Hell, in Canada they don’t care at all either.
OP said not everyone lives in the first world…
I think there is a big misconception that the main use of a VPN is piracy when that is really only true when in a community of pirates. There are many legit uses for one as well.
For example, while VPNs are generally not a great tool for anonymity they can be a useful tool for privacy. One of the side effects of not trusting your ISP (or better put trusting your VPN over your ISP) with your data is it also makes it easier to torrent.
Its this relationship of trust that makes choosing a respected VPN (such as Mullvad, IVPN, or Proton) important over just choosing the cheapest provider with port forwarding.
Keep in mjnd that in the US, downloading isnt the illegal part, its providing the file to others (seeding).
Got to seed tho matey…
Wrap that rascal up
pirating without a vpn is like having a naked phone. sure it’s great but at what cost.
Zero cost.
