Yeah, I think "VPNs won't protect you from the law" is far too broad a brush to paint with. There's no credible evidence that these services won't prevent a court or regular law enforcement from tracing an IP to a name without some specific arrangement to unmask you beforehand (there's a specific case where Private Internet Access replied to a subpoena saying they had nothing to provide), so people worried about that might benefit from a VPN, but of course it does nothing for the rest of the threat model. Torrents are pretty much the perfect crime in that it's a simple exchange of bits between parties that have nothing to do with each other, most other types of illegal activity involve myriad other ways to get caught that have nothing to do with a VPN. People who rely on VPNs alone to protect them from getting prosecuted for things like hacking and people who say VPNs are useless are wrong in exactly the same way: they don't have a complete/realistic threat model.

I used to work at an ISP, and once a month I would stuff envelopes with DMCA letters. I can assure you, that the only thing your ISP is doing with this letters is laughing at whatever porn you downloaded. They're just a scare tactic, and if you get one, you can almost certainly ignore it.

I've had a connection shut off because of three letters. Spectrum.

Spectrum is a joke. They constantly call me and expect me to provide them my address and payment details like it is a sane thing to ask.

Which is sad because their pricing model is less stupid than most of the competition.

This varies between ISPs. Some will shut off your connection after a certain number of DMCA letters.

Didn't Cox recently lose a big lawsuit for not actually doing anything to punish repeat DMCA offenders? I'd be cautious about assuming those letters are still harmless today.

No.

They got a $1bi shakedown in a local court because they successfully fought the RIA in 2015 and won (it was $25mi then).

This time, Cox legal team tried to simply stand behind the DMCA safe-harbor (just like google does) and somehow lost.

it will appeal and win (or likely settle out of court as RIAA already got what it wanted, a hole in safe-harbor)

It goes w/o saying but most if not all the cloud providers map IP to account, so using a VPS may have get your account sanctioned or revoked.

Defiantly don't spin up these VPN/VPSs on an account you don't mind losing.

Have received DMCA emails from DigitalOcean for torrenting on their boxes. Can confirm.

There are seedbox services that allow public torrents and don't forward DMCA emails.

If you're going to do that kind of stuff, make sure the provider is based in another country. That gives you a pretty strong layer of protection against these kinds of things. Of course, nothing is entirely foolproof...

Are DMCA letters still a thing?

It seems like Torrenting died out significantly over the last 5 years.

I moved to Germany and apparently they're still very much a thing here. Torrenting popular shows sans VPN is -- at least according to Germans on reddit -- an easy way to get sued, and forced to pay hundreds of euros.

Obviously, I have no interest in testing this out myself, so I take their word for it.

I lived in Germany for years, and this is absolutely the case. Don’t mess with torrents in Germany without a VPN.

Except for those Linux ISOs, of course.

I got C&D from Daedalic Entertainment. They demanded 1.1k or something along the lines. I was on welfare at the time, so a lawyer was not within my means,so I objected. I'm not sure what happened next because I probably didn't open the letter from the court (getting a manila envelope is fucking scary in addition to the stress of already being broke) but they seemed to have got a verdict against me and suddenly I owed over 2k. That being said I got a few letters from lawyers and replied with a legal note promising not to do it again (with any clause concerning automatic fines removed) and beat them by simply ignoring their demands afterwards. So it's entirely possible that I simply fucked myself with Daedalic by not opening their first letter and replying with a note. I haven't pirated in years but have gotten a VPN and will start back up because the fragmentation in the streaming space pisses me off too much especially since there's stuff I can't legally get here.

Can't wait for the "you don't need a VPN" folks to acknowledge that they don't understand why lots of people actually use VPNs. It's DMCA, man. DMCA.

Rather ironic that people pay for VPN services to access content that they won't pay for.

Just don't bother with Big Media content and they won't need a VPN...

There's plenty to do in life other than torrenting the latest HBO series.

Rather, it is used for accessing content that you can't pay for, given that Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO Go, and I'm sure many more are (or were in the past) simply not supported on linux devices.

And, "Plenty to do in life" is a value judgment, and isn't relevant to this discussion.

They'll go after you for downloading something you already paid for, or was free to begin with.

"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." -- Robert Goodloe Harper

Maybe in the US. Definitely not in ex-USSR. I don't know of any single person who's paying for anything other than Steam games (and that's only because they have prices adjusted to our ridiculous wages.)

Just go to any popular torrent site and see the number of people in the swarm. A little harder for less popular stuff but nowhere near dying out.

I got one about a month ago (United States, the smallest of the three ISPs available in my area). My ISP had a screwy way of injecting the complaint, which I almost missed. I had to call them and actually request the complaint be sent by mail so I could see the details, which I don't understand why they didn't do in the first place... They actually served it to a guest in my house, who thankfully told me about it, so I could investigate.

i torrent from home, i also work from home.

i just never wanted my job to hire some dumb IT consulting firm to do some cross between IPs on a swam and IPs VPNing in as a "threat analysis" and my dumb name getting dragged into an office. I know it's far fetched, but $40 a year of PIA keeps my mind at ease.

if you work from home and your company provided computer do not talk exclusively to a VPN tunnel into their network, I doubt they will pay a threat analysis.

They're too busy working through Twitch at the moment.