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.