At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content. You are, by law, entitled to it, as you might get yourself a copy of what you already own. Bought a film on DVD? You can legaly download it from wherever.

This all ends once you start uploading it, tho. You cant upload it, period. Problem with torrents is theres no checkbox to signal "stricly no upload", you can only set limit to few kb/s to minimize this issue, but technically even few bits can still get you prosecuted.

(edit: following is wrong, perhaps germany is same as Czech, see child comment) In Germany, its a different story. You cant even donwload, not by torrent or even from sites. I know of people receiving fines in their mailboxes with IP/Date/Site/Material list and finig each piece by ~200€.

Your information about Germany is incorrect. The legal situation here is the same as what you described for the Czech Republic. You can download anything anywhere. What's illegal is making stuff publicly available, and BitTorrent uploading falls under that.

Source: was caught and got council from a copyright lawyer.

Pretty sure you can’t download either. But the fines would be very low, so instead they go after uploaders, convince the court it’s "commercial distribution", values skyrocket and for a small 1000€ fee you can make the problem go away.

ime correct: individual downloaders will not be prosecuted unless somewhat high-profile, intitutional/commercial users (vps) will only get a cease and desist. uploaders are fair game.

It also helps that it’s pretty hard to figure out who downloads. With torrents, you’ll always upload as well (outside using specific clients), with websites they have no data.

Thanks for correction! Looks like the letters sent were torrent regarded, then. I also knew of most sites to download from were being blocked at every possible level (ISPs, landlord...), so I connected those two in a wrong way

This is also not correct.

> At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content

This is not correct - you still make a copy and the copyright holder could still sue you over it, but it's just not worth doing. It's not legal to do so, the Czech Republic is a signatory to the Berne Convention, it's just not a criminal offense. Which to be honest is the situation in virtually every country in the world.