I'm sure that you can get in plenty of trouble for downloading a ton of data from randompiratesite.xyz or whatever, but how the ISP determine the number of movies they've seen you download?
That isn't how torrent sites work. You visit site.xyz and download a .torrent file in the realm of 10s-100s (typically) of kB and that contains some metadata that a dedicated torrent client consumes. The torrent client connects to (1) some tracker via http (or https, but usually http) which may or may not be associated with the site the .torrent came from, to register as part of the swarm, and (2) any number of peer torrent clients. The actual data (X GiB) transfer comes from those peers; not the original site.xyz nor the tracker.
ISPs can observe DNS lookups / connections to site.xyz; tracker "announces" (that's (1) above), especially if they are http. And even the peer-to-peer traffic has a distinct protocol which is recognizable with packet inspection. But the main avenue for finding offenders, I believe, is just downloading the same .torrents for some specific copyrighted content and using the torrents' associated tracker(s) to enumerate swarm peer IP addresses.
Obviously, because, as the chain of comments above your shows, torrent users are easily caught and get fined to hundreds of euros per downloaded movie. Then they stop using torrent and tell all their friends about the experience. This has been going on for more than a decade, maybe two. So by now, German culture has adapted and people don't use torrents.
Downloading copyrighted is not illegal, offering is.
You could try to argue technicalities in court, but that'll probably exceed the hundreds of Euro the copyright owner demands.
Years ago I did exactly this by modifying my client to never seed/share, and also to fake my reported sharing stats so the private trackers wouldn’t boot me for failing to share.
Those were the days.
Now, I no longer fear the ISP or copyright holder chasing me (seems ISPS and laws moved on where I am) and don’t bother with modifications any more.
This would very quickly be identified by private trackers these days because the stats don't line up with your peers and earn you a permaban.
Then you may get a court order that states what the lawyer accuses you of and this you have to react to. The court just states this and gives you 2 checkboxes. If you check the one saying “I reject the accusation completely” the lawyer needs to decide. He invested some 40 euros into the court order but going to court is a different ballgame and not his main business model so they have to weigh the chances.
The owner of the router that the file went through is responsible for access to the router. Since the owner has so far not said anything to his Defence there is a possibility that multiple people including family members had access to the router and the lawyer might, in court, be presented with a list of people and their addresses which satisfies the defendants task to erschütter the accusation for the court and leave the lawyer with the option to figure out whodunnit or rather who in the list is going to fold and pay.
This is really not his business model. That said they do go to court and people get sentenced to pay the fine.
I even know of more people using Usenet then torrents! The amount of work to use torrents safely just isn't worth it for most people.
I'm not aware of this having happened for movie downloading but it has happened to data breach forums, the police in Holland have contacted some downloaders there after they took down a platform (raidforums): https://tweakers.net/nieuws/208638/politie-mailt-duizenden-n... (in Dutch, sorry)
So it's not unprecedented and certainly within the legal realm of possibility even though this is a different country.
Using a VPN isn't a lot of work really? And that's more than sufficient. It does cost a bit of money but so does a good Usenet server.
The problem with Usenet is the DMCA takedowns so you have to be really quick these days, after a day the content is gone.
I've heard from kinox from people I would have never suspected to be even capable of finding such a site.
Guess those people have been the marker.
Still.... you go, girl.
And here is the source claiming she was attempting to join the Comminist Party of Russia[1] (though she ended up not being able to, because she wasn’t a russian citizen, which is a requirement)
0. https://www.sci-hub.ru/misc/alexandra/bio.pdf
1. http://bilimveaydinlanma.org/a-robin-hood-in-the-world-of-sc...
In brief where those science paper coming from, Russia?
Not convinced myself, but to each their own.
Soviet and post Soviet literature tends to be layered and full of oblique messages, many of these suffer in translation.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu6oziDE5wc
Love it | Hate it, either way the Alexandra Elbakyan story is worth a read: https://sci-hub.se/alexandra
As a general rule pirate sites tend to not go in for founder bio's.
I'm no Data Scientist, but would be willing to bet a small round that were we to look, presence of founder bio's and their domicile's extradition policies are not uncorrelated.
[AFAICT there was a lot of paranoia on the Soviet side, and as a basis for that paranoia they pointed to all the Capitalist forces active in russia during the revolution, but in retrospect some part of all that foreign intervention had been due to a problem of their own making: they believed world revolution was only a few years off (and just maybe they didn't want to look inconsistent with their own ideology?), so instead of doing what any reasonable mafia would've done and kept on paying dividends on imperial paper (perhaps even after negotiating an acceptable haircut?) and maybe even paying lip service to IP rights, on both fronts they rather rudely essentially told all the now-former investors to "go to wood"]
Lagniappe: somewhere in Abai's қара сөздері, he says something similar to "you know, it wouldn't do us Kazakhs much harm if once in a while we were to think of something other than how to grift more cows"; with that in mind: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-3
This might be more a proof for this whole blocking-business actually working. kinox, serienjunkies and similar named domains were very famous and huge 5-10 years ago. Since then, they have been raided, sued, blocked, etc. So it seems they've been fallen in grace and awareness with their target-group.
So it's not shocking that some might want to shut down VPNs or make using a VPN illegal (like, uh, North Korea, Belarus, Iraq, Oman, Turkmenistan... oof).
I'm using many of the book sites and general torrent ones (I won't name them here), but none of these are on the list.
I also think the point is kinda moot because everyone doing torrents in Germany will already use VPN because it's only a matter of time before you get serious letters from lawyers there, demanding about 400 euro per move they've seen you download. ISPs always cooperate in giving subscriber info for each IP. Some lawyer firms actually specialise in this and go after downloaders on their own.
I wonder if they leave the big torrent sites out to provide income for these lawyers?