I once arrived in Germany, opened my laptop with a bittorrent client seeding some movie torrents, took me 5 minutes to realise and close it. 2 days later got a 800 euros fine in the mail, for one movie. A friend of mine got less lucky and got a hefty 20000 euros fine for multiple torrents. There are horror stories of Airbnb hosts getting fined hundreds of thousands for the torrenting of their guests.
I have since downloaded torrents in Germany, but not before being sure that my VPN setup immediately closes the internet connection if the VPN one drops. Private trackers should be fine.
what the fuck 😳, that’s super harsh
I agree. It’s a whole business, and of course everything is automated. They hire companies overseas that monitor the most popular torrents, and when they see a German IP a letter is sent to the “offender” address.
So that’s all they do?
Yeah you’re pretty much free to not pay it because it’s a ransom threatening to make a lawsuit, not an actual fine handed out by a tribunal. The company would have to pay huge amounts to start a lawsuit for money they’re not even sure you can afford to pay, and that’s assuming they can get you convicted.
As it stands, it’s a profitable business because people are afraid of going to court and pay the ransom, but there’s little basis to condemn someone solely based on IP address collection. IP spoofing is trivial, and there’s many other ways someone could use an IP tied to your name (someone mentioned AirBnB hosts).
In France, infamous HADOPI wanted to fine people for sharing copyrighted materials, but as it stands you are presumed innocent until proven guilty so HADOPI was deemed unconstitutional, and a later revision of the law now condemns you for “failing to securize your internet access”, not copyright infringement. To my knowledge, to this day only people who ratted on themselves have been fined by HADOPI.
I forgot where I read it, but definitely do not torrent there without VPN. feddit.de will know for sure…paging @sexy_peach@feddit.de
Thx, yes vpn is needed but is that enough?
The only thing I know for sure is that sharing copyrighted material through torrents without VPN will lead to bad letters in Germany. Dunno if it’s ok with vpn, I would think so, if it’s a save vpn. They can’t see the traffic in a vpn and if it’s from sweden or something you should be as safe as everyone else using it.
Thx. I read a lot of those posts but r/piracy states somewhere in the faq or sidebar that you shouldn’t use torrents in germany at all
You will get caught, Germany is insane about fining people for torrenting (like 1000 Euros, just insane amounts). This is actually one solid use case for running your traffic through Tor or a non-German VPN. You don’t really have an option honestly.
I’d suggest a seedbox located in a more friendly nation that you could manage your torrents from.
Many have services like jellyfin/ radar/ sonarr built in so you can stream as well. If you need the files you can ssh in and avoid detection
Depends which network but public torrent are monitored.
