I don’t live in the US, so my ISP doesn’t really seem to care what I torrent, but the megathread vehemently recommends to always use one. Since VPNs aren’t cheap and I’m on a strict budget (wouldn’t pirate otherwise), is it really that dangerous to torrent without one?
@Alextheacceptable In Germany, there are lawyers specialised on torrents. They collect German IPs from the peers list and mass-sue them over distributing copyrighted material. They always ask for a settlement payment of more than 5000€. It can usually be escaped by taking it to court, but I recommend not going through that.
So, depends on your location. Over here, download one movie without a VPN and you have a shit ton of legal crap coming your way.
Makes me think… if you exclusively use IPv6 you might be fine because they can’t geolocate you that easily 🤔
Would that really matter, though? Afaik, they could still just… ask your ISP who that IP was assigned to, which is what they’re going to do with IPv4 anyways.
@SolOrion They don’t deal with ISPs outside the country, because they can’t sue them at a German court.
So they need to know it’s a German ISP beforehand so they can request personal information accordingly. But maybe they could still figure it out from IPv6 address ranges… I’m not entirely sure.
Yes you can do that easiely with a ripe whois query. And they definitely do.
You get an IPv6 prefix from your ISP. This way you have thousands of public addresses for yourself, but they still can identify you by the prefix.
Maybe even better as with IPv4. Because nowadays most people have DualStack Lite which means you have unique public IPv6 addresses but only a shared IPv4 address.