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A few months ago I grabbed this torrent from rarbg, and it took weeks to download. Often going days with no seeders.
I finally got it, and decided I'd seed beyond my usual 2x to help others get this. Then rarbg went under, and now I think I'll just keep this one going.
Now if only torrenting wouldn't mean an automatic 500€ invoice from a very specific law firm in my country :(
sounds like pure intimidation to me.
1/ one could have "never received this letter"
2/ one could decide not to pay, and then what? will they go to court? based on what evidence?
3/ if it ever goes to court, "i don't know, i wasnt even home that day" should always work no?
i don't understand while in some countries (actually only one that i know of, Germany) people seem to be terrified by this lawyer's spam...
Oh no it isn't. Walldorf Frommer is well known to send "Unterlassungerklärungen" which you have to answer. It will go to court if you do not work against this. You normally need your own lawyer to defuse what they send you.
Also, if you are in court, there is the concept of "Störerhaftung" which is a wet dream for everyone suing you for copyright infringement. They will have your IP and the time, thus your address. Now you either have to name someone who did do it, or if you can't you will automatically be liable.
This isn't any intimidation, it is one company using the laws in place here to fuck you majorly over. There are a lot of stories about this and if you seed on any public tracker you WILL get a letter.
How effective are VPNs at preventing this? I've heard it recommended the most as a counter measure.
VPN's solve this problem completely. This law firm looks at the IP's of seeders and if they are german they request the personal details from the respective ISP.
If it's an IP of a (reputable) VPN they don't achieve anything and if it's not a german IP they can't do anything anyway.
They mostly go for the easy targets since that's their easy business.
This is the way. qBittorrent even has an interface option. You can set that to your VPN and it's basically a killswitch. I've still got mullvads killswitch option enabled on top of it tho. It just cuts your internet connection, if you ever drop the connection to their servers.
Oh right. Binding to the VPN network interface is really important.
It gives peace of mind. One time I noticed the VPN was off and qBit still ran and I didn't bind to the interface. Luckily it was fine.
VPN's solve this problem completely. This law firm looks at the IP's of seeders and if they are german they request the personal details from the respective ISP.
If it's an IP of a (reputable) VPN they don't achieve anything and if it's not a german IP they can't do anything anyway.
They mostly go for the easy targets since that's their easy business.