Comment by codetrotter
9 months ago
> This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!
It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.
With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.
With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.
And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?
This process of checking seeding peers to reporting an IP to an ISP to them send a user a nastygram is pretty automated. Torrent a Nintendo game (not even that new of one) and you will get an ISP nastygram within minutes.
I've heard.
Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client
Not sure if this is just misinformed, or anti-Germany/EU propaganda? Either way, not true.
In Germany, if you torrent something without protection of a VPN, you may receive a letter from a blood-sucking legal firm within a week or two, with a fine that can be argued down somewhat.
I'm sure the OP meant "knock on your door" figuratively. And refers to exactly what you say, those leechy law firm letters. In that sense it's entirely true.
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Huh, what in the world are you talking about.
If you’re torrenting and you happen to get caught, you will receive a letter from some copyright lawyer with a fine of X amount as well as a cease and desist.
The only knock on your door is the mail delivery man
What? No, you will not. You could get fined for seeding some popular stuff, but even then no one is knocking on your door, it'll probably come in the form of a letter, and even then it's not a guarantee.
I lived in Germany. At least back then it was definitely a letter. They were not very good at it, though, and I received one for torrenting large open source software.
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Do these letters have teeth or just trying to scare you into a settlement for lawsuit that would never come?
BS