Alternatively if price is an issue (NEVER use a “free” VPN) you could torrent over I2P, which is free and very safe (at least as safe as tor, if not moreso).

Also the next release of qbittorrent is about to have built in I2P support (but also standard I2P comes with its own torrenting software).

I find that most VPNs are so heavily shilled that by that very nature, makes them suspect. Since the days of Napster, WinMX, Bearshare and the like, I’ve gotten exactly 2 “Hey, knock it off” letters from my ISP. And they were both from new-release, mouse-affiliated movie releases from a public tracker.

Get in with some of the private trackers and 99.9% of the worry disappears. Try not to upload terabytes of data, and the majority of ISPs (I mean, two of the 3 that seem to have the monopolies at least) wont even bother sending the notices.

I personally wouldn’t take the chance. Mullvad is €5 a month, and is worth it to me. My ISP completely shut off my service before ever giving me a notification. I had to completely restart service after going full Karen and blaming it on “my kids.” I would do a few searches and find posts or info relevant to your area or ISP.

I’ve always seen this as a question of risk. What you’re asking is the digital equivalent to “Do I really need to wear my seatbelt when driving?”

You can drive around your car two hours a day, every day, without a seatbelt, and be fine for years. You can say you live in a calm neighborhood and say no one ever drives recklessly there. Everyone is still going to tell you to always wear your seatbelt.

You can be very careful about what you torrent. You could possibly torrent lots of things with no problems at all. All it takes is one person at one other endpoint grabbing your IP from one torrent and reporting, to cause a lot of problems.

It’s up to you if you want to take that risk, but when you’re asking for advice no one is ever going to tell you that you don’t need one, and if they are they’re probably giving bad advice. There are enough horror stories that many don’t think it’s worth the risk.

Yes, it is really that dangerous. People recommended VPNs for a reason. Whether you personally are realistically at risk is an unknown - relatively few people are actually the targets of anti-piracy action. As others have pointed out, copyright trolls generally operate in specific countries and regions.

Still, I would never recommended engaging in copyright infringement without some form of protection. I understand you are poor but it really is a silly risk to take. The way almost all pirates get caught, at least from what I’ve seen, is through stupidity or complacency (one could argue they are the same thing). This is why the megathread tries to recommended best practice wherever possible.

I was brought up thinking I live in a central europe. The “heart of europe” they called it. Only once I realized that I torrent without a VPN without consequences, I accepted the fact that I’m eastern european AF.

@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.

You’re probably fine, but I recommend just getting a free VPN to keep your ISP at bay. I don’t like Proton, but they do have a free VPN. Google around and you can find some others too, if that one is too slow