Questionable if this is only about movies, and not about any Bittorrent traffic.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Tor has massive issues with torrent traffic. Don't do torrent over TOR.
Internet service providers don't directly rat you out. The way it works is: Some (shady) companies watch torrent traffic for the copyright holders, and log the IP addresses. If it's a residential address and from a country they can pursue in, they file a court case. The judge then decides and sends a letter to the internet service provider. The ISP then is obliged to tell the court. It's a lawful request by a court. And then they get you.
Sometimes they can also take some shortcuts for a action for injunction(?). (I'm not sure if that's the correct term.) At least that's what they commonly do in Germany, where I live.
I'm not sure how law works in Australia. But where I live, it's pretty uncommon to pirate content via bittorrent without a VPN. There is a good chance you'll one day get an uncomfortable letter in the mail, if you push it.
I was not, at all, suggesting to torrent over tor. Like I said, I don't need to obfuscate my torrent traffic. I use tor for private browsing, which is the other major thing VPNs advertise themselves on.
In Australia, there is legal precedent that courts won't make these judgments anymore. American media companies, in the past, were granted these orders. However, they would then go off and commit actions that are illegal here, like sending coercive letters saying stuff like "Pay us $25 or we'll sue you". But sending it to a few thousand people and hoping enough pay, that it will recover your costs. The case was involving Dallas Buyer's Club. I actually got a letter, well my mum, when I was still living at home ~11 years ago.
I'm pretty sure they're still allowed to ask your ISP nicely. Mine refuses those requests. This also isn't my take on all of this, I followed the case back in the day on the Whirlpool forums.
I'm pretty sure most (all?) ISPs in Europe refuse nice requests. We have some data/privacy protection laws (GDPR ...) and it'd be illegal for them to just hand out your address. But as a company they have to comply with law, so that's why they need involve a judge. I think the courts also don't like to do this kind of work.
In the good old times some of our providers solved the issue by not logging IP addresses. So they'd be ordered by the court to say who did it, and they'd rightully say they don't have logs and don't know. But as far as I know that's a thing of the past. Some politicians regularly push for more surveillance. They start an argument every year or so, claiming online child abuse and pushing for more surveillance. I think as of now most providers keep logs, at least for some time.
The situation depends on the European country, however. Some don't really pursue copyright violations. And we're in a similar situation to Australia in that it's a civil matter and not any crime. I'm not sure how it is in the USA. They famously don't have any strong privacy protection (in most states), so maybe ISPs just hand out info about their customers. I don't really know.