Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Well first off, torrenting doesn't "require" a VPN, you may want to look up your area etc... in most of the united states, basically if you torrent without a VPN, there's a chance that your ISP will detect it and typically they will send you a letter saying "we know you downloaded _____ illegally, if we catch you again, we will cancel your service".

which depending on what you are going for (like say new releases and big name targets are what they will be watching for the most)... that could take years to even happen.

Now as far as safe, and lower risk... you could always look up pirating on the IRC... it's not the most user friendly route out there, but that's kind of the point, it's ancient technology and for the most part no one bothers to monitor it.

and then of course there's just tons of bootleg streaming sites. bottom line anything that's not peer 2 peer, is pretty much impossible for ISPs to identify what you are doing on... and thus are pretty safe.

Seems like a lot of people replying need to work on their reading comprehension...

Use private trackers only. Public trackers are way easier to identify you on.
Disable DHT, PeX and Local Peer Discovery in your BitTorrent client. This will prevent you connecting to random public peers.
If you're just interested in movies/TV I recommend streaming sites with an adblocker. Just so much easier and safe enough. Find sites on fmhy.net

I2p

ITT buncha folks with no reading comprehension, free != pay little.

if ISP/government are looking for folks doing the thing, get a torrent client for your laptop/phone, send links to it, and then seek out some free wifi, like a coffee shop or sumsuch. loiter about, limit download speeds so they don't ban your freeloading ass and there you go - adventure, fresh air, you don't gotta download "watch dogs", you're living the game!

Unfortunately any unencrypted file sharing, or really any unencrypted internet usage at all, carries some risk of ISPs or governments snooping on what you are doing. BitTorrent is just particularly notable because of its history and that by the nature of the protocol, you are uploading (seeding) in addition to downloading.

A good VPN is a few bucks a month and provides a lot of other benefits. It's worth considering.

Find someone in your circle of friends who can give you an invite to a private tracker or use usenet. Also vpns arent necessarily “required”. It will depend on your area and your download setup.

You could use a free VPN like Proton if you're worried about getting caught. You can also use DNS over https to hide what sites you're visiting from being visible, and you might not even need a VPN depending on your area, as others have mentioned. I've pirated so much stuff for years and never gotten any angry letters.

fmhy has a beginners guide, there's lots of options that don't require torrenting

for torrenting specifically, I've been using cloudflare's vpn (1.1.1.1) without issues, though it requires a bit of setup with wireguard

Mooch off someone else's paid VPN.

yt-dlp and a streaming site

direct downloads and JDownloader2, but your mileage will vary with availability

You can pirate over IRC XCDD. Without VPN the IRC server, other people on the server as well as the servers you are downloading from know your IP but it's significantly less exposure than torrents since you aren't seeding anything.

What I did, what I do and why I do it

At the beginning of the 2000's, piracy either wasn't as prevalent as it is today or it wasn't as persecuted, or a combination thereof. Which is to say, I started with DC++, Kazaa and direct downloads. No security or privacy measures. This is also when I proudly downloaded the first Pokémon movie Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), sat down with my parents to watch it and then immediately having to explain to them why Pokémon are having sex. Suffice it to say, it was some Pokémon themed hentai.

As my understanding of computers, networking and capitalism evolved - this being around the early 2010's - and especially as I had learned about the improved, albeit not perfect, anonymity of torrenting in a society with otherwise increasingly oppressive demeanor towards online integrity and piracy -, I decided to only pirate using torrent clients thenceforth. I also took a brief pause from piracy for about six years, as I moved to a jurisdiction whose laws and attitude towards privacy were not known to me. I was doing my Master's degree and thus couldn't spare the time and effort it would've taken to safely engage in piracy.

As we arrive to present day - present time (any fans here?) -, nation states' attitude towards piracy - or, rather the lobbyists' relentless pursuit to reap legal fees - but really just the overall cyber climate with all the data brokers indiscriminately collecting, profiling and selling our data to the highest bidder, I simply don't dare to be on the clearnet/internet without using a VPN, an adblocker and DNS/hosts file based filtering anymore. I would argue that the risks to the integrity of the individual is great enough to warrant these countermeasures regardless of jurisdiction, but I digress. Sure, if your jurisdiction does not criminalize piracy, be my guest, torrent without a VPN.

My current setup

• VPN: Mullvad VPN, €5 per month https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
• Adblocker (in browser): uBlock Origin https://ublockorigin.com/
• DNS: Mullvad (comes "automatically" with the above services)
• Torrent client: qBittorrent https://www.qbittorrent.org/

A few notes on Mullvad:

• I am using Mullvad VPN on a router so that all my traffic is encrypted, but their desktop app is also good - better in regards to customizability -, just make sure to bind your torrent client to the network interface created by the VPN app.
• You cannot make applications reachable from the internet (aka forward ports) with Mullvad. You can still download, but you are a passive seeder, only reachable by peers that do have port forwarding enabled. (Note: a great majority of the bigger seeders/public seeding groups use so called seeding boxes whose ports are forwarded and I seed in average 8TBs per month with steady share ratios of around 8.0, so don't let this discourage you, unless maximizing your seeding contributions is what is most important to you.)

Paying nothing

As others have already pointed out, double check what laws apply in your specific jurisdiction before pirating unprotected. I haven't tried it myself, except for running two of their routers to contribute bandwidth, but file sharing in the closed network i2p is supposedly popular. However, I can neither confirm nor deny this and it is a somewhat more technical approach. All your traffic is encrypted many times over and what you do inside i2p is not visible from the clearnet. https://geti2p.net/en/

Mullvad will coat you 5 bucks a year. If you don't pay for it, you're the product.

Check out Tribler. Its based on similar tech as the Tor network and allows for anonymous downloads and uploads. IRC is still a pretty decent option too, if a bit of work.

Mulvad is 5 euro per month for up to 5 devices. You could split it with 4 other people...

I2P

What would you advise i do?

If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM'd download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I'm commenting in.. :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.

Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna's Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna's Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.

I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don't have DVD releases and aren't on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider "Eternal September", while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.

Torrents don't require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don't ever use the "free" VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.

People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there's not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.

what did you do when starting out?

I'm getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90's and into the mid 2000's. Dial-up BBS's were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn't really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it's hayday) and Bittorrent hadn't been invented yet.

Only use direct downloads. For example https://rentry.org/megathread-games#direct-downloads I don't torrent, I don't use a VPN, nor pay for anything in order to pirate. Sometimes you might have to wait for slower download speeds but often times there is a mirror that will cap out my speeds of 200mb/s

I2p or opendirectories or direct downloads. Id personally opt for i2p as at least you give something back.

That being said a vpn is cheap.

yarrlist has a list of servers that are like the old fmovies, some are worse than others so use an adblocker.

Decade and a half ago I torrented all the time and didn't get caught until I stupidly downloaded something from the top 100 torrents on pirate bay.

Not sure how safe torrents are now.

Never have had any issues with direct downloads and streaming. Just use your head, adblock, and virus scan your downloads (knowing that keygens or cracked exes may show as viruses).

For safest option and free: Use an up to date web browser with a good adblocker (ublock origin is the current best), stick to direct downloads using a download manager to manage the 12+ parts, and virus scan everything that you download. Download from trusted sites from the megathread. Direct download is generally safe, unless you live in one of the few countries cracking down on fitgirl repacks specifically. Then that site is off limits for you.

You can use torrents without a VPN, it's just not safe. You could be caught and the penalty will vary based off of what you're downloading, where you live, and who you use for an ISP.

There's copyright infringement on one click hosters... And a loy of them offer slow, but free downloads. Some newcomers ask a friend to copy a movie from their harddisk or DVD collection... I mean piracy in general is a bit tricky for newcomers. There's some good resources linked in the sidebar... But a lot of piracy isn't exactly legal to do. And it's not really ethical to advise someone to do something that might get them in trouble... And openly recommending things is illegal in some jurisdictions. But yes. Don't do random torrents unless you know what you're doing.

where I live last I checked even if an IP holder sends you a cease and desist or other letter you can just ingore it and they can pound sand. If its worse for your country you kinda need the vpn.

Free Options:

• Go to your local library, borrow DVDs, Music CDs, and Audio books. Take them home a use one of the many free software options to rip the content onto your own computer.
• Stream recording. You can find all kinds of free streaming sites to watch movies and TV shows. You can use the ytdl command line tool to rip those movies and shows to your own computer, and I don't think that will trigger your ISPs alarm bells, I might be wrong though. If that is too advanced or isn't working, just go full goblin mode and start playing the media full screen, then use OBS or another free screen cap software to record your screen. Set it and forget it.
• Torrent raw and risk it from your own home. Depending on your country, this might not actually be a big deal.

Cheap Options:

• Mullvad is $6 per month. You can almost certainly afford that. But if you truly can't, then if you're in the US (idk about other countries) donating plasma can net you $30-$40 on the low end and $60-$80 on the high end. And assuming you're reasonably healthy, you can donate once a week. Even just one session at the low end would net you 4-5 months of VPN access.
• Sell stuff on Ebay, Craigslist, etc. You probably have some old junk laying around. Old computer parts, clothes, random tools, etc. All you need to do is find something worth 6$ and bam, there's a month of VPN.
• If you live in an area with multiple ISPs and you pay for your own internet, call the other ones and tell them what you're currently paying for internet, ask them if they can beat it by at least $10 a month. They will almost always say yes, and they will often include free installation and equipment set up too. You're now saving at least $10 a month on your internet and can afford a monthly VPN plan.

It depends where you are in the world. Some countries care more about copyright laws. Sometimes you can get away with torrenting with little to no consequences.

Otherwise, stick to direct download and streaming websites. There are a lot of great sites for movies and tv shows. They tend to come and go. Just remember to install an ad blocker. For games, you'll need to look at direct downloads. Some good links in other comments.

Do you have a dvd/blu ray disc drive? You could go to your local library and go hog wild on their selection