This exactly.
Imprint9816
Keep blowing hot air. Thats all you know how to do. The keyboard warrior generation at its finest.
Even if it was, why screw over the people who are doing what you want? Price hikes arent hurting pirates lol.
This is the new generation in a nutshell.
"Hey someone other then me should do this thing I want"
This made me laugh. Anyone who has lived in central or south america sees this type of thing happen all the time.
Do this all the time with video games. Pirate to try before I buy. If I really like the game I buy it in the hopes it creates an incentive to make more games like the ones I like.
There are legitimate versions of windows that are hard to get as a non enterprise consumer. Such as some of the IOT versions that have much longer security support.
The bar for torrenting is super low. If all you want to do is avoid DMCA notices pretty much any VPN will do as long as you bind it to your torrent client.
In terms of Windscribe they have become a much more respectable VPN if you also want some privacy protections and DNS protections but there are better options.
They used to be a bottom dweller VPN selling off lifetime memberships for $30 in the mid 2000s but have really become a strong privacy advocate over the last few years.
Something can be shady and not a honeypot. It's much more common. Its like people forgot this and now anytime anyone feels something is sus this type of post appears.
I was in middle school and I saw my friend had all the episodes of ATHF (aqua teen hunger force) and I wanted to be able to get free episodes of stuff. Silly but true.
You can therefore blame the mooninites for my piracy.
I use an optiplex for torrenting, Plex media server, and real debrid. The VPN is always on so I wouldn't be concerned to use it as my daily driver but it's a bit old to handle other tasks in use my daily driver for.
I admit this is not a helpful answer but...
If you want to have hundreds of gigabytes or more of media storage plus backups, its going to be expensive. There is no secret cheap way.
This is what makes debrid options so appealing. You can amass terabytes of media data for a cheap monthly cost.
You can then supplement that with a small nas or drive of rare or hard to find media / offline selection in which case you could probably run raid 10 with the small amount that you would actually need to backup.