Recently, my wife and I had a shouting match over piracy which went nowhere other than making me realize I couldn’t back up my positions on anything other than the higher-level ethics stuff.
The argument went something like this:
Wife: piracy is federal crime, federal crimes mean federal prison, i don’t want you going to federal prison
Me: thats not how that works
Wife: how do you know? What if they got a court order against you and you had to supply all your files to them
Me: incoherent monkey tantrum noises
To clarify, she is fine with piracy, she just is scared of me getting caught. And my position was “nuh uh!”
My understanding is that the biggest point of risk (of actual legal consequences, specifically) is when you are the one propagating files (because the feds will go after uploaders when able) and when using public torrents (if i forget to use a VPN, dmca snitches might send a “stop pirating” notice to my landlord who owns the router our internet goes through). Not 100% percent sure why these are the risky things, though, and I’m not sure if there’s other things i need to be on my toes about.
The argument i have more trouble with figuring out how to answer is the question of “what if the feds change their strategy for some reason and start playing whack-a-mole with individual pirates like me?” What do I do to future-proof myself? Is just using a VPN across all my devices enough?
We’re not in the 2000s where the RIAA/MPAA spent hour after hour, individually going after individuals whom they suspect is pirating.
They’ve changed up tactics all throughout the 2010s and into today. Where, they’re holding ISPs accountable and are targeting owners of services and pirating sites instead. They’ve actually got some victories under their belt through this, which is a damn shame, so it’s telling them that it is working. Not to mention we’ve had the misfortune of dealing with ACE, their little treehouse club and lots of copyright trolls that act as copycats who take it upon themselves to operate similarly as to how they did in the 2000s.
You have far greater risk being an owner, being the uploader and being the source of pirating than you are these days, just downloading it. Your ISP decides when they want to take action against whatever files you’ve downloaded.
As people have said, your best tools are with VPNs and figuring out which VPN has your back, most importantly. That’s what pirating has come down to and that is trust.
But blah blah, we get it, the feds will say copyright is a crime and blah blah. We got that decades ago, we just don’t care because consumer rights have been thoroughly fucked over which in turn, causes us to pirate. A lesson these idiots refuse to learn.