How is the anti-P2P enforcement these days? I think there are companies gathering bittorrent swarm data and selling it to lawyers interested in this sort of bullying. In Finland at least you can expect a mail from one of them if your IP address turns up in this data. However I think it is mostly focused on video and music piracy.
I'm in Italy. Most people I know have been pirating movies, series and games [1] for 20+ years, via torrents and eMule (yes, eMule is still big in Italy), and nobody ever received any letters.
But there's a big exception: as soon as you start pirating soccer, they're going to come after you.
[1] I've personally stopped pirating games a long time ago, because it's just easier and safer to buy them on Steam or GOG. Gaben was 100% right when he said "Piracy is almost always a service problem".
Yup, Gaben was 100% right. I haven't pirated a game or music album in ages. Having games that just work is great. An update came out? It's auto-installed. Don't have to wait for the cracker group to put out a new patched executable. For music, Spotify means I don't need to curate a collection and buy individual songs. Yes, I acknowledge that it means I don't own any of it, but that's fine. I'm still coming out ahead compared to paying for $1 for every individual song.
But movies and TV shows? All the studios fucked it up by all wanting a piece of the pie. It became a horribly fragmented market. I'd need, what, 8+ subscriptions to have access to it all? Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, Amazon Prime Video... Other than sports-centric streaming that I don't care about, what am I missing?
It's utterly ridiculous. My pirating plummeted when Netflix streaming became a thing. It returned when studios revoked the licenses so they could put it on their own platform.
In Germany you can expect to get a letter from some law firm, confirmed by some judge that orders you to pay 100s or 1000s of euros if you don't use a vpn
They will attempt to download DMCA files from you as often as possible and then calculate the amount of times times price of the product to come up with a fictional damages amount
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pirating-streaming-movies-...
A little intro intended for recent immigrants
at least they confirm you are indeed sharing them and not just matchibg your IP in some swarm list which may not even be real
US colocated seedbox with ~10k film and tv torrents seeding at any given time, the last letter I got was ~2014 IIRC, before that it was several a year. I never responded to any of them.
I don't think I'm especially good at covering my tracks, so either they've abandoned individual enforcement in favor of going after distributors or they no longer bother with non-residential IPs.
I don't even use a seedbox and I've been torrenting for years. The last time I got a letter from my ISP was I think 2012.
I use an invite-only tracker. I wonder if that's made the difference.
edit: curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you?
Anecdotally it seems the only enforcement in the US these days is via ISPs who have made some agreement to "self-enforce" against their residential customers, sending emails threatening to cancel service after three strikes. They seem to only monitor for select "blockbuster" level movies. A friend got one of these as recently as two years ago from CenturyLink iirc. Meanwhile I lived in an apartment building that had a shared (commercial) connection for all the tenants and eventually stopped using a VPN at all, never heard anything.
> curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you?
Yup, they would send their spam to `abuse@provider.tld` regarding an IP address, my provider would look up the IP address and forward it to me.
Presumably if they ever cared to escalate they could file a lawsuit and subpoena the provider for my identity, but they never did. They're looking for easy settlements and that would cost time and money.
Well, they did sue Cox Communications for a billion dollars because they weren't self-policing. ISPs can lose their safe harbor status and effectively become accomplices in all the piracy of their customers.
Happens every day in the US. Mostly video and music (MPA/RIAA). There's also been some effort put into extorting ISPs for the activities of their customers, but the effectiveness of that is still being determined as cases work their way through the court system. We should have a better idea this summer after the supreme court decides on the $1 billion in damages one ISP was ordered to pay to a bunch of RIAA labels.
It will be a lot more profitable to sue ISPs than it is to try to sue poor parents and grandparents for what children do online.
I've heard Finland sends out letters, same with Japan. Are there actual consequences, or can they just be ignored?
Norway I haven't heard of anyone getting anything in the past decade. The ISPs supposedly get letters from lawyers but just toss them, since the intersection of the burden of proof and our privacy laws make it such that nothing can really be done.
I think there was some ISP that gave out names and IP addresses to one of the firms years ago, but nothing happened and the police said "we have better things to do".
AFAIK you can completely ignore the letters, because taking you to court would be very costly and might not end well for them. However, they keep doing it because some people get scared and pay up right away.
In the US it can be a pretty big deal, even if rights holders don't take you to court.
You can basically get banned by your ISP and it's not like there are a lot of ISP options.
ISPs in the US that are lax about it have been sued for millions[1] (and even in one case a billion, pending supreme court decision). [2]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/cox-settles-disp...
[2] https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/alerts/2026/february/4/s...
Yes, I think it's the same in here, you have been able to ignore the letters without any consequence. Also from what I hear, the letters have been very inaccurate. I doubt the IP based proof would hold in the court of law.
Living in Sweden and in the Netherlands, I have never heard about any such case. Not sure I'm just lucky or if it's really non-existent.
In France, for movies/music you get 2 warning letters, then a scary one that says you can now get to court possibly.
Didn't really hear about people getting fines for this, but the law exists.
I find it absurd that with all of the dhit going on in the world right now that any legal resources are being spent on copyright enforcement.