EU is making a new law which makes your IP the same as (something similar to) your social security number and they say piracy is going to receive a huge blow. Obviously I have no intention of stopping but now I'll have to start using a VPN, if I want to continue my way. However, I do not trust VPNs a lot and I do not like the idea of paying for them (I could just pay for the movie in the first place)

I looked into using Tor network to torrent but it seems like it'd be a hindrance to the network itself, which is going to be a huge inconvenience for other users. Additionally I know that even if I found a way to throttle my bandwidth to remove this problem, Tor isn't exactly made for this sort of thing anyways.

Now, obviously it doesn't have to be torrenting, but I would gladly hear any suggestions on how to avoid paying and getting movies and shows without being caught doing it. Truthfully I was only streaming from websites for many years, so I do not know a lot about torrenting vs direct downloading either. Thanks in advance for any responses.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You can keep on seeding after downloading and your torrenting program will still manage to upload to any member of the swarm for that torrent that it connected to (even if only to check their status) during the download phase.

This should be enough to get you consistently above a 1:1 upload to download ratio for any popular public torrents, though for those with very few leechers you might never get there.

The lack of port forwarding is only a problem for remote machines your program has not connected to during the current session for a torrent (i.e. not yet seen machines that try to connect to your client), which means you can't seed at all in a purely for seeding session or upload to machines that joined the swarm after your download was done in a mixed session.

If your pattern of usage is that of mainly a downloader of public torrents who tries to give back to the communy at least as much as they took and whose not mainly into obscure stuff, it works fine.

[–] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You are not exactly right, but going in the right direction. Not having a forwarded port means you aren't 'connectable' by peers as your firewall will block incoming traffic. What this means is that only 'connectable' peers will be able to connect to you (your client can reach out to them as their port is forwarded). You are however invisible to peers that also aren't 'connectable'. You might also experience some degradation in time to connect as people can't reach out to you.

To sum it up:

Not connectable =X= not connectable (impossible)
Not connectable =>= connectable (degraded time to connect when seeding)
Connectable === connectable (perfect)