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Start your NordVPN trial here. Torrenting without a VPN means your internet service provider ISP can see your online activity including the sites you visit and the content you view.
In certain countries, including the US, ISPs are allowed to share this information with third parties including intellectual property owners. It is proprietary—not open source—software maintained by a legal US company. Like BitTorrent, the uTorrent software itself is legal, although it can be used for digital piracy.
The official uTorrent is free of malware and can be used safely and privately in combination with a VPN. It does not, however, prevent users from downloading malicious files that can infect their device. The BitTorrent protocol rose to become the most popular medium for peer-to-peer file sharing in the world after the demise of centralized services like Napster and Limewire.
Unlike those services, torrenting is almost completely decentralized save for the trackers that allow users to search and download torrent files and magnet links. Torrent files and magnet links are used to find other users on the network who host the desired file or files but do not actually host those files for downloading.
The BitTorrent protocol is not in itself illegal or unsafe. It is just the means to share any type of file, and plenty of legal torrenting services do exist.
The most popular torrent trackers, such as ThePirateBay and KickassTorrents, however, operate in a legal grey area, offering users free access to copyrighted content. Sharing and downloading copyrighted content by BitTorrent, or other means, is illegal in many countries and can be unsafe since sites including KickassTorrents have been shown to host malware. These trackers would argue that they simply find and organize information that is already out there, and they do not illegally host any copyrighted content on their own servers.
Just like the BitTorrent protocol itself, they are the means to an end. Not everyone is convinced. Major trackers have come under heavy legal scrutiny from content creators and distributors who argue the trackers enable and encourage theft. The blame ultimately shifts to the users, the millions of individuals who host files on their personal computers, downloading and uploading movies, games, software, music, ebooks, and more.
Users connected to the same tracker are called peers, and they fall into two categories. A leech uses a torrent file or magnet link to download the file from other users on the network who already have the file.
These users who already have the file are called seeds. When a leech is finished downloading a file or even just part of a file , he or she becomes a seed, allowing other leeches to download the file from his or her computer. Comparitech does not condone or encourage any violation of copyright law or restrictions. Please consider the law, victims, and risks of copyright piracy before downloading copyrighted material without permission.
Legally speaking, seeding and leeching copyrighted material fall into different criminal categories. Think of it like buying illegal drugs: purchasing the drugs for personal use is definitely a crime, but a relatively minor one. Turning around and selling those drugs to others is a much more serious offense.
The prosecution of torrent users has been sporadic. The chances of actually going to court or having to pay a settlement are pretty slim, but the penalties can be extremely high. The frequency of copyright holders suing torrenters for copyright infringement peaked in the late s. Copyright pirates were sued for wildly disproportionate amounts of money, and most settled out of court. These public scare tactics shone poorly on the recording and movie industries because they were portrayed as petty millionaires bullying poor college students.
Direct lawsuits are much less common these days, but the campaign against torrenters is far from over. Now the job of going after individual copyright pirates has been outsourced to a growing number of small businesses known as copyright trolls. These companies locate torrenters who illegally download copyrighted content through their real IP addresses.
They then approach the copyright owners and sign a deal that lets them take legal action on their behalf. Others are hired directly by Hollywood production companies to sniff out pirates. With legal leverage and a list of names, the copyright trolls then go after torrenters via mail, email, or even by going door to door and handing out settlement letters.
These letters are not legally binding documents or injunctions. Copyright trolls use intimidation, fear, and shame to make torrenters pay without ever going to court.
The most common way to receive a settlement letter is through your internet provider. A copyright troll will go through the court system to subpoena your ISP and force it to email customers with a legal threat and hand over personal details. According to US law, an IP address is not a person. Your case could be dismissed before the date that your ISP is set to reveal your personal details to the troll. If you respond and identify yourself, that gives the troll a more direct means of targeting you.
This is a game of probability for copyright trolls. If they send out 1, threatening emails and 50 people reply, they only need a handful to actually cough up money to make it worth their time. If things escalate and you decide to take action, lawyer up. Depending on your ISP, it may take actions against you on its own behalf. That could mean throttling your internet connection or threatening to hand over personal details to a copyright troll. Why does your ISP even care? Because torrenting takes up a lot of bandwidth, and that bandwidth costs ISPs money.
On top of that, an ISP could be receiving kickbacks from content owners and their associates. However, if you insist on torrenting, take the time to protect your online privacy and keep copyright trolls at bay. The best way to torrent safely is by using a VPN. A VPN accomplishes two things: first, it re-routes all your internet traffic through a server in a location of your choosing, which changes your real IP address to one used by hundreds or thousands of other people assuming your VPN uses shared IP addresses, which most do.
This adds a significant layer of anonymity and makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you. Second, a VPN encrypts all your torrent traffic before it leaves your computer. That means your ISP cannot monitor your internet activity, nor can anyone else.
Not all VPNs tolerate torrenting. You can check out our list of the best VPNs for torrenting here , which are services with fast download speeds and a focus on online privacy, security and anonymity like NordVPN , Surfshark , and ExpressVPN among others. We recommend a VPN over Tor for a couple reasons. First, Tor is slow, and usually best for simple browsing and other low-bandwidth activity. Another popular app among torrenters is Peerblock.
The penalties for illegal downloading vary by country, but the gravest penalties for illegal downloading are usually fines. It is possible to serve time in a prison for downloading a film, music, or other item illegally, but most areas recognize that this punishment does not fit the crime.
In most cases, a very high monetary fine will be imposed, but no jail time will be demanded. Even so, when Internet piracy can possibly result in jail time, it is very important to obey the law even if the chances of being prosecuted are minimal. Fines, where they exist, are often extremely inflated and can reach more than a hundred thousand times the purchase price of the individual song or film. In some areas, a person can be sent to prison for illegal downloading.
The length of the sentence is usually shorter for a person who only downloads and does not upload any files. As people who download files typically download many files, it is relatively uncommon to see prison sentences related to the number of files downloaded.
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