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?
Assuming you are in the US, your wife’s fears are totally baseless because lawsuits against people for consumer level piracy pretty much have not been happening at all since like 2010 (with the exception of porn video piracy copyright trolls, which still doesn’t happen that much and maybe your wife would be unhappy with regardless). Even when they were, due to industry group backed lawsuit campaigns, it’s civil law not criminal so nobody went to prison, and the few people who actually got stuck with massive fines eventually just declared bankruptcy to get out of paying them.
This is because said industry groups switched to trying to enforce copyright via ISP, getting ISPs to voluntarily forward people threatening letters, which are mostly empty threats with no associated legal action, so the ISPs are getting sued to try to obligate them to cut off people’s internet access. They want a way of doing it where they don’t have to take consumer level pirates to court, I’d guess because it looks really bad for them and is terrible PR to have regular people who obviously don’t deserve punishment sued for huge amounts of money because they torrented some media.
You are totally safe if you have a VPN and bind it to your torrent client (which prevents torrents from working if the VPN is off or drops connection), but even if you get such emails from your ISP (I got a few myself) likely nothing will happen for now.