Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

What do you mean by "the government doesn't care"? Do you mean that they are not enforcing copyright protection laws to your knowledge? Or that copyright protection laws don't actually exist in your country at all? If the laws exist but are not being enforced, there is always a possibility that they will be enforced in the future or that a change in government will lead to a change in approach. Your government could also potentially pass new laws in the future that make it easier for foreign entities to go after yourself and other pirates through your local courts.

You need to work out exactly what the law in your country says, what the government's attitude towards piracy is and whether there is a legal precedent in your country for the prosecution of pirates. For example, in Australia we have copyright laws and a government that is at least somewhat committed to upholding them, but we also had a significant court case a little over a decade ago in which it was ruled that the ISP being sued was not responsible for the piracy its users were allegedly engaging in. This essentially set a legal precedent within Australia that allows ISPs to turn a blind eye to piracy and makes it more difficult for foreign entities to prosecute Australian pirates. This is why most court-ordered anti-piracy action within Australia is limited to DNS blocks on websites. As a result, many Australians feel safe torrenting without a VPN because they believe it is very unlikely their ISP could be compelled in court to hand over their information or that there is even the will to attempt this following that high profile defeat in 2012.

Assuming the government defs doesn't care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.

Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you're buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.

If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren't expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you're using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.

If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it's not much of a risk.

It's a security risk but it's not a legal problem

If you do use a VPN for torrenting, ensure it supports port forwarding. You won't be able to seed if the provider doesn't allow port forwarding. Sharing is caring :)

AirVPN is currently one of the best VPNs that support port forwarding, but there's some others that do, too. NordVPN doesn't support it. There's an old list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/s9f36q/list_of_vpns_that_allow_portforwarding_2022/

The general philosophy: they can't prosecute the entire populous.

If everyone is pirating, they focus on the ones who pirate the worst shit or the ones who pirate the most shit for profit.

In a sea of pirates, you don't get tagged.

If people stop pirating, the bar for too extreme or too much lowers.

They do pirate the most extreme and the most prolific pirates, however.

A story as old as time.

Is the legal environment tomorrow going to be the same for you as it is today? Are they going to change the law, (or the interpretation of it) tomorrow? Have they already done so, but that news hasn't reached you yet? If they have changed it, does a hostile entity have your information already logged?

To answer your question, yes, you should be concerned about exposing your public IP address.

Oh man, normally I don't respond to these kinds of posts because I'm always worried I'll just be helping someone that does CP. BUt, since you 100% definitely don't, which I think is really cool that you don't btw, I'm going to give you the advice that you shouldn't be concerned about IP exposure.

I have questions:

1. Does the government just "not care" or is piracy specifically legal because there aren't local laws against it?

2. While you say they don't care right now, do you think there is a possibility that they might care in the future? Because governments often capture lots of information on their citizens with the knowledge that they can then target people that they dislike. Piracy is one of many things governments can use against a person if they really dislike them or what they're doing.

If it's explicitly not illegal and won't be in the near future, I wouldn't be too worried.

However, it might be a good idea to avoid public trackers anyway and focus on slowly growing a good reputation on private trackers. That might take some time, especially if you have a slow connection, which is quite possible in a country that doesn't care about this sort of thing.

You won't necessarily need a VPN for a private tracker, but it gives you a small amount of protection since at least the members of a private tracker are a (supposedly) vetted, trusted community instead of just any random person grabbing your IP.

VPN: Don't go online without it.

I just pirate media I like

In other words, your computer is downloading stuff from other computers, that's potentially receiving stolen property, but a potential argument might be that you didn't know that it was stolen. It's not a good argument, but it's an argument. So you're an individual who potentially broke the law. Depending on how much money you have, you might get a knock on your door.

But then, you also distribute that potentially stolen property to other computers, because that's how BitTorrent works, and now you're part of a distribution network dealing with stolen property. The chances that once you've discovered you come away with just a slap on the wrist are slim to none.

How do they find you?

Through your IP address.

How?

By figuring out who owns that address, who loaned it to you to get online at that specific time. One packet at a time the research will bring them closer to knocking on your door.

So, is it a big deal that your public IP address is linked to torrenting? Yes it is.

Is this the whole story? Not by a long shot, but it's not my job to teach you how to break the law.

Worse than CP?

NM, I don't want to know.

It's good opsec to have a VPN when torrenting but thats largely due to the risk of being identified commiting a crime.(Or at the very least, having your ISP send you an angry letter about copyright infringement)

If thats not part of your threat model, then you dont need to worry.

I'm in the same boat. There have been numerous copyright lawsuits that have been thrown out by the courts in my country; however, I pirate because I'm poor AF so I can't afford a VPN anyway.

inb4 someone recommends a cheap VPN: No.