> Where I live (Germany) you often get immediately subpoenaed (or the German equiv.) if you use it to download something.
That's absolutely not true. You can use BitTorrent as much as you like, there is absolutely no danger in doing so. If you commit copyright violations however, you might get caught regardless of how you did it.
Well, I thought it was extremely obvious that BitTorrent by itself is perfectly legal, and that it is of course not banned in Germany.
Of course you only get an "Abmahnung" if you use it for copyright violations. But that is by far the largest use case. It can hardly be ignored that most people, especially "non-technical" ones, associate BitTorrent only with illegally downloading media.
What I wanted to say, is that now - as opposed to a few years ago - the probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via bittorrent has approached ~1.
As I said on another comment to you, you better include "public" somehow in your rhetoric. The probability of getting into trouble when downloading popular episodes via private bittorrent trackers or on I2P is ~0, not that I would do or advocate such thing.
Well, I wouldn't trust private trackers too much, because if I can get access to such a tracker, then the piracy hunters can as well (with private I assume you don't mean really private between friends, but rather trackers you have to register for, or get invited to). I can't comment on I2P because I haven't tried it, I didn't know that it works with decent speed.
My point was basically, the old approach of Joe Average Pirate of 1) installing µTorrent and 2) googling for "Big Bang Theory S05E01 torrent" is as good as dead.
You're right I was a bit sloppy, but that's moot now since I can't edit my post anymore and will probably continue to be downvoted until the text is completely invisible :-(
Out of interest, could a network provider actually tell the difference between say the data to update warcraft (which at least used to use a torrent style download), and the data through uTorrent of a textbook, and so on.
It's easy for the hollywood copyright holders to just load the .torrent/magnet link into a bittorrent client and look at the list of peers.
Now of course, you can make it difficult to join the torrents - for example, by using private trackers - but that makes it as difficult for me as for the hollywood copyright holders.
Then just IP address -> Court order -> ISP -> Your home address and send the threatening letter.
You need deep packet inspection [0] of the traffic. You'll probably need in addition some signature and algorithm to distinguish between different type of content, but this is probably doable for unencrypted content.
That's absolutely not true. You can use BitTorrent as much as you like, there is absolutely no danger in doing so. If you commit copyright violations however, you might get caught regardless of how you did it.