Let’s not turn this into what the Reddit subreddit of Piracy has turned into and that’s an endless sea of questions that are all the same - “Do I need a VPN?”.
And the loud and vocal answer to such a question is - yes. Yes you do need a VPN for pirating. Nobody gets a VPN for casual use and I’m under the impression that VPN services know a lot of people are going to be going to them for pirating and not just accessing content out of their country. And it’s for that reason, is why I’m skeptical on entrusting my activity with the bigger VPN names available.
I use ProtonVPN myself, by the way.
Pirating under your raw IP address, only will set you up to get pegged by your ISP whether it’s in a short time or a long time. I’ve only ever gotten one single ISP letter in my entire 26 years of pirating and it was simply because I downloaded without a VPN. Well I was also downloading off of someone else’s network to take the fall, but I was confronted about it either way.
And I’ve gotten away with so much pirating because of my careful cautiousness when it comes to pirating. That and this applies to the United States, but the statue of limitations is 3 years when it comes to copyright infringement. So, good fucking luck to any ISP or so that wishes to try and nail me for something I downloaded 10 years ago, but I digress.
But a large part of me avoiding so much does contribute to having a VPN. So, yes, VPN is required. Please don’t ask anybody in the pirating community 100 questions that are all just ways to ask whether or not you need a VPN. You do.
It’s a numbers game for me. I think it really does depend where you live, and what you are downloading. 30+ years for me for the record, but I’m generally pretty low on the arrrrrr scale. Basically I’m guilty for like suburban house wife levels of pirating, downloading albums not yet released, the odd movie and maybe one to two PC games a year. Actually I’m a pretty big book pirate too, and I guess I do have IPTV, but my point is it’s all for super-micro levels of personal consumption, I’m not wholesale uploading, I’m not resharing it, nor am I dealing in anything weird or gross. So wasting your time on me isn’t going to be very fruitful, zero impact to the greater world and economy. Hence I don’t waste much time with VPNs and all of that, I just don’t think there’s much reason to. Plus I don’t fully trust that the NSA or whatever bureaucrat-org doesn’t have a way to front run your traffic out of the ISP even before it hits the VPN.