Does anyone have experience with doing this in germany?
Thanks for any answers
From what I’ve heard from my German friends the network owner, so the one paying the isp bill, is responsible for whatever happens on the network. If someone broke in onto your network and downloaded illegal stuff, you are still liable for the fines as you should have protected your network sufficiently. Maybe you can get away with it if you are able to present hard evidence your sufficiently protected network was broken in to.
It’s the same with speed cam tickets. If you prove in court someone else was driving your car, you won’t have to pay the fine. If you are unable to, you are liable.
Imo it goes against the law. There’s this thing called “innocent until proven guilty”, so the burden of proof lies with the authorities, not with you. But sadly it’s not always the case. This did cause a lot of legal fights though, and to my knowledge this caused the German police to flash cars from the front now, so the driver would be visible in the photo in most situations.
Or just ignore it. If you actually read it, it never says anything about you being in trouble at that moment, but it’s intentionally worded to invoke that fear.
Toss it in the bin, and use a VPN or Usenet.
You should just use a VPN in the first place and then none of this is a problem.
Routing traffic through another computer will certainly fix things for you.
As long as this does not log nor allow tracing packets etc. yes.
It does when another computer is a temporary session on a virtual machine…
“Don’t talk to someone who is a trained professional to handle these kinds of problems, instead talk directly to the party trying to get you into legal trouble” is the dumbest advice I can imagine.
This is terrible advice, please just get a VPN like IVPN or Mullvad and just keep the letter somewhere*. Anyone telling you to forego a legal professional when it comes to legal issues is leading you astray.
I have a stack of unpaid parking tickets from private companies that begs to differ
From my totally uninformed non-lawyer knowledge: It’s more or less safe to ignore random letters from German lawyers until they are forwarded to you by a German court (usually in a yellow(?) envelope).
You mean letters without “Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung” which is information on legal remedies. If that information on legal remedies isn’t on a letter, then yes a fictive person could always ignore such a fictive letter. I am not a lawyer!
Don’t even need to respond, just toss the letter. You will never hear from them again. But do use a VPN when torrenting from especially Germany.
was there any case where this didn’t happen
Not that I’m aware of.
They’re fishing with a very large net. I once got a letter saying I illegally downloaded a movie I never downloaded, so their accuracy is also pretty horrible.
Canadian here, I have received these letters in the past through my ISP, once for a dl I did (yeah I raw dogged it), and 1 or 2 from the kid that lives in my house. ISP says basically “We got this letter, we need to forward it to you, we have passed on no information to the sender. Please don’t get caught doing this again. Thank you”. Not sure what would happen if there were hundreds of files downloaded but my ISP is a pretty good one for doing the bare legal minimum to correct users.
I feel like at this point even the ISPs are like “bruh just use a VPN this shit is annoying”
After talking to someone else at work using Rogers, their VPN shit the bed one night they forgot to stop the torrents, they got a similar letter.
At this point our ISPs should just automatically put us all on rotating non-logged VPNs as part of our packages we already get the modem as part of the service, just integrate it there (not sure if I’m being serious or silly)
They may as well have said please use a VPN to save us the cost of a stamp next time
Similar happened to me when I was on Starlink. Strongly worded letter to say don’t do it again or further action would be taken. I told my adult kid to smarten up and make sure to use a VPN when tormenting games (which he already knew). Haven’t had a letter since.
Is your ISP TekSavvy by any chance?
Ding ding ding!!!
I love TekSavvy, they’re the only ISP I’ve used that I haven’t had completely horrible experiences with. In fact, I’ve been with them for the last ~3 years and haven’t had a single complaint yet. My parents have been with them for even longer, probably around 10 years, and same deal. No issues.
I have set people up on their systems and their tech support actually listens to your question and answers it instead of taking the meandering each and every insignificant step. I switched to them about ~8 yrs ago and my only issues with them were actually with bell doing something to my connection cause it was in the way or something.
k thanks for ur help, tho why use a vpn when I can do that yk…
Because they can and will try to compile a case on you if they can track significant amounts of upload from you. They will silently do that for years before knocking on your door.
oh ur right
tho does this happen in other countries aswell?
I’m from the czech republic and trying to help a friend.
from what ik in Czechia no 1 cares unless u make money off of it or ur a big fish
Number 1 rule when doing things that could get you punished: Don’t be the lowest hanging fruit. VPN is not much trouble but will make you a much harder to pick target.
In several countries there are laws that let representatives of copyright holders just get from ISPs the contact information of their users on demand (I believe Germany and the UK are like that) whilst in some others there are other similars laws like the ones where the ISPs have to pass the letters from the representatives of the copyright holders to their customers (such as Canada?). In fact as far as I know these kinds of letters only exist in such countries and only since such laws were passed - without such laws it’s the traditional process where a Court Order is required for such things which is way more hassle in general and thus not worth it to go after non-commercial copyright violation.
Add a VPN on the user side and suddently to track the person associated to the IP address detected sharing a specific torrent requires a Court Order (for the VPN provider to disclose that).
Use a VPN exit point in a different country and now that Court Order has to be obtained from a court in a different country from that were the user can be sued.
If in a country with extreme pro-copyright legislation like that, good luck getting enough in damages from a Court for the Copyright violation of somebody sharing a torrent for non-commercial purposes to pay for the cost of simply getting the contact of that person from their IP.
CGNAT maybe.
The funny thing is that I personally use vps in Germany. Have nothing in my name
Aren’t those Nazi businesses?
Where could one learn to rent a VPS in this manner?
Hetzner for hosting
Use either
https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core if you want to go through government censorship (Russia, China)
https://getoutline.org/ if you want just to mess with your IP for basic anonymity
I wouldnt admit not having a wifi password in germany. Theres the “Störerhaftung”. If its your device you are responsible. Thats why germany has so few open public wifis.
But i never got a letter and looked up what to do? Probably tossing the letter into the trash is enough. Just be sure to seperate your waste properly so your neighbour doesnt sue you.
AFAIK Störerhaftung was abolished, see TMG § 8 (3).
Is the joke that German neighbors get angry over improperly separated waste / recycle?
Not sure about the neighbors; we don’t watch each other fill the trash containers. I live in a rural area where every home has their own containers.
But the municipalities and the disposal companies do get angry and sometimes check the containers. If they are noticeably improperly separated they are not emptied, and that will hurt everyone depending on shared containers.
Not sure what you mean by “joke”. This is no laughing matter.
Yes, thats a Stackenblocken!
One letter = what letter?
Second letter = Maybe consider a VPN & plead ignorance.
First letter I started using VPNs. I get so many spam lawyer letters that I can’t remember the last one I opened that wasn’t from my lawyer.
Lawyers use registered mail if they actually want to serve you. I also don’t accept registered mail unless I expect it.
Given how often my mail goes missing this seems to be the better take.
Hell I can’t remember the last time I got a bill in the mail where the first notice came before the second notice lol
I was in this situation once, when I was the legal contact for the internet used by me and my roommates. One of them apparently downloaded porn and I got the letter. I contacted a lawyer, paid a flat fee (meaning even if it had gone to court I wouldn’t’ve had to pay more), he wrote one letter, saying I don’t even know what a torrent is, and I never heard from them again. I felt much better having the lawyer handle it.
An acquaintance from Germany received one or two of these letters. They didn’t react and there has never been more.
They told me the letters had big and official, scary looking paper work.
A non-reaction seemed to be enough to fend off these unrealistic accusations, they told me.
It’s been a few years since I heard this story.
Depends. Those are just letters. First and foremost meant to scare you and do something without thinking it through. You can decide to respond, or not respond, that’s up to you. Though it’s strongly recommended to contact a lawyer before signing any contract with them, admitting to wrongdoing or give them information about yourself. I’d probably try to avoid (5) without legal advise.
If you toss it in the bin, they’ll have to decide whether they have enough evidence and whether it’s worth the effort to actually sue you. Usually that letter was an invitation to settle out of court. At their terms and conditions, though.
And yes, they’re most certainly backed by the media companies. Otherwise they wouldn’t have any business messing with their intellectual property. And maybe the law firm only does letters, maybe they have some number of court cases to achieve each month, who knows? Maybe they already exhausted their more promising X court cases this month and you won’t hear from them again if you decide to just ignore them. Maybe you’re one of the “lucky” few who get sued.
The family I stayed at got a letter after I visited and had my torrent client on (it always started on boot). A lawyer sent one letter, costing 300 euros and we never heard from it again. Though, I think there was an update on laws against these practices
I have no idea what letter they sent and I have no understanding of the legal context, but I would just ignore the letter and starting using a VPN or another alternative.
In Canada the max they can get from an individual is around 5k which means they don’t often pursue things.
They still send the emails though. At least here unless it’s registered mail I would just toss it.
