LondonGent wrote: Sun Aug 08, 2021 8:56 am
Torrents don't have this issue - as long as one person out there is still seeding, the file is still available. If the author wants to keep the video up, all they need to do is keep seeding and it'll never be an issue. There is no hosting site or anyone else involved who can interfere and delete the file/ban the account/whatever.
Mostly true but with caveats. In a torrent swarm sometimes not all announcing clients will allow connections between each other, for various reasons, such as a privacy-motivated setting on one of the involved clients. For the same example reason sometimes not all announcing clients will appear to each other, because not all clients will talk to all trackers that know about the torrent.
Sometimes DMCA trolls will connect to torrent swarms with modified clients that announce and join the swarm but never participate in send/receive of data.
LondonGent wrote: Sun Aug 08, 2021 4:59 pm
Simply accessing the tracker doesn't give enough information for anyone to contact a user's ISP and issue warnings/threats. Despite the scare-tactics that attempt to put people off using them, there is nothing illegal about torrents themselves. They can be used perfectly legitimately to share non-copyrighted files.
A media copyrights owner will purchase the services of people who run software that catalogs torrent swarm participation. That headhunter will then return to them a list of IP, and the list is cross-referenced to IP range allocations. The owners of the IP ranges are then sent DMCA cease-and-desist requests by the copyrights owners. They will give the IP range owner a list of the allegedly offending addresses and details of the thing that was being transferred.
Then the ISP will choose their response. Most consumer grade ISP will send a threatening email or call to their subscriber then. Most VPN operations that are keeping logs of subscriber use will act the same. Some VPN operations that honestly aren't logging will reply to the copyrights owners with a legalese shrug.
It's also well documented that torrent and VPN software must be well made by their authors, then well configured by their users, to avoid leaking either ISP IP or local network IP to the torrent swarm. TorrentFreak
spends much time on the subject.
Some of the great VPN providers give tools that test your torrent network exposure for data leaks.