Thread: Is downloading movies in US safer from peers outside of North America?

I am thinking, how dangerous would it be to download copyright content through torrent in US? Are there cases when people get busted for this?

Would it be safer to only allow peers outside of North America? This way people who catch downloaders have to do this from oversees and this is less likely to happen?

Another question, is there any torrent client having this feature (geographically limiting peers) ?

From all the articles I read about it, a lot of people have been busted in the US, but as far as I know, it's all been from public trackers.

Also, it doesn't matter where the peers are. It's your IP address that's logged when you download something, so why would it matter if you download it from your neighbor or from halfway around the world?

As for torrent clients, I have no idea.

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But who logs the IP address? I thought that FBI would have their own peer for some copyrighted movie and would log IP addresses/times of other US peers downloading the same content.

If I am downloading only from the foreign hosts, all FBI peers are filtered out. Am I missing something?

Huh, I never thought of it that way... I guess you could do that. But even then, the tracker also logs your ip, and if they were forced to give information to whatever agency took them down, they would still get your ip.

But no copyright material is transferred during the communication with tracker though. So even though the tracker logs your IP, this record doesn't prove any violation and doesn't mean that material actually gets consequently downloaded. Is this right?

Using a proxy or a VPN to change your IP is easy even for the average Joe, i think the FBI have way better methods to hide themselves and blocking peers from the US would od little good for your securety.

Don't proxy servers slow downloads down because they are bottlenecks?

"FBI have way better methods to hide themselves" how exactly? My traffic goes through the cable provider. I believe provider doesn't log the traffic due to it's tremendous volume. If the traffic comes from abroad, how exactly the FBI would be able to log an IP address?

They can change the IP for one in any other country, in example, bypassing the non-US filter and actually allowing them to conect to you.

IP blockers like Peer Block are shit because of this, you can't trust an IP since it is easily fakable. Public proxies are slow, but private VPNs can be really fast, you can setup one by renting a simple server at OVH and you will have a blazing fast conection, but appearing to be in France. There is no 100% secure way to torrent, and who knows what FBI can really do if they want to track down someone.

Remaining anon is better done by hidding you true IP with a middleman instead of blocking conections, using a seedbox/VPN would be the safest way i know, All your external traffic would appear to any outsider to be done by the server you are using and you can get the files to your pc using a encripted conetion with your server, this way the chances of you being caught are nearly zero if you combine it with private trackers

Ok, so one opens an account in OVH. Downloads will appear to go to France. Who knows what France is doing fighting illegal downloads? Maybe they are partnering with FBI? FBI might request account identity. And one have to pay with CC to open the service. Also they will probably keep the logs.

One should open an account in some rogue country that doesn't care at all about copyrights, like China or Russia.