I know YouTube is a terrible provider of pirated content and also that it is almost impossible to pirate without a VPN, but I would like to know: if I download a movie from YouTube (directly from it, of course) without a VPN, will I receive “that type of message” from my ISP?
nope. the ISPs track torrent downloads is by leeching off of the popular public ones, and checking if any of the peers have IPs that belong to them. not by analyzing each customer’s traffic individually.
downloading a video off youtube makes a simple HTTP download which wont trip any ISP alerts. especially since it’s a trusted domain like Youtube
Most ISPs don’t do that, content owners do then send complaints to the ISP who forwards them to the user. ISPs aren’t going to spend money on losing a customer.
I work for an ISP (smaller, not a nationwide company). We genuinely don’t care what you use your internet connection for until we get a legal notice and then we do what’s required by law.
Dumb answer: Just use a VPN, my guy.
OT but what VPN do you recommend? I hear a lot of back and forth about which ones are trustworthy.
Mullvad seems to be the go-to if you want privacy (although no one thing is 100% private if you wanna go down that rabbit hole). No personal info requried, not even email. They claim no logs and they have gotten raided once and cops found nothing. I believe you can even mail them cash anonymously for a sub. Flat fee of €5/mo ($5.19/mo US) - you can pay for a single month or buy in bulk, costs the same either way.
Windscribe is another good option. More of your run of the mill VPN that seems to be well reviewed. Their free tier gives you 10GB/mo so you can see if it’s right for you (although torrents may not work - I don’t remember for sure). You can easily snag a whole year for $30 US as it goes on discount a lot.
Personally used both of these and haven’t had much to complain about. Both have great apps for almost every platform, tons of locations to choose from, torrenting works, and Netflix works (for the most part). Speeds also seem solid but I do have crap tier internet. Reviews seem to agree though.
Of course do your own research, don’t just take my word for it.
People also seem to like NordVPN but I can’t really speak to that.Edit: Nord sends data to Google apparently so that’s a big no.
I can speak for Nord’s client sending requests to Google for some reason, maybe not great for privacy thus not great for piracy either.
I can speak well of Mullvad, but advise against sending hundreds of bucks in one go as paper mail is not exactly well secured. There’s another VPN that happily accepts cash as payment and doesn’t need your info but I can’t find it atm…
I didn’t know about the whole Nord sending data to Google thing wtf. That immediately puts them on my shit list.
Yeah cash in snail mail is probably not the smartest haha. I personally use a card on Mullvad for the convenience alone - piracy isn’t illegal here and their no logs policy is good enough for my use case but it being an option tells me they take that stuff seriously at the very least which is why I mentioned it.
Please reply here if you find the other one that lets you send cash. I’m loving Mullvad so far but it’s always good to have options.
The violation they target users for is sharing a video, and that’s usually through a file sharing service like torrenting.
Think of it this way - whatever you watch online via a browser you’re already downloading. Or via an app.
You know, it really tweaks me that torrenting is associates with piracy, when it could’ve become the defacto way to share files between users, if OS devs had just included the protocol in the OS (looking at you Android, but Windows and Apple too).
I’ve often questioned why it wasn’t…
You should not. The biggest thing that will get you in trouble is the uploading portion of torrenting, which is why it is always recommended to use a VPN when torrenting any copyrighted content.
In your case, the traffic will roughly look like you were just watching the movie on YouTube, just really fast.
