Can you download torrents without a vpn

The easiest thing you can do is to torrent whatever you want, but before you do so, you need to know that torrenting without a VPN is a terrible idea. This is because in most countries check out our censorship map for which ones, specifically torrenting has been made illegal , and it will mean fines and maybe even prison when you get caught. The only good way to stay safe while torrenting is by using a virtual private network , an app that will encrypt your internet connection and hide your IP address.

There are lots of good reasons to use a VPN, and we recommend everybody use one, but they are absolutely vital when downloading copyrighted material.

Several members of the Cloudwards team have been hit with DMCA notices or their equivalent in other countries when torrenting without protection. For example, your author got slapped with two: one in Taiwan and one in the Netherlands. Copyright law is still mostly a national affair and different countries handle these matters differently. In other countries, you might just get angry letters that threaten you with legal action, or you might have to pay a fine not as high as in the US, but still.

If a copyright troll a person or company who tries to make money off of copyright targets you, they will likely try to scam you out of some money. Some copyright trolls actually create their own content usually pornography , and intentionally leak it on torrent websites. There, they can see all the torrents you downloaded. So yeah, the odds of someone trying to extort money from you using legal scare tactics when you download torrents are pretty big.

They might think it uses up too much of their bandwidth, or that it puts them at risk of receiving angry letters from lawyers, copyright trolls, and copyright agencies. Also, in countries that have laws against torrenting, ISPs throttle torrent traffic to discourage users from downloading torrents.

Pretty simple — anyone can see your real IP address in the torrent client. And your IP address can help hackers locate your network. Or maybe they have it out for you because you had a spat in the comments on a torrent. And repeated torrent downloads can even cause your ISP to suspend your internet access altogether. There has been a growing epidemic of copyright trolls targeting bittorrent users. This is especially true of small pornography production companies and some independent film studios.

And the business model is simple:. One notorious troll Prenda Law extracted millions in settlements until collapsing from a criminal probe. Of course, it stands to reason that few or none of the people who settled were using a non-logging VPN which would have shielded their public IP address.

By their very design, p2p networks like BitTorrent are very exposed to 3rd party observers. In fact, there are many organizations and even public websites that track torrent downloads. You can even check I know what you download to see a small percentage of the files specific IP addresses have downloaded even yours!

To learn more about how torrents are tracked , read our anonymous torrents guide. But if you want to go more in-depth, we have complete VPN setup guides for all of the most popular torrent clients:.

David started torrenting before it was cool. He enjoys hiking, strategy games and eats watermelon year round. He still rocks his Napster t-shirt once a month. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.