EU is making a new law which makes your IP the same as (something similar to) your social security number and they say piracy is going to receive a huge blow. Obviously I have no intention of stopping but now I’ll have to start using a VPN, if I want to continue my way. However, I do not trust VPNs a lot and I do not like the idea of paying for them (I could just pay for the movie in the first place)
I looked into using Tor network to torrent but it seems like it’d be a hindrance to the network itself, which is going to be a huge inconvenience for other users. Additionally I know that even if I found a way to throttle my bandwidth to remove this problem, Tor isn’t exactly made for this sort of thing anyways.
Now, obviously it doesn’t have to be torrenting, but I would gladly hear any suggestions on how to avoid paying and getting movies and shows without being caught doing it. Truthfully I was only streaming from websites for many years, so I do not know a lot about torrenting vs direct downloading either. Thanks in advance for any responses.
no they’re not.
the EU ruled that IP addresses are personally identifiable information (PII) for the purposes of GDPR compliance EIGHT YEARS AGO. this means that internet services cannot store your IP address without your consent and explicitly telling you why they need it, they have to delete it when they’re done with it, and if they are to be stored in any way for aggregate data then it needs to be anonymised so that it can no longer be associated with you.
any change to associate IPs with you would break the GDPR.
Greece did it anyway and EU made us, actually. https://bernitsaslaw.com/2025/03/27/law-51792025-on-digital-piracy the “dynamic blocking measures targeting end-users” are connection of the IP with the equivalent of a social security number of the people inside the house where the infringement occurs.
your link has nothing about the EU forcing the issue, in fact this seems to blatantly fly in the face of eu law.
Yes, I have failed to find an english article that covers this issue properly, not much I can do if there isn’t coverage. Maybe EU didn’t force it and I was misinformed but the government passed it anyway as you can see.
Something similar happened in Sweden, the politicians said that the EU is forcing Sweden to store data about users. Like, “we don’t want this… but we have no choice!” And then it turned out that what they did was actually against EU laws and Sweden was fined for doing what they did and ordered to stop.
Hope people don’t re-elect such dumb bricks…
That’s crazy, maybe its the same thing over here.
i can indeed see, and if the things the greek ad-article are saying but are not in the text of the law are true then it is very troubling and will probably result in sanctions from the EU, because the union have been on the asses of the greek government for years now to get them to curb corruption. it is also even more reason to get a vpn.
To be honest our country is run by a Mafia that has been committing literal crimes for a while now, this would be a drop in the bucket. Ironically, one previous offense involved the use of software to spy on the personal electronic devices of politicians and influential people, both in the ruling party and outside of it. Another was a criminal neglect of the train system that ended up in a train crash with 57 people dead. Not to mention the subsequent cover-up which involved editing audio records of the incident before their release to shift the blame and many other false records, the politicians literally disguising themselves as random civilians that one time and appearing on TV saying how safe they feel travelling after the incident and other things that don’t really come to mind right now.
If I may say, no, I don’t think EU is coming to save us. They barely gave them a slap on the wrist for all these offenses combined.
We have something similar in France for more than a decade. As you are torrenting, you are obviously sharing your ip with other torrent clients and this is where they get you. The agency (used to be called Hadopi but they change their name and can’t recall the new one) is following some torrents, gets your ip from torrent clients and then ask internet provider to give name/address. You then received a warning letter, upon 3 letters received, you can get a fine or go to court.
sweden also had this but they stopped sending out fines because they were a company masquerading as a government agency which is basically fraud. there is an explicit carve-out in the law for making private copies of things, and we already pay a “copying fee” when buying media that can be copied to so they had no way of proving whether you were pirating or doing backups.
We also have the right to copy media we bought here. Nonetheless, you need to prove that you have bought media you have downloaded.
Edit: Sharing copyright media is strictly forbidden here, so even if you prove that you buy media, you are not allowed to torrent it.