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I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed. If I could get the same user experience for t

I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed. If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.

nixgeek 3y ago
Seedbox providers seem like a pretty bad idea if you are based in a jurisdiction with strong copyright infringement laws or precedent of prosecuting piracy. Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries. Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you. You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property. If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings. It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime). But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  imo a simple normal vpn would solve any issue (well, it costs, but still may be cheaper compared to legal alternative)

nixgeek 3y ago

Seedbox providers seem like a pretty bad idea if you are based in a jurisdiction with strong copyright infringement laws or precedent of prosecuting piracy. Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries. Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you. You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property. If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings. It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime). But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!

Moldoteck 3y ago
imo a simple normal vpn would solve any issue (well, it costs, but still may be cheaper compared to legal alternative)