[skrowl]

I channeled the money I was spending on YouTubeTV into a seedbox that has 0 personal information about me, paid for with Monero (XMR). Much better bang for the buck and completely removes all the potential adverse legal effects that you could have by torrenting on your home / work connection.

I was happily paying a netflix and spotify sub for over a decade, but once we started getting greedy with Paramount+, AppleTV+, Discovery+, Peacock, etc. I decided it was high time to sail the seven seas again, which I hadn't done since college.

I keep waiting for all the netflix-likes to fail and people go back to just selling their content to netflix, but I don't think it's going to happen. I might be yaaar matey for the rest of my life.

[palata]

How do you access the seedbox anonymously? Unless you use Tor (which doesn't seem practical for movies), they surely see where your connections come from, don't they?

[lrvick]

You can buy seedboxes and VPNs with cash-purchased bitcoin.

[palata]

Right. But if you only buy a seedbox and connect to it from your home IP, then it does not matter that you paid with bitcoins, right?

If you connect to it through a VPN, then that's a second level of indirection, but still you must trust the VPN. Because even if you paid with bitcoins, the VPN knows your home IP and it knows that you connect to a seedbox.

[lrvick]

A VPN service would have no way of knowing the box you are connecting to is a seed box. Particularly if you connect over a different IP than you seed from.

Piracy is a local tort at worst, and not a crime. Certainly not something that can compel mandatory IP disclosure from multiple foreign entities at the same time for a US copyright claimant targeting an individual.

Even then if access to said seedbox is shared with multiple people they would need to prove who actually executed the choice to seed which files. Now you need a court order to get the FBI to travel to another country to use a hotplug device to seize the entire machine with memory in tact and do forensics.

If you do not do any logging then only recent files could be claimed if at all.

That much work to prosecute someone over their two most recently downloaded movies at worst? Never going to happen, and it never has.

There are exactly 0 cases of foreign seedboxes being seized over copyright claims.

I am not a lawyer and do not currently operate any seedboxes so take this as you choose.

[palata]

Interesting points indeed. Connecting through a VPN may be enough for the this case. I guess I mostly wanted to make it clear that it's not "perfectly anonymous" just because one paid with bitcoins. And of course that if you connect directly to the seedbox, then you trust 100% this seedbox to be legit.

[emeril]

I've been using a seedbox for years

I think the risk of not using a vpn to access it is pretty much zero as these seedboxes are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue (i.e., business in one country, hardware is another, likely minimal logs)

I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble using a seedbox - likely because there's enough much lower hanging fruit to prosecute

[palata]

If you DO NOT use a VPN, you 100% trust the seedbox. You trust that they "are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue". That's fine for me, but it's important to know that it's about trust.

If you use a VPN, then you do distribute that trust between the VPN and the seedbox, which makes it much better already.

[electriclove]

Do you move the files from your seedbox to your home to watch or do you have Plex or something like it on your seedbox and just stream to your home?