What should you do if you receive warning letters from copyright lawyers? If you don’t pay, they will threaten to sue you. These letters usually sound very threatening and require your urgent action to transfer money. This is how they find you, send you a warning letter (Abmahnung), and request you to pay a fine (can be more than 1000€ !).
Once the law firms have your IP address, they will act on behalf of the music/ movie companies and ask your internet service provider to give them your real address.
It makes it very easy for law firms to collect the IP addresses of people who download famous movies.
As mentioned before, when you download via torrenting, your IP addresses will be visible to everyone. Germany has very strict laws governing copyright infringement. In fact, I learned later on that many people in Germany have received letters for these fines. He has done that and got a fine for a thousand euros! That was the first time I heard something like that.
When I first moved to Germany, my roommate told me to never download content via torrenting. So, it is very easy for people (especially copyright lawyers) to track torrent downloads. There are even ways to track the IP addresses without sharing the same file. When you are downloading torrents, your IP address is visible to all the other torrent peers. How do other people know that you are downloading torrents? It is because you are actually sharing these materials with other people during your download.
It means that it is illegal if you download copyrighted movies, games, TV shows, software, or music by torrenting. However, it is illegal to share copyrighted material through torrenting. And it was a very popular way to share files. I used to look for files very often via torrenting when I lived in Hong Kong. That’s why the download speed is much faster. Instead of downloading from a central server, torrenting allows you to download files from many other users’ devices on the network at once. Because of this technology, you are always uploading at the same time while you are downloading. When you share files via torrenting, you will download these small parts concurrently until the whole file is downloaded.ĭuring your download, you are also uploading these parts for other people to download. What a BitTorrent protocol does is to divide a file into smaller parts. Torrenting is a filesharing technology that involves uploading and downloading files via the BitTorrent network. So, using Popcorn Time in Germany is no different from torrenting. For example, Popcorn Time is using BitTorrent to stream movies. It is because you may not know what the sites are doing in the background. It is important to stick with legal streaming websites in Germany. The best is to respect copyright and do not stream any pirated content. At this time, there is not really a way for law firms to track people who stream. Streaming pirated content in Germany is illegal, no matter if you can get caught or not. They were asked to pay fines because they have watched some copyrighted porn on the website RedTube. However, I know of a story that thousands of German people received warning letters from law firms in 2013.
And people who download torrents are easy targets for copyright lawyers. That’s why copyright lawyers focus on monitoring people who upload content. From what I heard, it is hard to trace people who stream. I personally do not know anyone who gets a fine because of streaming in Germany. Instead, streaming with sites like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime video is safe. For example, stay away from sites like Popcorn Time and 123movies. But streaming pirated content in Germany is illegal. Streaming itself is not illegal in Germany. Which streaming service should you choose?.Streaming in Germany – 11 ways to do it legally.
How to avoid getting warning letters from copyright lawyers?.What if someone uses your internet to download pirated content?.What should you do if you receive warning letters from copyright lawyers?.