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Comment by creamytaco | Hacker News Reader

Not very wise to export your (assumed) copyright-infringing activity over to a third party that has complete records of who you are. Folks have been sued for less.

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They're an old company (probably more than a decade old), and I'm using them since they started. I didn't download much and honestly used them for distribution .ISO files 99% of the time.

However, they're still operating, they only know my e-mail, nothing else, and they honor DMCA take down notices.

Oh, and the company is local to me.

how do you pay them?

They use an external card processor which stores your details. They only store my card details there. No address, no name, nothing.

They don't access to your card details. Just an API integration, that's all.

If a company takes legal action against you or other users, they will subpoena the card processor, too; the fact that the first company doesn't hold your personal details is irrelevant.

Except, realistically, nobody actually gets sued for torrenting.

Only takes a few to make an example.

Plenty of individuals have had significant penalty for torrenting, including settlements [1] (search for singapore), and being blocked from accessing the internet [2]. The RIAA also sued a large number of individuals in the US [3]. And that's apart from the large number of companies that have been sued for supporting torrents.

So, yes, people easily could be sued for torrenting and plenty of people have suffered significant penalty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-39961502

[3] https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later

Yeah, a decade+ ago back when MAFIAA was still experimenting with those tactics.

FWIW almost all the people listed on your wiki page were tracker operators, but I am aware that there have been a few exceptions.

No, there age big exceptions. In Germany there are law firms with hundreds of employees doing nothing else all day.

Those German law firms are not interested in services like put.io

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