OP couldve been a bit more precise in their statement. Downloading is legal, uploading isnt.

Uploading isn't legal, but neither is collecting the IPs of people who upload from torrent swarms, so enforcing that is... Uh... Difficult.

Edit: Source (german) https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei...

Machine translation (deepl):

> According to today's ruling by the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne, IP addresses are clearly personal data, which means they fall under the Data Protection Act. Furthermore, in a majority decision, the highest court considers it inadmissible for private companies to secretly research IP addresses. According to today's Federal Court decision, there is no sufficient justification for this. With immediate effect, the company Logistep AG is no longer allowed to collect and pass on data, i.e. it must stop all data processing in the area of copyright.

Side note, but ips being pii is pretty tricky. Think about all the places an IP is logged in the clear.

I think they are probably on the right path here but I've never worked somewhere that wouldn't be breaking the rules here.

and as a law student, it's stupid that torrent seeding is considered as releasing something to the internet. It is meant to be penal to be releaser or initial uploader - at least in polish(europe) criminal code, but non-technical judges just go with it, I hate it, but i'm not sure what polish equivalent of polish SCOTUS wrote about it to be honest

as always lobbing by big companys is designed to screw over teenagers and common folk for exaple, got(HBO) in freench amazon 50$ afterdiscount, in polish stores - 250$, how to not pirate when minimal earnings - 750$

I bought my first pirated warez in Poland as a teen. I bought Atari ST games copied onto 3½-inch floppies at a shady market stall in Szczecin. Good times! (Not sure why the 3½-inch floppy disks are called floppy, because they ain't.) I mean, what was I supposed to do? They weren't available in my country!

Sharing culture was strong even without the internet back then. I still fondly remember when I got hold of what was probably the first audio cassette tape to go viral in Norway. It was of a really angry North Norwegian cursing and cursing and cursing because he couldn't fix his bloody washing machine. Very colourful!

They're called floppy because the disc inside is still floppy :) Only the plastic case is hard.

Same as Spain. So using Usenet is completely legal.

Leeching is. Seeding is not. Its also more of a legal grayzone rather than a blanket "this is allowed".

Only German lawyers are disgusting enough to go after seeders and downloaders who never intend to distribute "illegally" downloaded content. Sometimes they themselves seed torrents and monitor who else is seeding or leeching. If they happen to not use VPNs or proxy, and based in Germany, they get a legal notice from them.

Nobody ever went to jail doing this. Some paid hefty fines, though.

But a friend said that you can send them a counter notice where they have to prove that it was you at that time at that computer downloading or uploading. After doing this, someone he knows never heard back from these absolute parasites of the society.

(I am not a lawyer, and this should not be taken as legal advice.)

Its a rite of passage in Germany to get a "Waldorf & Frommer" letter. I plastered mine on the wall and use it as target practice.

https://kanzlei-bennek.de/en/waldorf-frommer-warning/

Ignore these people and never reply.

What I did was to ignore the initial letter, and nothing happened. Over the years I’ve found that not engaging is usually the best defense.

Downloading isn't really a gray zone, even though some of the content industry would like to paint it as such.

But uploading content is ? hm? even when hatespeech may be seen as an expression of speech, the: "'190 visitors'(-rule)", 'viewed the content' -so it became a threat or worth to be 'investigated' is still such a thing (painting it as such) ?!