Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I'm old school and just download torrents with something like BiglyBT and put them in my local NAS (which is really just a bunch of portable HDs connected to my router), from where I can access them anywhere in my home, most importantly from a cheap media player connected to my TV.

Been doing this for over a decade and it works for me. Also I know how to do it in a way that keeps me safe from such legal firms extorting money from people pirating digital works, whilst if you thrown "convenience" software into the mix, it's harder to make sure it's not leaking your IP address or other personal data even when using a VPN.

The rule with running under a VPN is to:

• Use a VPN provider which does not keep logs, hence my recommendation of Mulvad but there are others that the community considers reliabled in that respect (look around)
• Do not register for any pirate anything using your e-mail.
• Configure your torrent application to only connect via the VPN (settings depend on the program) so that it doesn't "leak" by using your ISP connection directly if, for example, you forgot to start the VPN.
• Personally I also tend to chose a VPN exit point outside my own country to make things harder from a legal point of view: complex legal cases involving multiple legal jurisdictions aren't worth the trouble for the legal system to catch a person torrenting for personal use.

If your torrenting goes via a VPN (hence it's important to make sure it's not leaking) all that those law firms have is an IP address to an exit point of the VPN provider. Unless the VPN provider is willfully cooperative (i.e. a letter in legal language merelly asking is enough for them to give the data, and the whole point of the likes of Mulvad is that they are not cooperative) those legal firms need to get a Court Order to force the VPN provider to give them the IP address of the machine using that VPN exit point at that time (i.e. your machine) and if the VPN provider doesn't keep logs they can't give that data since they don't have it anymore, plus is both the VPN provider and the exit point are in a different country - i.e. a different legal jurisdiction - it gets even harder because, for example, German Courts can't directly issue valid court orders for other countries (it's pretty simple when the target is your local ISP, not so much if it's, say, a company in Sweden)

It's simply not worth it for those law firms or the courts to go after common torrenting in such a situation, especially as there is a vast number of easy to extort people torrenting from their home connection directly, what the Americans would call "low hanging fruit".

Certainly this is how it worked in the UK which had the same kind of situation.

A VPN is not a protection for people committing actual real crimes (say, murder for hire) because it's definitelly worth it for the Justice System to jump through the hops needed to get such a person (in this case they would need a court order to wiretap the VPN provider to catch that person on the act and other legal jurisdictions would definitelly cooperate in a timelly manner to catch a murderer), but for people just doing normal torrenting for personal consumption it's absolutelly not worth it to overcome that many hurdles to give somebody a fine. For those law firms too, it's just easier to send legal letters to the ISPs of people torrenting via their home connection directly to get their name and address (without even involving a Court) and then send those people threathening legal letters than to try and legally force an uncooperative VPN provider in a different country to give them the IP address of the home user whilst they still have it (if I remember it correctly, Mulvad's logs are in-memory only and last only 24h).