In the advent of the digital age, file sharing has been one of the main benefits of being online. That is why privacy has been a growing concern these days. However, since the anti-piracy law in the United States, or also known as 6 strikes, has been introduced, Internet users are more vigilant when it comes to file sharing. The anti-piracy law aims to catch BitTorrent users that are violating copyright laws for various types of media files.

If you’re in the United States, there are certain punishments that you might face if you are caught committing copyright infringement. Major ISPs may block your access to certain sites, reduce your Internet speed, and even block you from the Internet as a whole.

Every time you use a torrent program to download or upload files, many people connect to your computer and these are called a swarm. All the people in the swarm can identify your IP address. They have to so that they can establish the connection. What you don’t know is that one of those people in the swarm that is currently downloading or seeding a file could be someone from the piracy monitoring group. This group is funded by the entertainment industry in order to catch pirates. They track your IP address and send it to your ISP provider.

You might think that the best thing to do for piracy monitoring groups is they should just go to anonymizer service that you are using to find out which files were downloaded illegally. In theory, this is a good idea. However, if the anonymizer service is good, there’s no trace and logs of the files and websites of your online activity. What the monitoring groups just see is that your IP address is connecting to a proxy service in order to share a file. Your ISP sees the same thing. This is why we highly recommend encrypting your BitTorrent usage so that these groups won’t be able to find out that you’re running BitTorrent.

Once these monitoring groups get the IP address and a log of your activity, they can easily send it to the big Media companies so that they are able to file lawsuits.

Censorship in the United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, they took on a different approach. They have issued strict court orders for the major ISP providers to block all the torrent websites like Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, YIFY, and a lot more. Big agencies pushed this motion and because of this, all torrent websites are blocked when you’re in the UK. The agencies responsible for this include the British Phonographic Industry, Federation Against Copyright Theft, and the Motion Picture Association.

Avoid the 6 Strikes And Censorship with VPN

The best solution to avoid the 6 strikes in the US and censorship in the UK is to make use of a VPN. When you connect using a VPN service, your IP address becomes anonymous. Now, the ISP providers can’t figure out your real IP address. They also can’t see if you’re using torrent services such as BitTorrent. While a VPN is simply the best solution for this problem, you should know that some VPN services don’t allow torrent downloads from their servers. That’s why you should first find out the right VPN service for you. Faceless.me VPN service is one of the VPNs that does allow torrent downloads.