Hey, Cohost! I'm enthusiastic about piracy, and though there are a lot of guides out there, I wanted to write up something that's both general-purpose and gets in-depth about how to pirate safely and efficiently, and hopefully, is clear no matter how little experience you have.
Getting pirated files
Before you can start pirating, you need to know where to go to find pirate media - there are a lot of sites out there, some quite obscure. r/Piracy maintains a masterlist of pirate sites that they consider trustworthy, as well as sites that are known to be malicious or likely to contain malware.
As noted in the masterlist, it's also highly recommended that you install an adblocker before pirating. Many reputable sites still have intrusive and possibly malicious ads. uBlock Origin is available for Firefox and Chrome, and well-regarded. The Firefox browser itself comes with some ad-blocking and privacy features.
Pirate websites can be loosely divided by whether they provide direct downloads, torrents, or both.
Direct Download
A direct download is the "normal" way of downloading something. The data exists on a single server (i.e. computer), usually a file storage service or one belonging to the website you're downloading from, and you download it directly from them.
Obviously, direct downloads are very serviceable, but for large files - such as a video game or a season of a TV show - they can also be extremely slow. Any given computer can only send or receive so much data at once, so directly downloading a particularly large chunk of data can take hours. Data also takes up space, so a lot of DDL sites rely on third-party file storage services, which might enforce limits on how much you can download in a day.
For these reasons, although popular media is often available via DDL if you search, torrenting is the better option overall.
Torrenting
Torrenting is a form of downloading where, instead of getting all the data from a single server, your computer downloads small amounts of data from many different servers, often people's personal computers. For this reason, it's called P2P (peer to peer) file sharing. Torrenting circumvents a lot of the issues of direct downloading because it reduces the amount of bandwidth (upload/download capacity) any given computer needs to use, dramatically speeding up downloads. It also means that there's no central source for a file that could go down, taking the files with it.
Torrenting comes with a lot of jargon. The important ones are:
- A seeder is someone who is currently allowing others to download data from them, "seeding" it.
- A leecher is someone who downloads torrents but does not seed them afterwards. It's considered rude to not at least temporarily seed a file.
- A peer is someone currently downloading the same data as you.
- A torrent swarm is the group of all computers currently seeding and downloading a specific torrent. For popular downloads, a swarm can be quite large, and the bigger the swarm, the faster the download.
- A tracker is a server that connects the members of a torrent swarm to each-other, though it does not personally seed anything.
To torrent something, you need a torrent client - qBittorrent is the standard - and either a .torrent file or a magnet link. A .torrent file does not itself contain the pirate media; it just tells your torrent client what it's looking for and where to find it. You'll also often see magnet links on torrent websites; they do the same thing as a .torrent file, but feed the data directly to the client, with no file.
The downside of torrenting is that it uses your IP address to connect you to other computers, This means that, without proper protection, the fact that you're torrenting and what might become public information. This can lead to punishment from your internet service provider or the law.1 That's why you need a VPN.
Using a VPN
A VPN (virtual private network) is a type of software that conceals your internet traffic. When using a VPN, your internet traffic (all the communications between your computer and others) is encrypted and routed through a server owned by the VPN, so it's can't be read by prying eyes and can't be directly linked to your personal IP address. When using a good VPN, your internet traffic, torrents and all, should be invisible and illegible to your ISP and malicious parties.
ProtonVPN and Mullvad are well-regarded in the pirate community. I personally use Windscribe. If you want to look for a VPN on your own, find one that does not log user data, and, ideally, allows port forwarding, which will let you connect to more computers. (Mullvad no longer does, so it has lost some favor.) Although many VPNs offer a free plan, you will need a paid plan to torrent.
Setting up to torrent
How to set up a VPN to work with your torrent client will depend on the VPN.
In general, you will want to bind qBittorrent to the VPN if possible, meaning that all torrent traffic must go through the VPN. If the VPN is off, qBit won't work. This can be done by opening qBittorrent and going to Tools > Options > Advanced. There will be a dropdown for "Network interface"; select the appropriate interface (based on your VPN) here.
Some VPNs have a feature that blocks all internet traffic if the VPN unexpectedly goes down, such as ProtonVPN's killswitch or Windscribe's always-on firewall option, which should be enabled while torrenting as well. Note that, if you turn one of these options on and then close the VPN, you might not be able to connect to the internet. It is safe to turn it off once the torrent client is fully shut down.
Preventing IP leaks
Make sure the VPN is turned on, encrypting your traffic, and has the killswitch active before opening the torrent client. Before turning it off, make sure to stop all torrents and fully close qBittorrent by going to File > Exit. If you just press the X button, qBittorrent will run in the background after closing the app, and continue to work on any active torrents. This is intended behavior and useful for seeders, but it means you need to be thorough about stopping torrent traffic before you shut your VPN down. This is one reason binding it to the VPN is useful.
How to not get a virus
- Don't click any ads, ever. Pirate sites are unfortunately often home to malicious (or, at best, extremely intrusive) advertisements. That's why you need an adblocker.
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- In particular, file hosts used by direct download sites often have fake download links. If you aren't sure which one is the real one, try hovering over it to see the URL it leads to.
- Be cautious of torrenting anything that was just released.
- Make sure the file type is what you think it is. Is that movie actually a .mp4 file, or is it a .exe with a video format in the title?
- If the website you're pirating from has comments, read them - people will usually call out malicious downloads.
- Finally, you can always smack it with the antivirus of your choice. Some pirated video games might return a false alarm, so keep that in mind.
Ethics of piracy
That's all cool, but is piracy ethical?
Is piracy theft?
Nope! Theft implies that something is being taken away from another; piracy creates a new copy.
Doesn't it take money away from creators?
Yes and no, but it's generally not a big deal. In principle, piracy does reduce the amount of money a creator makes, but a large company will be basically unaffected. For small, independent creators, one person (or a hundred people's) revenue does matter; for this reason, I always recommend going legit for small creators.
Some pirates will also go out and buy a product after pirating it as a "test run", to make sure it's worth the money. I personally doubt that this is common, but it does happen.
Doesn't copyright law protect a creator's rights to their creation?
In principle, yes - but corporations universally abuse copyright law to make money. Being able to control who can share or reproduce a piece of media means corporations can choose to only release media in situations that are maximally profitable for them. It also means media - even media with historic significance - can readily become completely unavailable, because its accessibility (in legal channels) depends on the corporation's personal interest. Piracy is an act against financial exploitation, a form of media preservation, and a fun hobby!
And now you can (mostly) do it whenever you want. (But seriously, you can get Windscribe for like three bucks, get a VPN.)
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Some ISPs don't care, particularly outside the US, so here and there you'll encounter people who torrent without a VPN, but I would not recommend gambling on it.

































