How to pirate movies, TV shows & Music without getting caught

So first off.. here’s the disclaimer:  Piracy is theft and you should not pirate media or content that is owned by someone else.

However content ownership is a grey area, it might be argued that ownership of content in some cases is unclear. For example – all of your old music you collected in the 90’s is on cd (unless you checked them away) and now your macbook doesnt have a cd drive.. so rather than paying again for the same file you might want to download the files that you already own in a different format.

This would of course be illegal to do – but your conscience  may be clear. Anyway – the ethics or piracy isnt something for us to debate… we’ll just show you how to do it without the rights holders chasing you down

Step 1: Hide Your Identity

Never pirate on your own network

Never – under any circumstances should you pirate media on your own network.. It may be obvious but so many people just assume that ‘because so many people are doing it’ that they wont be caught..  do not fall into this trap – and make sure you hide your IP or use a VPN:

Hiding or Cloaking your IP

Hiding your IP address using a proxy sounds pretty geeky – something confined to the greenscreen coders with spray on jeans and avoid sunlight. Well now its actually pretty easy so anyone can do this without having to learn to code or change the sleeping habits!

This is basically just setting up an additional step in the download process – so that you download from one location to another (third party location, which is the proxy) and then collect the content from there. Makes you a lot less easy to identify!

When downloading Bit torrents, you simply find a public proxy (there are hundreds of constantly updated lists out there) and paste any one of those addresses into the Proxy field of your Bit Torrent client. Alternatively for a small fee you can sign up for a service such as BTGuard, which does all the work for you. You literally just download and run the app, enter your login information, and then run your torrent.

Setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN)

You can take this a step further by using a virtual private network (VPN), which BTGuard also offers. VPNs essentially do what the proxy does, but for all of your online actions. This is perhaps overkill if you are just downloading that best of Bryan Adams CD that got lost when you left for college, but if you’re up to something a bit darker and worried about who might be tracking what you’re doing, it’s something to look into.

The downside is that a VPN introduces an additional point of failure for your connection – which means getting online and downloading stuff is not quite as reliable

Encrypt your outgoing torrent traffic in your Bit torrent client:

That’s generally found in Preferences > BitTorrent > Outgoing Encryption. It won’t do anything to hide your elevated bandwidth use from your ISP, but you’ll at least mask what you’re doing.

Step 2: Careful where you go

While Pirate Bay is now shut down, there are a few alternatives rising from the ashes.. So be careful where you go – as this will be where the copyright lawyers and forensics will be headed as a first port of call to get the easy pickings.

Consider File sharing sites over Bit Torrents

Sorry – I know this post is about downloading Bit Torrents safely, but Bit torrents bring an inherent risk of being targeted along with hundreds or thousands of others in a lawsuit, as you are not just downloading content but also distributing content, as it is peer-to-peer, so seen and chased down more seriously.

As an alternative, consider filesharing sites where you can directly download content. In this situation the lawsuit is solely aimed at the filesharing site – (eg Kim Dot Com for Mega Upload) rather than the hundreds of thousands of small time downloaders

While the Megaupload is long gone there are dozens of replacements constantly appearing; eg Mediafire, Rapidshare, DepositFiles, 4Shared, Hotfile, Filehost, File4Sharing to name a few

The draw back to direct download sites however is finding links to the content that you want to download. Unfortunately its not as simple as joining a community or searching a torrent tracking marketplace!

Probably the easiest way is to use Google; and query the name of the content  or file you want to download together with the name of the filesharing site – so to return the pages with links to that content.
There are other alternatives include meta search sites, and tricks such as common formats for media classification.
More on this to come…

or Join a Private Bit Torrent Community

The benefit of this is an amazing selection of high quality reliable content.. The drawback however is that you need to contribute to this in equal measure, so you have to upload almost as much content as you download, if you want to stay in the community…
Which means adding a burden to your internet connection and so increasing the chances your ISP will start investigating!

Last of all: think about the consequences of your actions..

So at the start we touched on (or rather we skipped over) the ethics of downloading pirate content. Its probably wise to return to it – and the consequences for others (now that you are all hopefully safe from the lawsuits and cyber police) if this is conducted both illegally and immorally.

In the same way the raping and pillaging of our planets resources with scant concern for the environment has sever consequences for all of us.. so does our downloading.

If you arent paying for content, that means less money for the artists and producers.. which in turn means less small time or niche producers and so less quality and variety out there.  Lets not hasten the era of globalised dumbed down media…!