Hello. I downloaded some stuff quiet a few times. Always care to have a VPN (Mullvad and Proton) active and also integrate it as an interface in BitTorrent. Regularly checked my network for DNS Leaks and downloaded Test-torrents to check my IP. So I thought I should be safe. I had no problems the last 6 Months.
About 2 month ago I switched my OS to Linux. Because I didn’t was familiar with VPNs, Network Interfaces, etc. I stopped torrenting until I know what im doing.
One monthe later I bought a Homeserver and was planning to setup a little Seedbox to torrent 24/7. For training purposes I installed qBittorrent on a VM and downloaded some completely legal and official Linux Distribution. Never ever downloaded something which could cause a copyright issue.
Until I checked https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ With my real, unprotected IP yesterday. As expected I saw that I downloaded the Linux distros. But between them, there showed up an entry for a Series and a Film that I never downloaded and dont even know. Timely very close together. In a period when I definitely didn’t downloaded anything.
Cause I’m from Germany it drives me crazy. How reliable are the infos from iknowwhatyoudownloaded.com?
Anyways, I will definitely contact my Lowyer if I find a letter in my letter box.
iknowwhatyoudownload.com is pretty unreliable. It lists some torrents downloaded from that IP and then likes to add some torrents (mostly porn in my experience). I’ve tested this with many connections over the years, and it’s not just sharing/rotating IP addresses that triggers this.
(My use case for iknowwhatyoudownload.com is mostly to see what public torrents other people have in their seedboxes.)
Also, I wouldn’t worry too much in Germany unless you’re downloading the latest YTS release or something. There are a few horror stories out there about being sued, but they are mostly exaggerated and not recent. That said, your setup sounds very solid and you should still use a VPN.
I have the exact same history with that site and its… creativity when adding stuff to my household download history that I know for a fact no-one in my household would be downloading. Safe to say it’s extremely unreliable.
This is the (mostly) correct answer.
An additional aspect, you may have DSLite, so you share your IPv4 with other people. So it was them that downloaded the movie and series, and your ISP knows that.
Then again, the horror stories about Germany are true (depending on which exactly I suppose), but yes you’ll only get a lawyer letter in the mail if you download very popular torrents of popular movies that just got released.
And even that just for the production companies that care to employ the “lawyers” who do this kind of stuff (WarnerBros is one of them)