I know YouTube is a terrible provider of pirated content and also that it is almost impossible to pirate without a VPN, but I would like to know: if I download a movie from YouTube (directly from it, of course) without a VPN, will I receive “that type of message” from my ISP?
nope. the ISPs track torrent downloads is by leeching off of the popular public ones, and checking if any of the peers have IPs that belong to them. not by analyzing each customer’s traffic individually.
downloading a video off youtube makes a simple HTTP download which wont trip any ISP alerts. especially since it’s a trusted domain like Youtube
You should not. The biggest thing that will get you in trouble is the uploading portion of torrenting, which is why it is always recommended to use a VPN when torrenting any copyrighted content.
In your case, the traffic will roughly look like you were just watching the movie on YouTube, just really fast.
Your ISP cannot differentiate between weather the YouTube app is streaming the video or any program is downloading the video.
So don’t worry about it.
First, unless you redistribute the video (esp. for profit), you should have nothing to worry about.
Now, for the educational portion of our program:
Unless your ISP censors internet traffic, it is absolutely possible to pirate without a VPN. Barring censorship, your ISP usually doesn’t give two shits about what your traffic is as long as your bill is paid. Those letters they send are in response to a lawyer notifying them that an IP address was found to be distributing copyrighted material.
Companies obtain these IP addresses by “pirating” their own material and recording the IP addresses of any seeders they find. If this IP address belongs to a VPN service that doesn’t keep logs, they cannot be in possession of said material. Additionally, they have no way of knowing what traffic went to which customer after the fact. So, any letters sent by lawyers to the VPN service are pointless. Which is why, if you have a good VPN, they can’t trace it back to you.
It’s not impossible to pirate without a VPN, just use Usenet. Until a couple months ago when I had some free time and was super super bored, I hadn’t even bothered to tell SABnzbd to use a VPN. Over two ISPs and however many hundreds of episodes and movies watched, I never got any letters. Likewise, you usually are pretty safe on private torrent trackers, because copyright trolls don’t like putting in the effort of maintaining access.
