This sounds similar to a seedbox, a server rented to do piracy so DMCA complaints and such are sent to your seedbox provider instead of you.
The seedbox providers are typically headquartered somewhere where they can just burn DMCA notices. The servers themselves are also often located in piracy friendly jurisdictions (the Netherlands used to be common, not sure what’s current).
They usually come pre-installed with a remotely accessible torrent client like Deluge, Transmission, etc. Also often includes other software like VPNs, Plex, etc.
You should be relatively safe using one. The server does all the torrenting, you just download the files over FTP so you never appear in the swarm directly. It’s also a huge pain in the ass for law enforcement because it becomes international quickly. You’re in country X, the server with its IP in the swarm is in country Y, and the company that has the rental agreement with the data center for the server is in country Z.
Anecdotally, I used to spend some time in the space and I can’t recall a seed box provider ever getting raided. I think they just generally don’t bother with folks technical enough to go that far; there are easier fish to fry.
It's by the way interesting idea that developing countries entertrainment industries may develop very differently due to internet piracy being already prevalent, though foreign investment may lead to this not happening, IE an "agreement" like TiSA or TTP will mean laws that lead to loss of investments like "no copyright" would become "illegal."
I'd hope someone prepares for that, and when it happens proposes a vote or public address, for laws that make the attempts backfire.
> The servers themselves are also often located in piracy friendly jurisdictions (the Netherlands used to be common, not sure what’s current).
Definitely not piracy friendly jurisdictions most of the time, most are located in Netherlands (most popular), Germany, Canada, United States, Finland and France.
> I used to spend some time in the space and I can’t recall a seed box provider ever getting raided.
Most seedbox providers don't officially allow piracy and don't promote piracy and will listen to valid legal requests, they're safe, you aren't. If they get in legal trouble that involves you, they will totally throw you under the bus to save themselves.
A lot of seedbox providers also don't allow public trackers because that attracts legal notices.
> It’s also a huge pain in the ass for law enforcement because it becomes international quickly. You’re in country X, the server with its IP in the swarm is in country Y, and the company that has the rental agreement with the data center for the server is in country Z.
Actually, it really isn't.
They just don't care as long as the providers stay legal (example: Whatbox (Incorporated in Canada, servers in NL and US) and RapidSeedbox (Incorporated in Hong Kong, servers in NL) started forwarding the legal notices to their users to avoid issues, Ultra.cc (Incorporated in Singapore, servers in NL, CA and Singapore) and Hostingbydesign (Incorporated in Denmark, servers in NL and DE) blocked some trackers to avoid issues)
It's when you stop following the law that you get into trouble, like Hostingbydesign's owner who ran another seedbox provider and got arrested, sentenced and fined when he knew about the piracy and ignored it.
They’re guaranteed to be permanently online as much as such a thing can be for $20/month or whatever. They don’t shut it down if you’re not using it, if that’s what you’re asking but they do occasionally come down for upgrades/migrations/incidents/etc. I’d ballpark most providers in the 99% uptime range.
Some provide root, some don’t. Last I checked, you’ll pay more for root because most of the servers are physical so you have to rent a whole server basically.
The servers are typically IO bound on the NIC so they aren’t super picky about what you do with CPU and memory. They won’t let you run a crypto miner or do heavily parallel transcoding, but if you want to chuck a Python+SQLite web app on there I doubt they’d care.
Depends on the seedbox most will give you root/ssh, others just give you a APi/web interface to a managed torrent client which can be convenient. Check r/seedboxes
How much would you pay for that - compared to existing VPN solutions? You can find cloud hosts or server rentals in Bosnia, Colombia or wherever fairly easily.
You can technically just get any ol' VPS and install the respective/relevant software on it. Just check that the VPS provider doesn't forbid torrenting/etc. in their ToS, I guess :)
I used to do this, but virtually all streaming sites etc block VPS IP ranges now. The beauty of OPs idea is that you get a nice domestic IP instead of one belonging to AWS/GCP/etc.
I've also resorted to putting tailscale exit nodes in foreign relatives homes with Pis in the past.
There are enough weird issues with pretending to be a domestic internet connection from a VPS IP that I've given up trying.
>Just check that the VPS provider doesn't forbid torrenting/etc. in their ToS
They almost always do. But many of them forbid only in tos, and not exactly do something about it
providing such a service (-network) is a popular monetization option for all kinds of useless crapware. this is very useful, but even more shady than regular vpn providers.
