Yup, at least in Germany that's the legal situation: They send out cease&desist letters because torrent upload counts as "sharing the copyrighted work without a license", and because of bit-torrent high connectivity they just assume by default that you are doing it on the "scale of a business", stipulating absurd damage sums.
I once torrented an episode of the show The Americans, my last option as my usual sources were weirdly all offline and it was the middle of a season, the show wasn't even legally distributed in Germany at the time.
Turned out some German publisher picked up the distribution rights to the show and their first action wasn't to make it legally available in Germany, but trying to profit from Germans who followed the show trough piracy by sending out serial c&d letters demanding 800€ payments and stipulating damages in the range of 10k€
It's a pretty wide-spread and annoying situation to such a degree that using public torrent is a very quick way to get expensive mail as there's a whole lot of anti-piracy outfits in Germany that monitor public torrent trackers for German IPs downloading files named after copyrighted works to send out those c&d letters.
I'm not living in Germany, but am downloading torrents (to watch stuff unavailable via HBO/Netflix) via VPN which terminates in Germany. I wonder if the VPN company is getting shitloads of those C&D letters and if they can ever blow back on me.
Afaik the worst they could do is cancel your service/subscription because the c&d letter is addressed to the owner of the connection, which in your case would be the VPN company.
I once torrented an episode of the show The Americans, my last option as my usual sources were weirdly all offline and it was the middle of a season, the show wasn't even legally distributed in Germany at the time.
Turned out some German publisher picked up the distribution rights to the show and their first action wasn't to make it legally available in Germany, but trying to profit from Germans who followed the show trough piracy by sending out serial c&d letters demanding 800€ payments and stipulating damages in the range of 10k€
It's a pretty wide-spread and annoying situation to such a degree that using public torrent is a very quick way to get expensive mail as there's a whole lot of anti-piracy outfits in Germany that monitor public torrent trackers for German IPs downloading files named after copyrighted works to send out those c&d letters.