ISPs Detecting Torrents Question

Long story short, I have a VM running QbitTorrent (torrent server) with a VPN on 24/7. I was wondering if I could get those annoying letters from my ISP from simply downloading the .torrent file (and downloading the torrent over a VPN).

TLDR; could my ISP threaten to sue me for just downloading the .torrent file and not torrenting the file(but actually torrenting over VPN)?

Running torrents is not illegal. Downloading torrents is not illegal.

Copyright infringement is illegal. If you’re not infringing copyright, you will not get copyright infringement notices.

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My understanding is that ISPs send letters when they reciever DMCA notices or something similar from a copyright holder, generally they don’t monitor your torrent activity and it would be pretty difficult to tell anything useful from just the traffic.

What they may do is throttle torrent traffic which they do either by identifying the traffic (which doesn’t really work as most torrent clients encrypt the traffic by default) or just assuming any udp traffic on a high port number is torrent traffic.

They wouldn’t be looking at .torrent files or anything like that but honestly if your ISP was scrutinising your traffic to that degree I’d be using a VPN anyway.

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If done right, your VPN provider might get DMCAs, that’s pretty much it.

Your ISP wouldn’t be suing you - it’d be some cheap lawyer hired by a sleazy digital detective agency, hired by a copyright holder.

Most trackers worth anything these days are private trackers with https/pfs usually setups usually behind cloudflare, without any VPNs, your ISP might know which website you visited, but not what you downloaded from there.

One additional identification vector is the DHT. DHT is a database that says this infohash is being seeded from this ip:port. If you’re doing some kind of split routing / partial routing setup and you mess up, you might find your public ip in the DHT. If you’re doing a whole VM, or a container with no other network access other than through VPN - you’ll be good.

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Since you are using a VPN, the ISP only sees the tunnel traffic, not what is in it … Of course, ISP can guess the type of network traffic by the number of GB and time of activity in the context of correlation with the typical average network traffic of other customers. But this will only be speculation …
Your ISP is unlikely to get a DMCA due to your activity. As long as you use VPN all the time for all p2p-related network traffic, both .torrent files and the download / upload procedure. Because on the ISP side you have traffic in an encrypted tunnel. And on the world side, your traffic comes from your vpn provider’s servers. The vpn provider would have to be involved so that your ISP gets a dmca.
Another option is to rent a seedbox in France and use P2P there and download ready ISO linux home using ftps / https.

PS
Also watch out for dns leak. It is also good to use a kill switch or firewall rules that always block p2p traffic if vpn is not active.

LibreOffice (among other software) is available to download via torrent. Nothing illegal about that.

When you transport illegal drugs with your car, you will get in trouble for the drugs, not for the way you used the car.

Assuming you’re just worried because you’re downloading from torrent a copy of something you already own and you’re afraid to having to dismiss a useless legal action against you, you’re just fine running a your VM behind a VPN. Also not moving hundreds upon hundreds of GBs every day does help not sticking out.

Unless you’re carrying drug in your car AND driving 200mph on the shoulder.