this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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If the only reason you want to use soulseek is to save money, then paying for a VPN wouldn't work out that much cheaper than Spotify premium as far as I'm aware. As you are appear rather paranoid, perhaps a modded Spotify frontend would be best.
However, a VPN isn't really necessary for soulseek as it is ptp.
But, I would actually (obviously) recommended switching to soulseek as that allows you to build your own library of lossless audio files, which then of course involves spending large sums of money on high capacity drives but is a fun hobby to have.
You say that a VPN isn't needed for Soulseek because it is ptp (peer to peer I assume?), but I thought that was the same "thing" as torrents use, which I'm fairly certain you pretty much need a VPN for?
With a torrent you’re downloading from many unknown peers, one of which could be a rights holder lawyer who will log your IP and send a threatening letter to your internet service provider. With Soulseek you are downloading from only one peer.
With a torrent you are downloading and uploading chunks at the same time. With Soulseek you have options about what you share for upload. If you were to get in trouble legally on Soulseek, it would probably be for what’s in your shared library, not for what you downloaded.
However, it’s not super polite to download from others without sharing. Some users block uploading to peers who aren’t sharing anything. My advice would be to go to your local library and find a few rare CDs of local music. Rip them to MP3 at a good bitrate and share them. Or maybe classical music? I’m not a lawyer, but just think of what music you can share where the artist or record label isn’t going to sue you. Independent and smaller record labels are probably not going to sue you.
Classical isn't necessarily non-suable. You can share the sheet music Beethoven wrote, since he's been dead for a long time and his work is in public domain, but each new performance and recording of a given composition is also copyrighted by the musicians(s), since they have invested creative effort into its realisation.
Not that you'd be remotely likely to get fined either way, unless the publishing label is very prestigeous, Warner Classics or maybe Deutsche Grammophon (though even then if you're outside of US/UK or Germany I don't think they'd care).
At least in Germany they get you by pirating and logging who seeds to them, as uploading is the killer not downloading. If you throttle your upload to 0kb/s aka disabling it you can torrent safely.