Does anyone care about it in Canada or even anywhere? I read some places that downloading is fine it is only uploading copyright material that is illegal. If i were to do it i would buy a VPN anyway to be safe/peace of mind, but would i need to keep it after the initial download? In theory can you get a vpn for a month and download 2TB of games within the first month and then dont renew the subscription the following month?
Yes. You can subscribe to a VPN for a month and unsubscribe the next month. You can always resubscribe the next time you want to use the VPN.
If you are connected to the internet when you launch these games is anyone made aware of this?
I’m gonna assume you’re talking about games that are or mostly singleplayer.
Probably not. The only thing I can think of is if you’re playing a game that has an online multiplayer feature that relies on Steam (or Origin, Ubisoft, etc…) servers or the game’s servers, you probably won’t be able to play online as the server will probably detect that you don’t own a genuine copy of the game. Also, I do believe some games, if you’re connected to the internet, can check if you own a genuine copy or not by connecting to their servers.
The online multiplayer feature isn’t really an issue because there’s nothing you can really do about it. However, if you torrent a game that connects to the internet, you can create a firewall rule to block the game’s connection to the internet.
Is there ways for them to know the how the game was attained?
If you’re talking about game developers/publishers/copyright owner, there are ways for them to know. Usually, some copyright owners are the ones releasing the torrents and they use this as a tactic to catch people who torrent their stuff. This is also true for movies, music, etc…
If you’re talking about your ISP, your ISP can literally see everything you do online. They can see every file that you download/upload. However, they won’t really care about what you do online unless authorities comes knocking at their door with a warrant that requires them to hand over your information.
If this is the case could it be solved by using the vpn to download what you desire and installing them on a external hdd, which is then only plugged in when the pc is not connected to the internet whats so ever to play them?
Using a VPN encrpyts your internet traffic. Your ISP can still see what type of traffic is coming in but they can’t see the content.
For example, you torrent a game, your ISP can see that you’re torrenting something but they can’t see what you’re torrenting.
Your ISP can technically try to decrypt the connection to see the contents of the traffic but they won’t because that’s not their job. It can take years to break a VPN’s encryption even for strong computers so your ISP would not waste effort on allocating resources just to see what you’re downloading.
You do not need to go as far as installing torrented games on an external HDD or disconnecting your PC from the internet. Like I said above, you can just block the games from accessing the internet by making firewall rules for them.
I haven’t seen anywhere of anyone getting anything more than threats by their ISP as a scare tactic but nothing ever followed. And if anything ever did happen Canada has a newly made law stating that nobody can demand money/payback for the things illegally downloaded, so seems like a pretty safe bet to me?
I just looked up the new law since I’m in Canada too and from what I got from the sources I’ve read, it seems like copyright holders can’t send you notice letters asking you to pay for all the stuff you illegally downloaded.
However, they can probably still send you a notice letter letting you know that someone with your IP address downloaded something. If you choose to respond to that letter with your information, you can get taken to court by the copyright holder and get fined for up to $5000 in damages.