Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

yes it's important. take it from someone who is also young, but learned their lesson quickly

If you use only private trackers you can skip the VPN. If you use public ones, your ISP might take issue

im young enough to live with family

Tell your parents that they'll lose their internet if they don't give you $20 per year for VPN.

Ask people from your country, or look online to see if torrenting is prosecuted there. If people don't get letters from the ISP, you can just enable encryption in your torrent software and forget about it.

I've been torrenting without VPN for a decade (Spain), and never had any issues, not even traffic slowdowns.

Edit: You're probably gonna see a lot of advice to always use a VPN. Most of this advice is from US users, who are not used to torrenting without VPNs. The truth is, as with everything, it really depends. I'm not a fan of generalized answers to questions, and the same advice isn't as good for every situation. VPNs are a barrier of entry, and they also come with a slowdown. If you're starting to torrent and VPNs are not necessary in your country, don't be afraid to torrent without one. But of course, if you're from the US, you'll have to use one!

OK, so what is a VPN?

A Virtual Private Network is a virtual network that lives on top of a physical network. In the case of the Internet, basically what happens is that your network traffic goes into the VPN on one side and comes out of the VPN provider's network somewhere else, rather than out of your ISP's network. All this really does is move any privacy concerns from your ISP to your VPN, which may or may not protect you from any legal inquiries.

For a more thorough explanation look here: https://www.howtogeek.com/133680/htg-explains-what-is-a-vpn/

Is it possible to use torrent without a VPN?

Certainly, however your torrent traffic will be visible to and inspectable by your ISP. If a copyright holder chooses to, they may sue your ISP for the personal information of the person whose IP address matches the illegal traffic that they found. After they have your personal information they can prosecute you directly. A VPN might shield against this by changing the apparent IP address associated with your torrent traffic, but then you are at the mercy of the VPN provider and the government of whichever country they operate in.

It should be noted that if you are not paying the bill for the Internet, and you use it for illegal activity, then the person you are putting at risk is the person who pays the bill. It's their name attached to the ISP records.

If you are caught, or if they just don't like torrent traffic on their network, the ISP may decide that you are simply too much trouble and it's not worth keeping you as a customer, and just cut off your service (for your whole house).

Yes, I ignored it for a while but then got walled off by charter until I acknowledged I’d fix the torrenting issue with my account. Got a von and never had a problem again

depending on what you you plan on downloading you can probably use direct downloads instead, and you won't need a VPN if I'm not mistaken. no idea if and how available things are, though

Just use ProtonVPN. They have a free tier. No credit card required. Its slightly slower speeds, but it will keep you from getting in trouble while sailing the high seas 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

I've never used a vpn while torrenting in the US. Unless utorrent has one built in. Been doing it for 25 years and never had a problem.

People probably won't like that answer, but whatever. It's true.

You can get a vps for $5/month or less. Installing vpn software with one of the automagical scripts takes 30 minutes at worst.