In my country (east-EU) you don’t get caught for using torrent sites + softwares. It means you can download a lot of things for free from the internet.
I lived in Germany where my former colleague got a 2000€ of penalty bill for downloading using torrents.
What about in Australia? Do you go to the jail or get penalty?
You only go to jail if you don’t seed.
The govt blocks access to popular torrenting sites and ISPs are required to report piracy.
The simple solution is a VPN so that you can access the sites and mask the activity from your ISP.
I suggest avoiding free VPNs and investing in one that doesn’t keep activity logs.
Only if you download a car
You’re really only going to get caught if you download and use the material for monetary gain.
If you just download for personal usage noone is going to give a fuck.
As far as I know in Australia at least, the fine is not for downloading, it’s for uploading.
AFAIK penalty normally involves calculating how much damage you caused to the copyright holder (which will depend what you torrented and how many people it was to) and how much financial gain you made (which could be zero - so only the other one might apply).
We don’t have a fixed fine. You’re going to be taken to court. And you should probably spend more than 2000€ on a good lawyer. For minor infringements, they might leave you alone. If yes, people have gone to jail for large scale infringement - especially people who operate at “commercial scale” which could just mean having torrents running all day every day with a high bandwidth upstream connection.
Mate. If you have any questions regarding torrents got to r/torrents and ask.
You are not going to get into trouble here unless you upload A LOT even then I doubt it.
Seed away.
You have to enter Thunderdome if you get caught
Yep straight to gaol!
Yes, this is the FBI, send all of your downloaded and illegal content to me.
USB only and leave it in a drop box.
No idea, I’ve had a vpn for many years
I know Germany is a nutjob regarding torrenting punishment, but Australia isn’t Germany. Most Aussie ISPs don’t give a shit. The few that do care, they just block torrenting sites at DNS level.
Simple solution is just changing DNS. Blocks are only DNS level
An even simpler solution is to use tor browser.
What if I am using my country best site? I think that site is not blocked over there. What are the consequencies over there? Jail or paying penalty?
Which is a good VPN? If I use VPN I think I cannot download with high speed, right?
We are beyond downloading cars, I am downloading houses now.
Government hate this trick.
Wow it is good to know. I would use for only personal usage in the future.
Torrenting? Jail. Undercook fish? Straight to jail. Overcook fish? Believe it or not, also jail.
Nice, thanks, that’s the answer what I was looking for! 
It sure is simple when your router isn’t locked and you already know how to change the dns.