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Torrenting in Japan

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PithyGriff:
I'm wondering how unwise it is to torrent in Japan. I have some friends in Japan and I plan to live there short-term in about a year, and we're all looking for a good answer to the question. Through searches we've all found the same general concerns, but not much concrete. If anyone has relevant experience, I'd appreciate it.

I know there's a general fear of ISPs being proactive, much moreso than in America. Some people have been arrested. Though a lot of cases are of people using their max bandwidth for prolonged periods, and downloading recent content. Not much different from America; always better off waiting for the retail release of something; much more likely to get a letter in the mail for downloading the latest House than the M*A*S*H finale.

Pointers in the right direction are appreciated. (And apologies if the subject is misplaced/taboo/repeated)

relic2279:
I don't know because I'm not in Japan, but I can say they generally don't use regular torrent sites like bakabt... They're more inclined to go with actual p2p programs like Share, PerfectDark, Winny (that still around?) etc, which is where if a bust or a sting was going down, law enforcement would be looking there. However if ISP's are proactive, then it might not matter.

vuzedome:
The usual peers lists i get from public trackers show lots of connections coming from Japan, but the stuff I usually get are pretty obscure or undesirable to begin with anyway.
More importantly, there are people using utorrent(actually most of them, but not all peers) in Japan, but that's about all the info I have.

PithyGriff:
All around that's the one fact that seems to fly against all the paranoia. On almost anything I torrent there's at least one Japan ip floating in the peer list. Whether they're actually uploading or not... But I know I've gotten plenty from Japan ips before- just from obsessively babysitting my torrents.

The consensus seems to be that uploading will get you in trouble, not downloading.

iindigo:
I've lived in Japan (Tokyo even) since last August, and in that time have torrented a significant amount of stuff. Nothing that even touches the amount that a lot of guys here download, but still pretty respectable - it's definitely over 300-400GBs.

I haven't been bothered at all. As far as I can tell, law enforcement here really only cares about Gnutella-esque P2P programs like Winny and Share. I've also been told that ISPs generally don't give a shit about how much you download - meaning you can download terabytes of stuff and they won't care - but you can get in trouble if you repeatedly overstep upload limits. I don't know what the general going limit is, but at least for one gigabit FiOS provider I was looking at, you are limited to about 30GB of upload per day.

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