The hunt for the cofounders of torrent site The Pirate Bay was a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse, spanning several continents. In the end, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm all ended up in prison.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.

Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.

I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.

If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.

I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.

Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.

Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.

The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.