What a tricksy thieving hobbit you are! /s

You’ll be fine. Stop seeding the thing they don’t like and increase your security—VPN, seedbox, private trackers, etc. If anybody asks, you had an asshole neighbor kid who guessed your WiFi password.

Edit: just realized that you were using a server with Hetzner—Germany is one of the worst places for torrenting. Get a server in a friendlier country for that.

There’s no need to answer.

Stop whatever it was they detected. Don’t do that any more.

We are requesting your immediate assistance in removing and disabling access to the infringing material from your network. We also ask that you ensure the user and/or IP address owner refrains from future use and sharing of Company materials and property.

Do that. Take whatever torrents they detected offline and don’t torrent those media again from that machine. Unless you want to lawyer up and fight them, of course; this isn’t a court order, it’s a mere cease and desist. You’d be stupid to try and fight them, of course.

If you want to keep your seedbox, make sure nobody can detect your illegal activities. Switching to a VPN seems prudent.

Hosting pirated content on a German platform seems awfully risky to me. The German media actually sues random torrenters. I don’t know if they do it outside Germany, but you’ll make your life a lot easier if you install a VPN so you don’t get detected.

Use a VPN

I get these from comcrap weekly.

They are toothless. IPs aren’t people.

Hell, if you really want to get cheeky and piss off the lawyers, ask them:

Please at your nearest convenience reply with all the evidence you have so far accumulated thus far that indicates the person with which you have contacted has indeed been the one to violate your client’s IP rights. Please cease all further communications until this request has been fulfilled.

VPN is your best friend, also don’t host a piracy server over a hoster within EU…

You don’t reply, just stop sharing publicly.

Very, very, very brave you are to torrent on Hetzner lol

So someone mentioned that lawyer is probably better placed to offer advice to you on this issue. While that’s true and you can’t really be wrong by saying that, I think there’s a degree of personal common sense applicable here albeit with the caveat that as a random forum user I could be completely wrong and it’s not my ass on the line.

I’ve seen similar things to this before when companies join torrent swarms and then contact the ISP to which swarm member’s IP addresses are associated and ask them to send emails to the owners of those IP addresses with similar threatening sounding stuff. You never know if you’ll be really unlucky but on balance, these guys are probably fishing (not phishing although really, kinda phishing). They haven’t asked for anything in particular from you except that you stop what you’re doing. To respond would basically confirm that you are the owner of the server and likely imply that you specifically, knowingly distributed copyrighted materials. They haven’t compelled you in any way to respond so it’s best not give them that gift.

They did say don’t delete anything and my lack of legal knowledge prevents me from saying confidently to what extent they really can do that, but I strongly suspect that if push came to shove you couldn’t really get in to trouble for deleting things given you could well never have received the email or had some kind of a problem with the system causing you to lose data, however you can bet that your plausible deniability would be greatly constrained if you respond, therefore acknowledging that you have seen their request that you not delete things.

TL:DR you don’t have to reply and you definitely shouldn’t, and also, they asked you to stop, so stop.

"Dear Sir/Madam

NUTS!

Sincerely,"

The first thing I would do is anything that doesn’t involve asking for legal advice on reddit/Lemmy.

If you a concerned about this: Ask a lawyer for advice.

I’d move hosts. Frantech will ignore dmca requests if you get a Luxembourg slot. Or move to feralhosting. They’re based in the Netherlands.

It was an email or a registered letter?

If it was an email, you never received it. Probably it got rejected by the spam filter as it looked like phishing.

But imho it wasn’t a good idea to use a commercial server provider with KYC policies for seeding torrents. It was better to use one of those seedboxes for this

There was a post here not long time ago about faking your own death and starting new life in another country. Read it. Apply it.

you could try to use i2pd or i2p for bittorrent with BiblgyBT or qbittorrent 4.6RC and above, there is a few decent public trackers on i2p.