You are most likely to be noticed if you directly torrent a recent blockbuster movie or song. Older material will not trigger them. 5 years is old enough.

Who does the noticing? Big Media funds these anti-piracy organizations to do the watching. They will try to download from you, and if they see that you are uploading copyrighted material, they may complain to your ISP, who then passes the complaint on to you, reprimanding you with “that kind of message”. These organizations are NOT law enforcement, they’re more on the order of vigilantes. And their resources are thankfully limited, that’s one reason why they don’t monitor 20th century stuff, and why they focus on torrents and largely ignore all other means of downloading. Their masters also understand, most hypocritically, that if they look away from piracy of obscure stuff, that might lead to more sales of that stuff.

When the anti-piracy organization complains, the ISP may cut your service and force you to read a message telling you how Naughty piracy is, before restoring service. That’s it. They won’t rat you out to the anti-piracy organization, who, without a name, is unable to sue you. Anti-piracy orgs have tried going to court to force ISPs to connect IP addresses to names, and after a few initial connections some of which went embarrassingly wrong for them, and many of which were denied, don’t even try any more. But don’t slip up and let them have your name! Don’t, for instance, host a website advertising your name and business on the same connection that you use to torrent! If you do that, the anti-piracy organization will be able to see who you are, skip going through the ISP, and sue you directly.

Spectrum has a separate department of “digital enforcement” that handles this stuff. I tried talking to them, just once. Waste of time. Either they are deep into their false narrative, and their jobs hang on them refusing to admit that copying is not stealing. Or, they have to toe the official line on this stuff, and have to give you a load of hooey. The more you talk to them, no matter what you say, the higher you’re going to get on their lists that you don’t want to be on. Think also about the sort of people who would be chosen for a “digital enforcement” job.

The violation they target users for is sharing a video, and that’s usually through a file sharing service like torrenting.

Think of it this way - whatever you watch online via a browser you’re already downloading. Or via an app.

You know, it really tweaks me that torrenting is associates with piracy, when it could’ve become the defacto way to share files between users, if OS devs had just included the protocol in the OS (looking at you Android, but Windows and Apple too).

I’ve often questioned why it wasn’t…

nope. the ISPs track torrent downloads is by leeching off of the popular public ones, and checking if any of the peers have IPs that belong to them. not by analyzing each customer’s traffic individually.

downloading a video off youtube makes a simple HTTP download which wont trip any ISP alerts. especially since it’s a trusted domain like Youtube