The cease and desist fine (about 900 euros these days) is what the lawyer wants. Max return on investment for a single letter. You don’t have to react to this letter which will bring about the second letter with the generous offer to pay less, this repeats until around 340 Euro are reached.

Then you may get a court order that states what the lawyer accuses you of and this you have to react to. The court just states this and gives you 2 checkboxes. If you check the one saying “I reject the accusation completely” the lawyer needs to decide. He invested some 40 euros into the court order but going to court is a different ballgame and not his main business model so they have to weigh the chances.

The owner of the router that the file went through is responsible for access to the router. Since the owner has so far not said anything to his Defence there is a possibility that multiple people including family members had access to the router and the lawyer might, in court, be presented with a list of people and their addresses which satisfies the defendants task to erschütter the accusation for the court and leave the lawyer with the option to figure out whodunnit or rather who in the list is going to fold and pay.

This is really not his business model. That said they do go to court and people get sentenced to pay the fine.

Downloading via torrents by default implies distribution (from technical point of view).

My understanding is that one can download without seeding/uploading; is this inaccurate?

You are correct.

Years ago I did exactly this by modifying my client to never seed/share, and also to fake my reported sharing stats so the private trackers wouldn’t boot me for failing to share.

Those were the days.

Now, I no longer fear the ISP or copyright holder chasing me (seems ISPS and laws moved on where I am) and don’t bother with modifications any more.

> also to fake my reported sharing stats so the private trackers wouldn’t boot me for failing to share.

This would very quickly be identified by private trackers these days because the stats don't line up with your peers and earn you a permaban.

Since the whole system relies on people seeding, even if this may be possible technically, clients don't tend to support it as a feature.

There are some services where you send a torrent file/magnet link and it’ll download the file for you, so you can download over HTTPS. I believe those particular services intentionally don’t reseed.

Correct. E.g., https://github.com/pmoor/bitthief .

That's a very technical nitpick — GP's general point ('Obviously, because, as the chain of comments above your shows, torrent users are easily caught and get fined to hundreds of euros per downloaded movie.') stands.