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The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old
(torrentfreak.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A decade or so ago, there were some widely-publicized cases of folks who got absolutely ruined with six- or seven-figure judgements against them for copyright infringement.
Example from 2012.
Maybe it was a tactic the copyright cartel used in the mid-2000s and then stopped or something, but it was enough to shift folks' behavior such that using VPNs became the norm.