Pirating copyrighted material.

Well afaik seeding on public torrents is just about the only way, where you would get in trouble for pirating.

Just don't do that, use a private tracker and use Tor for small stuff like ebooks.

There's nothing magical about a "private tracker", those are regularly infiltrated too.

I may be completely wrong on this one but...

This is not much of a problem, because you are seeding to "friends" making the whole thing non commercial and a private affair in some legislatures.

Not sure if the laws have changed but what.cd used to have a certain number of users which was capped by the number of friends some judge thought to be reasonable.

If i recall correctly that whas around 200k meaning that you could run a private tracker and in case of a bust claim to know everyone.

Back in the day i had a what.cd account and when they got busted (took them many years) nothing happened to the users. I think they shredded the servers before the cops could seize them.

None of that helps in the US.

Getting onto many private trackers is a real pain in the ass, involving lurking on some IRC channel for who knows how long, begging and sucking up to people until somebody gives you an invite (assuming the tracker is even open to new applicants at the time.) Then, even with an invite, often the admins want to interview you to see if you answer probing questions like a pirate or a lawyer. The whole thing is a pain in the ass. These days I just say YOLO and use public trackers.