(Of course I'm going to stop, but my server has been blocked by Hetzner, would like to recover it XD)
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.
Say nothing. Stop sharing or seeding. But, above all, say nothing. You’re getting phished. Just comply and stop seeding the shit. Keep quiet. If you reply you’ll just have problems that cost money.
Just do what they asked you to do. Remove the torrents, it's not like they are threatening legal action. They are actually asking pretty nicely.
In the future, use a VPN.
Any lawyer would tell you to not reply. Replying shows you personally got and read their letter, which they could use in court against you potentially.
It may shock you to learn that countries exist outside of the US, and they have different laws. Notably, Germany (the place in question) has copyright enforcement with actual teeth.
Given that it's Hetzner, there's not much you can do besides telling them "oops sorry didn't know this was illegal" and proceed using a VPN on your seedbox, go private tracker or just use a different hoster. Hetzner isn't a big fan of torrenting since they have the (german) feds in their neck.
You quietly comply. Then take tougher security measures to protect yourself before continuing. Do not respond under any circumstances. If you're served with actual legal papers, retain an attorney.
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.
Stop seeding the torrents they mention. Use a VPN, verify it is bound to your torrent client.
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.
I've found Usenet backbone+indexer to be the same price as VPN while being significantly faster to download, no seeding required.
It allows more complicated setups like radarr+sonarr which download episodes as they come out, at around your internet speed.
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
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.
