IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines.

ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent.

In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it.

If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>