I havn't downloaded anything in months but I never ever got a threat letter. Don't you use peerblock, or use any other ways to prevent them watching.
I believe a VPN is the only way to stop it. Even your internet provider can't watch your traffic. Large copyright holders seem to be distributing their own work through torrents. Then they just make a list of all the ip's downloading it. Then they contact your ISP. It's possible they are watching torrent traffic some other way, I have not really looked into it. They appear to only notice certain downloads. Recent releases, I wouldn't worry about anything over a year old. Also, if your not using a large ISP company like verizon or charter. You probably won't hear from them. Your ISP is not required to take any action without a court order, but you know how those large companies are...
You just need to download a blocklist of known bad IPs and use this in your torrent program - Vuze has an IP Filters option where you import the list. Bluetack distributes such a list, but since they are in "donation telethon" mode, here's a link to the
July 10 list.VPN (or whatever you think that means) won't do anything, as the "P" in P2P is
peer - by the very definition, you are sharing with others you don't know, who can monitor your downloading - just making the connection with peers "secure" doesn't matter, since you can't "trust" anybody not to be the bad guys. You can block some suspect IP addresses though.
I'll bet somebody would have bought you a ticket to Spiderman for 3 BTC...