Let's not turn this into what the Reddit subreddit of Piracy has turned into and that's an endless sea of questions that are all the same - "Do I need a VPN?".
And the loud and vocal answer to such a question is - yes. Yes you do need a VPN for pirating. Nobody gets a VPN for casual use and I'm under the impression that VPN services know a lot of people are going to be going to them for pirating and not just accessing content out of their country. And it's for that reason, is why I'm skeptical on entrusting my activity with the bigger VPN names available.
I use ProtonVPN myself, by the way.
Pirating under your raw IP address, only will set you up to get pegged by your ISP whether it's in a short time or a long time. I've only ever gotten one single ISP letter in my entire 26 years of pirating and it was simply because I downloaded without a VPN. Well I was also downloading off of someone else's network to take the fall, but I was confronted about it either way.
And I've gotten away with so much pirating because of my careful cautiousness when it comes to pirating. That and this applies to the United States, but the statue of limitations is 3 years when it comes to copyright infringement. So, good fucking luck to any ISP or so that wishes to try and nail me for something I downloaded 10 years ago, but I digress.
But a large part of me avoiding so much does contribute to having a VPN. So, yes, VPN is required. Please don't ask anybody in the pirating community 100 questions that are all just ways to ask whether or not you need a VPN. You do.
I know 2 Germans. They prefer Usenet over VPN. USA gives you warning. Germans don't give warning.
A "great" thing about copyright infringement in Germany is that the statue of limitations only starts after the copyright holder learns from the copyright infringement.
This means, even if I torrented a movie 5 years ago, and the copyright holder finds out my name only now, they'd still have another 3 years to sue me.
Anyway, there're private torrent sites in Germany. It's only public sites that don't exist.
DDL and streaming sites are really big in Germany. Usenet too, but until a few years ago I don't think there were Indexers with API's, so it's been either manual downloading or streaming.