Well, the sub had gone downhill recently anyway - endless memes or posts about 'what is seeding' 'what is a vpn' 'what is plex' or just idiots who got an ISP notice and think it means they are going to jail.

Heh - except it’s more like a a couple of minutes

You know that ebooks exist too right?

This is silly - the delivery medium is irrelevant.

VPNs create enough friction for authorities to stop them

Its not 'authorities' you are hiding from when pirating, its just copyright trolls. All they do is scrape IP addresses from torrenst and automatically send a notice to the relevant ISP. If that IP belongs to a VPN provider, the compaint will never reach you.

Communities

Exactly - snd yet people still claim their 'VPN ratted them out' - it didn't - it might hve failed, or the user never turned it on, but the VPN provider didn't get a copyright notice from Disney and forward it an ISP.

because they’ll hopefully collaborate with law enforcement to track you down.

Unlikely - most of the time they won't have any logs anyway.

People get caught for CP and other crimes due to lapses in their own security usually - reusing user names across sites, details in photos that can be identified, or simply using a non encrypted connection one time.

your ISP cannot spy on what you’re doing.

ISPs dont monitor torrents, they just pass on complaints from copyright trolls. ISPs have no interest in inspecting your torrent traffic and have always resisted any attempts to make them do so.

There's often a lot of bad information about VPNs which is never backed up with any actaul evidence.

Sure, you have to make sure its working properly and bound to your torrent client, but if it is, then that's enough to protect you from copyright claims.

There is no evidence of any commerical VPN provider ever responding to a copyright notice. People mistakenly think this, when all that's really happened is they were not connected properly and their ISP got the notice direct. There is no situation where the copyright troll contacts the VPN provider, find the real user, then somehow makes the ISP send a notice to them. Doesn't even make sense.