I'm in Italy. Most people I know have been pirating movies, series and games [1] for 20+ years, via torrents and eMule (yes, eMule is still big in Italy), and nobody ever received any letters.
But there's a big exception: as soon as you start pirating soccer, they're going to come after you.
[1] I've personally stopped pirating games a long time ago, because it's just easier and safer to buy them on Steam or GOG. Gaben was 100% right when he said "Piracy is almost always a service problem".
Yup, Gaben was 100% right. I haven't pirated a game or music album in ages. Having games that just work is great. An update came out? It's auto-installed. Don't have to wait for the cracker group to put out a new patched executable. For music, Spotify means I don't need to curate a collection and buy individual songs. Yes, I acknowledge that it means I don't own any of it, but that's fine. I'm still coming out ahead compared to paying for $1 for every individual song.
But movies and TV shows? All the studios fucked it up by all wanting a piece of the pie. It became a horribly fragmented market. I'd need, what, 8+ subscriptions to have access to it all? Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, Amazon Prime Video... Other than sports-centric streaming that I don't care about, what am I missing?
It's utterly ridiculous. My pirating plummeted when Netflix streaming became a thing. It returned when studios revoked the licenses so they could put it on their own platform.