If they are trying at great leghth to block IPs associated with piracy, it isn't that much harder to get known VPN IPs blocked too especially when they could use the 'why won't someone think of the children' card and claim VPNs are solely used for CSAM and drug markets.
The smart move would be to skip VPNs and move over to I2P. For those who don't know I2P is kinda like if tor and torrents had a baby that was a VPN on crack. Unlike a VPN where your traffic is encrypted and sent to one centralized server, I2P encrypts and routes your data through multiple servers and unlike tor every client by default is a node that data can be routed through.
But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it's still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who's likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.
Now don't misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I've used it on and off for years, but it shouldn't be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it's built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.
Bully everyone and pass restrictive laws yields more piracy than ever, and a good crop of mentors for future pirates.
Build quality streaming services with excellent selection of media, and the piracy community shrinks. (Sad, when it happens, because there's evidence that wide-coverage digital media preservation is nearly impossible without the piracy community.)
It's almost like the Movie Industry doesn't care about any of the things they claim they care about...
Edit: I guess it's possible they're playing out a long con to ensure their favorite episodes of "I Love Lucy" survive...
Edit 2: No, I don't really think they're somehow secretly not the assholes they appear to be.
It really depends on how much people want to get around it. I grew up in Vietnam, where when I was in about year 10 of high school, the government decided to start blocking Facebook. Their block was only DNS, so word quickly spread around the school that you could still access Facebook if you changed your DNS. This was before quad 9 or even Google's quad 8 (the latter came around shortly after, which was a big improvement to how easy this became), so the DNS we ended up using was a difficult specific number to remember and communicate, but even despite that, by the end of the month pretty much everyone in school—from students to teachers—had learnt how to change their DNS to bypass the block.
People always say that piracy is more popular when it's easier than the legal means. And obviously adding a DNS block to pirating is going to increase its difficulty, and increase the relative convenience of legal means. But if the legal means continues getting worse and worse, at some point piracy is going to look more appealing again, and people will figure out how to bypass the DNS block.
A site-blocking law would let copyright owners "request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content," he said. Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy "steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy rich people's yacht money, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales."
I have straight bind running on my network already for local zones, it would be easy enough to switch it to be a root resolver. The only problem is it's a lot slower. I use DoT to cloudflare for non-local zones (using blocky); if you run a root resolver, your DNS traffic is all in the clear. Not like it truly matters but I wouldn't put it past my ISP to do DPI on DNS traffic to try to sell my data.
I trust them more than my ISP (Verizon). Quad9 is, and I used it for some time as an upstream, but it is markedly slower for me than cloudflare. Those milliseconds add up for an impatient asshole like myself.