That’s kind of my thought as well. It’s certainly possible someone might go through the effort to find a single pirate downloading The Lion King, but that’s a lot of effort (read: money) to find just one person.

There’s certainly the possibility that an ISP could note that you connected to a VPN, but given that it’s not a remarkable event, since people connect to VPNs for all kinds of legal reasons, they aren’t likely to track your particular IP’s connection to a VPN apart from a court ordering them to care. They get paid their monthly internet plan price whether someone pirates or checks their email.

If someone was running the Pirate Bay from their home servers, however, more parties would likely be interested in finding that person, and that person’s threat model probably exceeds just using a logless VPN.