As I said, I don't care about the legal question and my post was about system security only. Otherwise it would have been completely futile to mention the VM since that does nothing at all for the legal issues.
The illegality-of-streams question is not really relevant unless you are a premium account customer of a portal the authorities might get access to, or any streaming website they might get access to. They have no (legal) way to find streamers if they have no access to the server and/or whoever is hosting it or owns it. They get (non-VPNed) torrent downloaders because it's legally possible to find out which IP addresses download and/or offer a given file.
In the past I did download torrent file videos - only to watch them exactly once or never. I got caught and paid the "Abmahnung" - so what. I stopped because I don't really need it. My need for such video content is very low. Usually I watch 10-30 minutes of movies, even "block busters", and then I'm too bored to ever watch the rest. For example, I still did not watch Game of Thrones past the end of the very first season.
So all streamed content is illegal in EU? YouTube, Netflix, ...?
How is a user supposed to know, for all anyone visiting a website knows it's licensed.
Anything on Netflix might be unlicensed, I have no way to tell, same with any random site. If I can find it, that means a large media corp can, so surely one must assume if they didn't get it taken down (sites are blocked and taken down all the time, blocked at ISP level) then it must be OK with the large rights holders.
And of course we know that even stuff from MPAA can be copyright infringing. There's no way for users to establish if something is properly licensed because license are secret.
Streaming pirated content is exactly as illegal as downloading in Germany and also the whole EU.
Here is a source: https://www.focus.de/digital/praxistipps/anwalt-zu-eugh-urte...