Here in Germany, it is almost impossible to pirate for free. If you download shows via BitTorrent you almost immediately get a fine ("Abmahnung"). There are some illegal streaming sites, but quality and reliability is poor in my experience.

But you can get a subscription to a VPN for about the same price as a Netflix subscription (~10€/month), that will allow you to torrent without worring about getting caught. Strangely, they manage to have an exit node in Frankfurt, and take credit card, although it is clear that they are frequently used for pirating. Alternatively, for a similar price you can get a premium "sharehoster" account, and then download all the shows using JDownloader.

I am firmly convinced that this is at least tolerated, if not even condoned by the film industry. The goal is to make pirating a bit inconvenient, and about as expensive as legal streaming. It is like a pressure valve. If it weren't for this "good enough" system, people would be motivated to build a P2P "Pirates' Netflix" (maybe with a friend-of-a-friend architecture, like RetroShare, where the lawers cannot get your IP). And that would really be a problem for the IP holders.