It never ceases me to amaze me there are countries that try to go after those downloading since it’s much harder to determine if it was done within fair use boundaries.

Fair use is a US-only concept. Western EU countries tend to have much stricter copyright laws.

It might be called something different but without fair use principles you wouldn’t be able to quote, review or parody a movie. This intent isn’t known by the persecutors ahead of time, hence what they’re doing is rather overzealous (an euphemism for police working for corpos).

France copyright law does not allow full length reproduction, whatever the intent. It does not apply here and it's not why they are going after the customers here.

Quoting, parodies etc. is explicitly regulated and very tightly regulated. I can only speak for Germany here, other EU countries have different laws but I know they tend to be on the strict side as well.

For example, parodies must explicitly comment on the original work to be permitted. Modifying the lyrics in a funny way alone is not enough to be a parody.

Same with quotes: They are only permitted if they serve a scientific, informative or analytical purpose. Quotes for illustration purposes or entertainment are explicitly not permitted.

In 2021, "pastiches" were legalized which allows for some entertainment use of derivative copyrighted works but there is no legal precedent yet that defines their scope.

I never realised how things are different in Poland when it comes to this. Around here you’d get away with downloading pretty much anything except software which is explicitly excluded from our fair use laws. You can share full copies of audio, video and text among close group of friends / relatives legally so if persecution happens it’s usually against those uploading torrents or selling piracy services where it’s easy to make a case that it wasn’t fair use.

selling piracy services

That's exactly the subject here.

Sure, but the users of the service could also claim they got scammed with a counterfeit product. Those selling the service are the only ones worth pursuing from the practical and ethical standpoint.

I highly doubt the users could get away with such an excuse but I'm not a lawyer. And the complaint comes from the football ligue rights holders, there is not ethics to be found here.

Given that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, an excuse can be all it takes sometimes, especially in a civil suit.

How fair use does apply in that case? To me it seems a question of legally acquiring or not what you intend to use fairly.

Yeah, fair use apparently doesn’t work the same way in France. Regardless of this consumers can still claim they thought they were purchasing a legitimate product. Do you check if YouTube has rights to videos you’re watching there? Am I liable for watching Star Wars Holiday Special on Youtube?