Depends on jurisdiction. In the UK they probably won’t waste their time. I know police officers who also pirate.

In Canada there’s a cap on how much you can get sued for piracy and it’s all infringements combined, not per item. The cap is so low nobody ever gets sued because nobody would make any money off it and it wouldn’t financially ruin me.

So they’d find a NAS with every video game ever made in all languages up to 7th gen and partial 8+9. All legacy PC games and partial archive of modern. A lot of music, and some less popular/rare video media. I mostly moved to debrid for video content outside of some stuff I worry could get lost to time while I’m alive and youtuber archives. Sacrifices of a limited budget.

Tl;dr: the max worst case scenario here is a maximum $5,000 penalty and theoretically I suppose they could tech ban me. Forbid the usage of a computer or limit it.

In reality I get the occasional scare letters from ISP and pin them to a wall like trophies. The reseller ISP I’m with is pro user and doesn’t care.

IANAL and not really sure if this would hold up for digital assets, but if there is a search warrant, anything in plain view is up for grabs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_v._California. I would assume anything on the hard drive can be evidence in court if it is in plain view of the assets of the search warrant.

But also, for simply possession of pirated content, I don’t think the state would charge you, but you could be open to civil litigation if the copyright holders find out somehow.

EDIT: Looked into it some more, and seems there’s precedent that files of similar type on a hard drive are considered to be in plain view if they match the type of files which would be searched via a search warrant of the hard drive

In the case of United States v. Wong, police were searching the defendant’s computer for evidence related to a murder when they discovered images of child pornography on the computer. Although the warrant was specific to evidence of the murder, the Ninth Circuit held that the plain view exception allowed them to seize the child pornography, as searching graphics files was valid under the warrant and the files were immediately identifiable as contraband.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1158361.html

Possession of content – with the unique exception of CSAM – in the USA does not draw a distinction between how it was acquired, whether or not it may have violated a license or copyright. The primary provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 are to protect the production and distribution of copyrighted works. So unless your stash of content is being hosted on a server for others to access – which constitutes distribution, though one could possibly argue that if no one ever accessed it, it’s not distribution – then the mere possession does not incur criminal liability. Of course, civil liability may attach, meaning that the copyright holder could sue you for the cost of buying a legit license. Though there’s zero reason for the police to pass that info to whomever the copyright holder is. Whether police can gratuitously share investigation info with a third-party is a matter of state law.

But the other potential criminal charge could come from the infamous DMCA, whose provisions make it a crime to circumvent DRMs. Though this provision has an out, whereby certain circumvention is permitted as exceptions for designated purposes, created and renewed through a regulatory process. Outside these exceptions, the standard defense of fair-use for copyright infringement does not apply to a charge of DMCA circumvention. So if the police could put together evidence that your content stash is the product of circumvention, and other evidence shows that you used or have the tools/software to perform that circumvention, that’s technically a charge which could be leveled.

This would take a colossal amount of effort, for something which generally has to be brought by the (federal) US Attorney’s office, rather than a state-level District Attorney. So realistically, this would only really be considered if you somehow managed to annoy an FBI investigator enough. And even then, it’s quite petty to charge DMCA circumvention alone.

If your content was purely acquired through download-only means – as in, not BitTorrent – then I can’t think of what criminal charge could be raised. But IANAL.

As far as the US is concerned (because a lot of this stuff does depend on jurisdiction), you’re most likely going to be raided by a state-level police department (local PD, county sheriff, etc). They don’t give a hoot about pirated material because that’s a federal crime.

If you were raided by the FBI, ATF, DEA, etc., they could use any pirated content they found to bring up criminal charges against you.

There are four essential elements to a charge of criminal copyright infringement. In order to sustain a conviction under section 506(a), the government must demonstrate: (1) that a valid copyright; (2) was infringed by the defendant; (3) willfully; and (4) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.
source

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is if they find illegal stuff during discovery for an unrelated charge, you can be charged for that as well. One caveat would be if the original search was illegal, so say you see some police in public and you start recording them, then they come and take your phone away as evidence for the crime of recording police, which everyone knows is not actually illegal. They did not have the right to take your phone to begin with so anything they find on your phone then should be not admissible as evidence against you. Again, not a lawyer.