It doesn’t seem like the pirates who were described in the article were behind any kind of proxy, which is why the ISP Frontier repeatedly wrote them to desist. They were pirating on the clearnet without any obfuscation. Pretty dumb and easily the lowest hanging fruit for copyright enforcement.

Using Tor for streaming or large downloads probably won’t result in great quality or quick speeds. Using Tor for browsing and seeding on private torrent trackers is also typically banned for security reasons.