I'm more afraid that the use of a VPN will actually become less secure than without using it. ISPs are governed by different laws ensuring your privacy (to some extent). VPNs aren't subjected to those laws and can thus, legally, sell you out long before your ISP ever could. Sure, the potential outrage for such behavior is probably enough to convince most VPN services to never do it (although a secret agreement with MPAA or similar is probably tempting for many) - but you get no extra protection against the law.

Since the moment someone has a warrant against you both the VPN and your ISP are obligated to cooperate you really have nothing to gain, in theory, from using a VPN in order to pirate.

There is one exception and that is if your VPN resides in a different country, then filing a warrant is probably trickier but with time this hole will probably be a lot smaller (at least within countries of EU etc.). And having a VPN in another country is of course not the best thing you can do performance wise.

That or the absurd idea that VPNs is to be criminalized. I wish it was a joke but politicians are seriously considering it.

I think a lot of it depends on which ISP you have, how much you trust your ISP, and how much you trust your VPN. Many VPNs claim to keep no data at all, which means that government intervention cannot reveal your Internet activities, because there are no records. If you live in an area where your ISP is required to maintain certain histories, and you have a trusted VPN in a more relaxed country, it's easy to see how a VPN might be preferred.

This works until your VPN provider gets an order "please start logging for user PaperclipTaken and turn over all logs for the coming 30 days to $BADGUYS".

There have already been attempts to restrict their use, written into proposed U.S. legislation, as just one example.

And I can't disagree with your comment, "won't require any new laws to be passed", either.

Again in the U.S., Federal authorities have already and are increasingly demonstrating willingness to act in extra-judicial fashion. It's not too much of a leap from ISP reporting to demands that ISP's detect and shut down such pipes (think of the "terrists", the children, the poor starving record labels and producers, etc., etc.).

What the ISP's really want, is release from any and all liability. That is one aspect of the recent CISPA negotiations. As long as they can't be sued nor otherwise hauled into court, they may view "shutting down the pipes" as one more avenue for shoving users onto their own, in-house services.

If you are using an SSL-VPN is there any way, apart from the destination address, of someone detecting that the SSL traffic is a VPN and not a secure website?

Essentially, yes. There are usage patterns and timing attacks. It would take someone with a hell of a view of the network though.

I guess the obvious heavy-handed approach that would be taken would be to simply ban the use of anonymizing VPN services.

If it ever gets to that point, there are still workarounds:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

This is one of the dangers of course. When I read it I thought "Ok now they can show they know what they were doing was wrong, because they tried to hide it." In the US that could work towards proving intent.

And when you are out looking for bad actors of a modestly sophisticated nature you might start with the VPN traffic.

A much nicer solution would be create all VPNs everywhere to protect us from Google Street view type drive by snooping (you know common good and all) which keeps you from being lumped into the 'usual suspects' pot. This is a Good Thing (universal VPNs) because even though Google has stopped their practice, there are still cars/vans out collecting this information for resale.

I don't think courts would take kindly to that kind of blatant attack on free speech and privacy rights that are well-established in law in most countries.

In many countries, I agree. But there are some places, like the UK, where I could easily see this kind of thing happening. Free speech and privacy don't seem to be very fundamental in some systems of government.