In many countries there's the threat of your ISP sending you a notice of you are caught torrenting without a VPN. It almost never happens (unless you happen to

In many countries there's the threat of your ISP sending you a notice of you are caught torrenting without a VPN. It almost never happens (unless you happen to live in Germany) and even when it does happen the chances of them following up are close to 0. For pirates torrents are often the only way to obtain copies of old games/movies that aren't frequently used. Traditional hosts like mega/drive usually take them down a couple of months/years after it was uploaded, and smaller hosts inevitably die (see zippyshare, megaupload, rapidshare). The creator of pixeldrain (a file hosting service extremely popular with pirates) said in a HN comment that their ad revenue was drying up and they had to rely on donations.