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I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst things someone can do. It’s also why I was at least a little bit glad when the megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn’t legitimize anything.

Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don’t seem to feel a need to attend it. As Valve’s founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles available? Is there any service out there that let‘s you watch without having your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for getting the latest "fappening" leaks?

Hence piracy.

Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control over the contents can be retained?

The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you want HQ videos, don’t mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something right now, don’t have much bandwith or storage and don’t care much for quality, a steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in similar behavior as streaming services.