How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?
You can probably debate endlessly piracy, ethics, "backups of media that have been purchased but have rotted away due to disc rot", etc. But fundamentally torrents are just a mechanism for delivery of large files or large sets of files, and they work extremely well for things in the tens-of-gigabytes range.
Yet the overwhelming use by far is just to pirate vids.
I don't think it's anything to be sad about; people use it because it works. It would be much sadder if it weren't used at all.
That's pretty much all I use it for. Great for grabbing the latest shiny Linux iso image.
Wish more stuff used it.
it's durable (as long as the process is still running it will keep sending on reconnection) and more private