darkwater parent
I know and - cough cough - I might be embracing that as well. But still paying someone that basically leeches on someone else (and I don't mean Hollywood/Netflix etc, I mean the ripper themselves) unethical.
A lot of the time the distributor (or legal IP owner) is like a billion times more immoral than the ripper (or IP violator), and they are the ones leeching. You can choose legality over morality, but then don't claim moral high ground.
You have probably misunderstood. There are 4 parties here:
A) the content creator, owner of the IP
B) the people that copy the content made by A and publish it (i.e. the "release groups"). They can distirbute the content over bittorrent, sharing sites etc
C) people that run platforms that share copies made by B, and they offer access to those copies (sometimes even just a hash to a torrent) with some kind of paid subscription. Their added value is making it easier to access content copied by B.
D) final users, they can choose to consume content from A, B or C.
My point was that D paying for C are... weird, in my opinion.
Edit: technically there is a 5th group, like C but that do it for free, running forums etc at most hosting some banner to pay the hosting cost and not much more.