Everybody talks about torrenting, but recently when searched for some software I stumbled on regular sites with extensive collection of cracked programs. There's many of them, but what I looked at closely was filecr . com and what I've seen puzzled me. They have many, many releases. Old, recent what you need. All neatly organized, just like regular legit software store. I've tried one of files and it was clean and worked flawlessly.
How they operate so openly? What's the catch?
Look for monetization. Bandwidth costs money which makes torrents great since ideally everyone shares the burden.
Ads alone probably won't cover the burden, so they either have a subscription or have another agenda. Some might be legit for a while to sell out to the highest bidder at some point.
That said, there're some examples of someone just loving to distribute e.g. Wii or older games. They usually have really slow download speed though.