Truthfully, online piracy is a direct result of the insanity of pricing out there. You can go to a Red Box and rent a movie for a buck and a quarter. If you digitally rent it, odds are you're going to end up paying at least three times that amount. Consider it - one requires a physical copy to be made, distributed, stocked in a machine, and then handle all the credit card transaction fees. The other simply requires clicking on a link and credit card transaction fees.
The digital copy gives no better production quality, offers far less features than the physical discs, yet costs more. It is encouraging piracy, just like they did when they distributed peer sharing software and told us which was best to steal music and movies with by comparing copyrighted content over multiple pieces of software. Forbid price fixing by media companies (the so called ‘licensing’), or commission sales (another form of price fixing.) If a physical DVD can be rented on a nightly basis for under a buck fifty, then no digital movie should ever cost more than a buck fifty, even less if provided by a cable provider for on-demand watching.
There's another factor too. I bought a collection of Clint Eastwood movies and found that several of the DVDs got stuck - rendering them unwatchable - on the first play. That's not the only story I have. I still have VHSs that have been played as much as vinyls and still work.
I've never used Torrent, and actually have went out of my way to pay for digital content - e.g., by deleting a music file I sent to someone else and paying up again to get a new copy. But I can see why someone would be ticked off enough to pirate DVDs. Had DVDs lasted as long as video tapes, I think piracy would have been contained. Getting a DVD that siezes up after three, two or even one play(s) says the seller don't really care about the customer. As a result, enough customers get irked into not caring about the sellers.