That is a gross over-simplification, and it saddens me that no one has called you out on this. Torrent indexes like Mininova, while mostly used to share illegal content, and not overly functionally different from a centralized data provider, is vastly different conceptually. Sites like Rapidshare are doomed in terms of pragmatic design as opposed to torrent indexes, because (as you reference in your post) centralized download sites must use their own bandwidth and file space to provide their service - whereas torrent indexes use the bandwidth and space of the people sharing the content in addition to the people downloading the content. Also, both sites have legitimate non-warez based uses (although, different legitimate uses, because they work differently and most importantly have different user bases).
In short, you are comparing apples and oranges. They are both fruit (file sharing mechanisms), but completely different.
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