Why do people assume these sites are honeypots? Would there be a point to the FBI operating a torrent site? I thought copyright violations were handled at the ISP level.
It's also a lot simpler and effective for anti-piracy agencies and LEOs to make honeypot torrent files or even just peer on existing torrents. You can monitor all the IPs in flagrante delicto that way... running a torrent site doesn't catch anyone red-handed per-se (particulalry with magnate links) and is a lot of overhead.
> Would there be a point to the FBI operating a torrent site?
Possibly for the same reason they end up operating other sites such as illegal pornography sites.
But why do they do that? Because these sites have users who sign in and upload things. In this case, they could have access to the releasers account details. usernames, emails, passwords. It's generally the releasers that are the same people or groups that do the ripping, who may have relationships with studios, networks, cinemas etc. Nothing major but it's a bit better than not having them.
Also, if a third party controls a server, they can, as Snowden has repeatedly shown, target specific users with malicious payloads. Even if they are using HTTPS.
I really doubt the scene members are releasing anything on public sites like KAT. The users uploading torrent files to KAT are probably just users of private sites where the original releases happen.