Who profits from uploading of copyright materials on torrent and filesharing sites?

Open-source software is different. So is the creative commons licensed information. Many universities are offering their course material free of charge on their websites as Open knowledge resources.
However, a lot of copyright books, magazines, movies, songs, games and software are freely available on torrent sites and file sharing sites. Naturally, people will rather download for free something rather than buying it! Naturally, the companies and individuals producing these utility products will suffer a great loss. Though these sites state that they will remove any copyright material if the owners register a complain, the sheer magnitude of such sites will cost the companies extra expenses to have special departments to track and handle such piracy.

How is such piracy on the internet affecting the global economy? If piracy causes the loss of the producers, whom does it profit? Obviously, the people who download stuff for free will be happy, but what do the people uploading this stuff get? And how do the sites who offer such facilities profit from this?