Trading TV shows online is, of course, illegal. Television shows are copyrighted, and unless the copyright owner has granted permission, it's as illegal to download a TV show as it is to download a song or a proprietary operating system or a video game. Violations of this law carry heavy penalties -- we've all heard about the kids who lost their life savings for swapping songs using services like Kazaa and Morpheus.

But what about the ethics of trading online? Regardless of the legality, is there anything unethical about downloading a television show from the Internet? Is it wrong?

This is a harder case to make. When you download a song that you could otherwise have found only on a CD in a store, it's reasonable to say that you've gotten something for nothing -- what most people would call stealing. But broadcast television is free, and many of us already pay for a basic set of television shows through some kind of cable or satellite package.

We're also already used to recording and trading TV; who hasn't taped an episode of "Friends" for a friend, or borrowed a copy of "American Idol" from a co-worker? If you download an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rather than ask your brother to record it, are you really doing anything that bad?

"It's hard to identify what the harm is," says Mike Godwin, an attorney at Public Knowledge, a digital-rights group that opposed the broadcast flag rule. "Let's say you're a fan of the FX show 'Nip/Tuck,' and you wanted to see it on Tuesday night, but you were out and you didn't set your TiVo. So you say, 'Let me hunt it down online.' People do that all the time. People who are fans of the show probably already have FX -- they're paying for it. Now, you could say that the harm is in that the distributed version is usually made available without the commercials -- but if you have a TiVo, you aren't watching the commercials anyway."

Godwin concedes that downloading premium-channel shows such as "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under" might be a bit harder to justify for people who aren't subscribers to those services. But even this is something of a stretch, since nobody considers it wrong to ask an HBO-blessed colleague to feed you your weekly diet of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," or to invite over a half dozen friends for a "Sopranos" party. (HBO, though, came down on bars and restaurants that publicly screened its shows.)

The mass distribution of premium shows might worry Hollywood, but the main fear of media companies is bigger than that. Media firms make money from TV by keeping it scarce. Even considering the hundreds of channels now on TV, there are only a finite number of slots available, and there are hundreds of thousands of episodes of new and old television programs that might fill those slots. TV companies choose which shows to play when, and, because you've got no other choice but to watch what's on, you watch -- even if you might not particularly enjoy what's on. But would you continue to watch what the TV companies chose if you could find something you actually wanted to watch? Hollywood fears that you would not.

As the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's main industry group, said in a statement responding to the FCC's approval of TivoToGo, "Technologies that enable redistribution of copyrighted TV programming beyond the local TV market disrupt local advertiser-supported broadcasting and harm TV syndication markets -- essential elements supporting the U.S. local broadcasting system." As Hollywood sees it, in other words, TV depends on your powerlessness over it.

It's this powerlessness that rankles Mark Sailes, a 20-year-old computer science undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the U.K., who is working on a number of systems to make TV trading easier. Like students all over the world, Sailes has two abiding interests -- tinkering with computers and watching television. His taste in TV, too, is rather typical. For the most part, he says he likes popular American shows. The trouble is, new American programs aren't immediately broadcast in the United Kingdom; it can take years for the latest episodes to skip across the pond, which clearly is too excruciating a wait for dedicated fans who need to know what happens in the end with Ross and Rachel.

So what's an enterprising European "Stargate" fan to do? In a world made small by a ubiquitous computer network, the answer is obvious -- download the latest American shows. But BitTorrent, the best tool to download extremely large files, works differently from something like Kazaa, in that it has no built-in search capability. Pointers to BitTorrent files are posted on the Web or traded on discussion groups or in chat rooms, and you've got to know where to look to find them. For a long while, finding good-quality shows online was difficult, Sailes says -- and once you found a file of a TV show, how would know whether it was any good, worth spending hours to download?

So in order to bring a kind of professionalism to TV trading, Sailes and his friends set up a worldwide network of distributors. Members of the group are responsible for recording shows, encoding them into portable formats, uploading them using BitTorrent, and then posting the shows' details on the IRC channel #BT, where Sailes and his crew hang out, and on Sailes' own Web site. (Sailes asked Salon not post his site's URL, not so much because he fears prosecution, he said, but because he didn't really want to deal with the extra unnecessary publicity; it's possible to find the #BT crew's torrents, though, on SuprNova, the biggest and most popular torrent site.)

But a few months ago, Sailes says, he and his friends began noticing another bottleneck in TV trading. "It became apparent that hundreds of people were coming into our IRC channel just to ask when new shows would be available, just spending a whole lot of time doing nothing but waiting for the new show," Sailes says. This is due to another idiosyncrasy of BitTorrent. The system works best when lots of people are downloading the same file at the same time, and getting a TV show requires a knack for timing -- you've got to find a show while it's new, within the first few days of its being posted online, before everyone who wants it has downloaded it and the file has faded away. Instead of having the people come to IRC to ask about new shows, Sailes wondered, wouldn't it be great if the #BT crew could somehow notify all the interested traders when a new show was ready?

The situation faced by TV show downloaders is not very different from the problem faced by consumers of most content on the Web -- how do you know when your favorite Web site has changed, and how do you know when to check back in to a blog that's only occasionally updated? In the blogosphere, the answer for most people is RSS. So why couldn't that work for TV shows? Sailes wondered. People's computers could automatically check the RSS feed for updates, and when a desired show was found in the feed, the machine would automatically download the program, without the user's input. "We saw that we could quite easily get this done," Sailes said.

Sailes didn't exactly come up with this idea on his own. Net visionaries have long been pondering the marriage of BitTorrent and RSS, and many people have built systems to bring about this union.

But Sailes didn't think that anyone had gotten it just right, and this spring he and a roommate set out to build a stand-alone RSS reader meant specifically for TV trading. What they came up with is Buttress, an open-source Java application that, while still very much a work in progress, looks extremely promising. Using the system is easy: You give the program a few RSS feeds to monitor (here are some to get you started), and you give it some keywords of shows you'd like to download -- "sopranos," "buffy," that kind of thing. The program periodically scans the feeds, and if it sees your keyword, it launches your BitTorrent app and downloads the show. Because this happens in the background, while you're sleeping or at work or out of town, it's painless -- you don't need to look around for the show, or to wait while it downloads, or to worry about whether you recorded it, etc. All you've got to do is trust that someone, somewhere, has put the show online -- and when you check back on your machine, you'll see that you've got it and it's ready to watch.

Buttress is not the only such application. There is a plug-in for the popular BitTorrent client Azureus that's also useful, and there's an app for Linux systems. All of these are open-source programs, and developers are working mightily on improvements. Sailes says that by the fall TV season, there will be a very stable version of Buttress available, one that "shouldn't be a problem for anyone to use."

Although there are no firm numbers, TV trading still appears to be relatively uncommon. Sailes estimates that there were more than 50,000 downloads of the last episode of "Friends," but compared to the millions of people who watched it on TV, that's not much. It's clear that trading is not hurting Hollywood. "The last time I checked, the sales of DVDs of television shows were huge -- way larger than anyone had ever expected," says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It doesn't seem to me that the Internet trading is harming the market in any substantial way."

And the best way for Hollywood to curb trading, von Lohmann says, would be to quickly offer high-definition digital television. Because of their quality, high-def shows would be much more difficult to trade, and the better quality would give people a reason to tune in to their televisions. But Hollywood's not doing this; instead of quickly moving to HD, the industry has been pushing for a regulatory lockdown of HD technology, a complicated scheme that will do nothing to stem the trading of shows online.

And it's conceivable that the trading of standard-definition shows online may even slow the adoption of digital TV. After all, who will want a digital TV device locked down by copy protection when people can stick with standard TV and experience the sheer joy of doing what they want. With online TV trading, you'll never miss a show ever again, and you can find shows from all over the world, and you can even catch some old-school programs. As the blogger Jason Kottke has termed it, you can now "roll your own reruns."

"Of course, they just want to restrict choice," Sailes says of the media companies who would lock down TV. "It's up to us to get the best out of what they give us."

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