TVSquad

If you take Jesse Alexander, the Executive Producer of the popular series Heroes and Lost, and add the word 'pirates', what do you think you would get? Well, it could be a show featuring pirates that have superhuman abilities who crash into an island that really isn't an island at all. If you were thinking that, then you would be way off base. If you're thinking more in the realm of information-sharing pirates you would be taking a step in the right direction.

It seems that Jesse Alexander is teaming up with Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma for a show about modern-day piracy and how important it is for today's society. For those not familiar with the book, Mason makes an argument that the open source culture that we now have with information sharing is changing the shape of economies and breaking down walls that allow easier access to software, music, television shows, and other forms of media and technology. According to a post on TorrentFreak, the show will aim to educate people on how piracy has been an innovator in our society and how it will shape our future. A teaser of the show can be found on TorrentFreak as well as Mason's own blog.

We all know that how people watch TV has been changing dramatically in the last few years, but now comes this news from TorrentFreak.com: 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given point in time are downloading a TV series. More than anything else, it's TV content they want.

What this means is that TV fans aren't just watching TV shows live or using DVRs and TiVos alone. They're just as apt to download a show to view on a laptop, desktop or iPod. According to the article, "over a billion TV shows are downloaded every year and this number continues to rise."

And here I thought it was According to Jim. Who knew? Maybe this year.

Until then, NBC's Heroes is the number one most pirated TV show of 2007, according to a list compiled on TorrentFreak. Nearly 2.5 million illegal downloads were made of the super-hero program, with the BBC program Top Gear coming in second at about 1.2 million. Others on the list are Battlestar Galactica (706,000), 24 (524,000) and Scrubs (tenth on the list at 427,000 downloads).

Here's my question concerning all of this...why is this still illegal?