This news, that Heroes is the most pirated television show, is very disappointing to me for many reasons. It violates my personal primary rule for downloading. I will only download content if I cannot legitimately find it online for a fair price. I am happy to pay for content and/or watch ads and I do so all the time via iTunes and Hulu.com. If you do not make your content available to me online I feel like I am forced to get it another way. I guess I held out hope that many people felt this way. But Heroes is available on Hulu as well as NBC.com. In fact, I would argue it’s a hell of a lot easier to watch shows this way than try to download them via BitTorrent.

Those of us that argue for a digital future need to understand and respect that some kind of business model must follow. Likely, it will not be the same model that exists today, but producing television costs money and many people need to be compensated. Either the audience needs to pay for the content outright or watch some kind of advertising. I don’t know nor care at this point what model wins out but what I do know is that if shows are pirated and people are not compensated, the digital future will not happen. When networks make shows available online as NBC, ABC and others have done we need to reward that behavior as much as possible. If we can work with the entertainment industry and stop spitting in their faces, together we can carve out a future where everyone wins.