I completely agree with what you said. I was saying that Loren's method of downloading all of his TV content is not a valid alternative to Tom's experiment. Tom was attempting to see if it was feasible and economical to legally circumvent the cable and satellite providers. Besides the legal issues, of course it's possible to do this by pirating everything. But that's not the point of the experiment.

As for ethics, I agree with you, believe me. I'm pretty sure I had a post a long while ago in which I outlined all the reasons why I thought it was perfectly ethical to illegally obtain content that is otherwise unavailable to me. If there's a music video or TV show that is not being aired on TV and is not available for rent or purchase, I consider that a failure on the part of the content owner. But I won't argue that it's legal.

And no, I really don't think that you're going to get caught for what you're describing. Three out of the four times I got caught, it was downloading individual episodes, but it was for very recently aired programs. They caught me pretty quickly for that stuff. I had downloaded hundreds of gigs of older content that they never seemed to blink an eye at.