For heaven's sake, raymond904, ignorance does not excuse liability. Every movie and television show in the United States, and in other countries too, includes something similar to this at the end of the credits:

"This motion picture is protected under the laws of the United States and other countries, and its unauthorised duplication, distribution, or other exhibition may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution."

The broadcast of any such material over free-to-air television services doesn't remove copyright law; nothing is placed into the public domain simply through broadcast.

Also, the creator's copyright protection is most certainly not removed with the absence of any such statement. Copyright infringement is illegal, there's no way around it, and every ISPs terms and conditions will enjoin you from using their service to perform any such infringement. Read the terms of your 4 megabit service and you'll see for yourself.

A criminal court will not permit ignorance of basic copyright law as an excuse.

Also, copyright infringement notices are routinely sent to infringers, as previously discussed. The problem is very much not ignored; your lack of visibility of such is again not an excuse to perform copyright infringement.

Face it, you're doing something illegal. It's certainly up to you to do it or not, and I'm not attempting to be hypocritical enough to tell you to stop. But you need to face up to the fact your "it's not illegal" stance is just plain wrong, and no amount of posturing or excusing will make a difference to that fact.

To continue the car analogy, there are no signs in the street that say I can't take someone else's car for a drive down the street without their permission, but we all know not to do it. What part of the highway code or driving lessons / tests teaches you that? No part does: it's common sense and knowledge of basic modern law that does, and the same goes with respect for copyright.

As for your "thousands of sites" comment, didn't you notice that the largest hub sites such as suprnova and btefnet have been shut down by legal action or threats thereof?

Yes Neuro, I knew that uploading TV shows was illegal, in the same way that copying your best mates CD is illegal but nearly everyone has done or does do it. As you know I was 100% sure (and wrong) that downloading TV shows was also illegal.

However I am moderately experienced and take an active interest in the internet, downloading and TV.

I'm thinking of others who haven't a clue that downlaoding TV shows is illegal and now that the BBC are offering the service for free (trial at the moment) people are going to be even more confident that they aren't doing anything wrong and new users to the internet won't even think twice about downloading whatever they like from torrent sites.

Now I think thats enough of that discussion.

I'd like to open another topic which is that when TV channels are as bad as they are at the moment with on screen junk, wrong aspect ratios, terrible bit-rates (on Freeview), ever increasing minutes of adverts and most of all, cancelling or messing about with the times of under-performing tv shows - just what are they doing to prevent the increase of P2P file sharing of TV shows?

If you're really enjoying a series which is then cancelled by a UK channel and is easily available on the internet, what would u do?