The only way I can think that sharing TV programs would not annoy the powers that be would possibly be if you were forced to watch, or at least let play a set of commericials.
It'd never happen. Commercials are targetted regionally. You don't want to send a Safeway commercial to viewers in Chicago, any more than you'd want a Jewel commercial sent out to the west coast. Not to mention the small-retailer commercials on your local stations -- they don't have any need for national coverage, and would put their money elsewhere (radio, print ads, etc) if they were forced to because the stations decided that because shows were being shared nationally, they should charge the national-coverage fee.
Nothing we could do with FOSS software would make the networks happy -- the "free and open" part gets in the way of their being able to control what we'd do with it. Even if the official MythTV project implemented DRM, someone could just fork the project and produce a non-drm version -- and we'd all happily switch over to using it (just look at what happened when XFree86 changed their license -- most people are using X.org now)
Personally, if Torrentocracy really is ONLY about sharing free-and-legal shows, I wouldn't mind seeing it become accepted into the official mythtv plugins list. But right now, as I understand it, it's just too easy to be construed as a tool for piracy. One user picked up by an automated filename-matching bot and found to be using mythtv + officially-sanctioned-torrentocracy for sharing a copyrighted program and the mythtv devs are submersed into a legal battle that they didn't want or need. It's just not worth the risk/effort at the moment. But like I said, I'd love to see some safeguards installed, or something like that, to make it "safe" for people to use as an officially sanctioned plugin. I still don't see that happening anytime soon.
-Chris
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