@MissAnthrope : For now you can skip over commercials, there’s been attempts to make that impossible at the hardware level of the DVR and they’ll succeed at some point. It’s always been illegal to record stuff on your TV unless you can claim fair use, it’s just gotten so prevalent to the point now where people have actually forgotten that.
Whether you pay for cable is irrelevant. The small text likely says you are paying for a license to view the content, but are not permitted to reproduce it. You pay to see live shows and movies in the theater and neither of those give you the right to record them.
The difference is they want you to see the ads, they want to be able to track the numbers of who views these ads, because the larger the viewership, the more the station gets paid When people pirate off BT they lose money because not only are the ads not there, the viewership isn’t trackable.
Plus, the method they decide in which what shows get to stay or go is based on the advertising revenue, not the quality of the show. If people don’t watch the show and those commercials, then the series will get axed. That’s how shows like American Idol continue to exist and shows like Firefly were axed even though the show itself was very entertaining.