Watching Lost and Heroes has compelled me to confront great philosophical issues

It's best to be upfront about this. Pretty soon, I'm going to use words like 'downloading' and 'uploading'. I'm going to use the word 'peer' and I'm not going to mean people like Lord Levy. I mention this, just so you know. Just so you don't get halfway through and think, `the sneaky bastard. This is geek stuff. I thought it was going to be something interesting.'

It is something interesting, I think. And it isn't really geek stuff. It's about Lost and Heroes and The Wire, and all those sexy American dramas that have suddenly made owning a television worthwhile again. Have you seen The Wire? It's a gritty cops 'n' drug dealers thing, and Nick Hornby once wrote that it was the best thing on television. He was almost wrong, but only in the sense that it only barely is on television. If you want to catch it in the UK, you have to be pretty nifty with your recorder, or buy the DVD box set.

Now, much as I admire Nick Hornby, I wasn't prepared to invest in 12 hours of telly, just because he liked it. So I downloaded episode one off the internet. The quality was pretty poor, but the programme was great. So I looked around for episode two as well, and when that was only in rubbish quality, too, I got the box set from Amazon. It was only about £20.

Good story, eh? Let me tell you another. Last summer, I was watching Lost. I had cable, and it was on Sky One and, towards the end of season two, Sky and Virgin fell out. Suddenly, I didn't have Sky One any more, and Lost came to a jarring, unsatisfying end. (Yes, I know it always does. That's irrelevant.) And there was the internet, beckoning in the corner.

There's a point to all this. I'm not just going to spend this whole column telling you about me watching television. (Who do you think I am? James Delingpole?) I'm worried about the ethics of all this. With The Wire, it was the download that made me buy the box set (and then another, and then another) and then rave on about it, afterwards. With Lost, hadn't I already paid for it, with my subscription? Hadn't Virgin already paid Sky, who had already paid ABC? And if they hadn't, why was this my problem?

Morally, downloading somebody else's TV is pretty complicated. Download music or movies, and you are avoiding buying CDs, DVDs or cinema tickets. But TV feels free at the point of use, even if it technically isn't. My friend with Sky could have taped Lost, and lent me the video. It's illegal, but it doesn't feel wrong. That's a problem. No?

So I've been phoning around, for ethical advice. My first call, in which I was perhaps a little cagey, was to Eddy Leviten, head of communications at Fact, the Federation Against Copyright Theft. 'Anybody who works on something has a right to be paid,' he told me. 'It's not up to somebody else to decide. If you disagree, you are in favour of theft.'

Not much elbow-room there. Only weirdly, downloading isn't the illegal bit. The offence occurs when you make it available to others. Unfortunately (and I'm not going to go into deep geek detail here) most TV downloads use something called BitTorrent, in which your computer links with many others, and you all share tiny bits of files, in a manner known as 'peer-to-peer'. And, as a peer, you are giving away something which you have no right to give. Which actually, now I think of it, is what some people used to say about Lord Levy before he was cleared.

At the risk of getting technically woolly (proper geeks out there, don't write in) there are websites which facilitate all of this, by putting one peer (you) in touch with all the others (everybody else). The next person I call runs one of them. He's a Swede called Peter Sunde, who works on a website called The Pirate Bay. Their ideology is that, if authorities seek to control file-sharing, then these authorities are seeking to control private communication, and that's not on. As ethical standpoints go, this is obviously a fairly convenient one for them to hold. Still, I guess that's what Sweden is all about.

I'm not sure, though, how much it helps me. Just because it is wrong for somebody to stop you doing something, that doesn't mean that you are right to do it. What about copyright? 'Copyright has nothing to do with creation,' says Sunde. 'It is all about control.'

If TV companies were to chill out a bit, he insists, they could actually do quite nicely out of file-sharing. Take the new season of Heroes, currently only being broadcast in the US. People download it from Korea, India, Germany and Brazil. That's a global market, offering itself up. Yet, instead, the makers decree that this stuff should be immediately available in the US and nowhere else. In other words, sharing television is not ethically bad, but ethically good.

Convinced? A spokesman from a smaller British torrent site, which doesn't want to be named, makes the point slightly better. Forget the ideology, they just want UK TV to be available to UK expats who miss it, and UK residents, who have missed it. Why not? If there were a legal route, they say, they'd pack up shop.

We're getting there. Finally, I speak to Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology. He's the man behind the much-trumpeted iPlayer (which is essentially a legal way of doing all this, only without worldwide reach) and is also involved with the recently announced Kangaroo (which is something similar). Non-availability is what we don't want,' he says. 'That's when the pirates step in.'

Ultimately, he says, the solution lies in intelligent video content, which knows in which country it is being watched. Email Heroes IX to Korea, and the advertisements will be in Korean. Then the distribution won't need to be controlled, and pirates (myself among them) will have no reason to bother.

And for now? Who knows? Like everybody else, I guess I'm part of a wider internet trend, where legality has limited reach, and the providers of content have to use their presentational wiles to make sure readers experience it in the right way, with the right advertisements. With some mediums, this already works. Possibly, you're reading one.

Crikey, what a paragraph that was. It really did turn into geek stuff, didn't it? Sorry. Sneaky bastard out.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.