Subliminal bugs.

Mindjack.com ("The Beat of Digital Culture") has a great article up on television "piracy" and the exponentially-growing success of Battlestar Galactica. Combining 'Filesharing 101' with a breakdown on viral marketing and dovetailing into some intelligent, insightful commentary on the nature of broadcast in the digital age, the essay is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic. Excerpt:

Audiences are technically savvy these days; they can and will find a way to get any television programming they desire. They don't want to pay for it, they don't want it artificially crippled with any digital rights management technologies - they just want to watch it. Now. This is the way that half a century of television and a decade of the Web has conditioned them to behave. We can't really complain that audiences are simply doing as they've been told. It is pointless to try to get them to change their behavior, because, in essence, you're fighting against the nature of television programming itself, the behavioral narrative which grew out of our relationship to the technology. We all understand that this piracy is technically illegal, technically a violation of copyright; but we're in a hell of a bind if we're telling the audience to "sit down, shut up and do as you're told" when it comes to television viewing. The audience won't do as they're told: they'll do as they've been taught, and that is another story entirely.

The article raises some interesting questions about the evolution of advertising and the complex web that intertwines content, form and the exchange of capital (both cultural and economic).