My thinking is, if they wanted people to stop downloading things illegally, they should stop making the legal way such a pain in the ass.
A little while back, we missed a programme that the OH wanted to watch (due to the crappy Sky box crashing). I spent the best part of three hours cocking about with iPlayer, trying to download it in a format where I could stream it to the TV (I've got a PC connected to the TV using my Xbox as a media header). In the end I gave up, hit the torrent sites and was watching it perfectly in about ten minutes.
Or, watching a series on iPlayer, got to the last episode to find it was 31 days after broadcast and we couldn't watch it. C'mon, WTF?