By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Mike Godwin, the legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital-rights advocacy group in Washington, is a fan of Showtime's new drama series "Huff." So three weeks ago, when he missed the season finale, he decided to download it to his personal computer.
It took about seven hours to download all 500 megabytes of the hour-long episode over his high-speed Internet connection, using the latest file-sharing software designed to handle large digital files.
Still, he did get it. And he did watch it.
"It's a great show," he said.
To Mr. Godwin, the time-consuming download (and the file's poor quality) indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs -- a threat Hollywood has long warned against -- was hardly imminent. But to the Federal Communications Commission and the Motion Picture Association of America, cases like this one suggest a future of widespread illegal file-sharing that must be stopped before it begins.
The debate will be presented in oral arguments tomorrow before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the F.C.C., challenging a new regulation that is intended to prevent such bleeding of television content onto the Internet.