Here's my guess: Just like people make custom, amateur soft-subs these days for both pirate and legit DVDs, a file-format for reprogrammable program time-lines

Here's my guess: Just like people make custom, amateur soft-subs these days for both pirate and legit DVDs, a file-format for reprogrammable program time-lines would be invented pretty quickly basically editing out the ads runtime. I'm not going to say I could make it in five minutes, but it should be pretty trivial to implement a plugin for this kind of thing. Heck, base it on Avisynth and on the Win32-platform you already have 99% of the groundwork done for you. These custom time-lines would probably be indexed, by show, season and episode, with direct links to the legal torrent all at one place. And I doubt anyone would be able to argue that files denoting time-lines could in any way be illegal.