Fol­low­ing on from Wired’s rev­e­la­tion that less than 24 hours after the sea­son pre­mière of Prison Break its tor­rent was down­loaded almost one mil­lion times, Life­hacker asks its read­ers, is file shar­ing just more convenient?

Prison Break fans didn’t have to down­load the show ille­gally. The show is read­ily avail­able to stream legit­i­mately on both Hulu and Fox.com, where view­ers have to sit through a few com­mer­cial breaks, but they can still watch the entire episode legally.

The fact that one mil­lion peo­ple down­loaded the show within 24 hours — a lit­tle less than one-sixth of the 6.5 mil­lion peo­ple who watched Prison Break on TV on Mon­day night — proves, though, that P2P isn’t going away just because there are legal alter­na­tives now.

Why is this? Wired writer Betsy Schiff­man argues it’s because file-sharing is habit­ual and convenient.

The obvi­ous com­ments ensue: own­er­ship, on-demand access, unadul­ter­ated shows (no adver­tis­ing), the list goes on… but peo­ple seem to miss another seri­ous point.

Hulu, Fox, and count­less other sites that allow users to legit­i­mately watch shows online are only avail­able to those within the United States. Of those one mil­lion peo­ple who down­loaded the show in its first 24 hours, I’m will­ing to bet a very large pro­por­tion were from out­side the US. And yes, I know there are count­less ways to bypass these restric­tions, but why should I have to take extra mea­sures to do so? After all, Mini­nova and Pirate Bay are avail­able to any­one, anywhere.