Your TV has a QAM tuner in it and your cable company doesn't scramble the digital channels. The QAM tuner can pick up the unscrambled digital channels your cable company feeds. It probably also has a Cable Card slot to allow reception of the scrambled channels without a cable box. As far as the legality goes, if they aren't scrambling them then you are fine..but odds are good at some point they'll wise up and scramble them, especially if they are already offering a digital channels package.