You can get Copy Freely

You can get Copy Freely channels, just not protected content.  This may or may not be useful depending on your cable provider and market.

You can setup network bridging in Linux using bridge-start but it isn’t officially supported and I can’t comment on the reliability as I haven’t done it myself.

In terms of Windows VM usage and bridging my biggest recommendation is use Intel network cards, just not the Intel PRO/1000 GT (a horrible, unsupported network card).

There are a couple issues with Network Bridging, most have to do with network card drivers not implementing all the interfaces needed for proper bridging.