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Thursday 20 November 2008

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Watching Lost and Heroes has compelled me to confront great philosophical issues

Hugo Rifkind on his internet TV habit

Now, much as I admire Nick Hornby, I wasn’t prepared to invest in 12 hours of telly, just because he liked it. So I downloaded episode one off the internet. The quality was pretty poor, but the programme was great. So I looked around for episode two as well, and when that was only in rubbish quality, too, I got the box set from Amazon. It was only about £20.

Good story, eh? Let me tell you another. Last summer, I was watching Lost. I had cable, and it was on Sky One and, towards the end of season two, Sky and Virgin fell out. Suddenly, I didn’t have Sky One any more, and Lost came to a jarring, unsatisfying end. (Yes, I know it always does. That’s irrelevant.) And there was the internet, beckoning in the corner.

There’s a point to all this. I’m not just going to spend this whole column telling you about me watching television. (Who do you think I am? James Delingpole?) I’m worried about the ethics of all this. With The Wire, it was the download that made me buy the box set (and then another, and then another) and then rave on about it, afterwards. With Lost, hadn’t I already paid for it, with my subscription? Hadn’t Virgin already paid Sky, who had already paid ABC? And if they hadn’t, why was this my problem?

Morally, downloading somebody else’s TV is pretty complicated. Download music or movies, and you are avoiding buying CDs, DVDs or cinema tickets. But TV feels free at the point of use, even if it technically isn’t. My friend with Sky could have taped Lost, and lent me the video. It’s illegal, but it doesn’t feel wrong. That’s a problem. No?

So I’ve been phoning around, for ethical advice. My first call, in which I was perhaps a little cagey, was to Eddy Leviten, head of communications at Fact, the Federation Against Copyright Theft. ‘Anybody who works on something has a right to be paid,’ he told me. ‘It’s not up to somebody else to decide. If you disagree, you are in favour of theft.’

Not much elbow-room there. Only weirdly, downloading isn’t the illegal bit. The offence occurs when you make it available to others. Unfortunately (and I’m not going to go into deep geek detail here) most TV downloads use something called BitTorrent, in which your computer links with many others, and you all share tiny bits of files, in a manner known as ‘peer-to-peer’. And, as a peer, you are giving away something which you have no right to give. Which actually, now I think of it, is what some people used to say about Lord Levy before he was cleared.

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