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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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

Hugo Rifkind on his internet TV habit

At the risk of getting technically woolly (proper geeks out there, don’t write in) there are websites which facilitate all of this, by putting one peer (you) in touch with all the others (everybody else). The next person I call runs one of them. He’s a Swede called Peter Sunde, who works on a website called The Pirate Bay. Their ideology is that, if authorities seek to control file-sharing, then these authorities are seeking to control private communication, and that’s not on. As ethical standpoints go, this is obviously a fairly convenient one for them to hold. Still, I guess that’s what Sweden is all about.

I’m not sure, though, how much it helps me. Just because it is wrong for somebody to stop you doing something, that doesn’t mean that you are right to do it. What about copyright? ‘Copyright has nothing to do with creation,’ says Sunde. ‘It is all about control.’

If TV companies were to chill out a bit, he insists, they could actually do quite nicely out of file-sharing. Take the new season of Heroes, currently only being broadcast in the US. People download it from Korea, India, Germany and Brazil. That’s a global market, offering itself up. Yet, instead, the makers decree that this stuff should be immediately available in the US and nowhere else. In other words, sharing television is not ethically bad, but ethically good.

Convinced? A spokesman from a smaller British torrent site, which doesn’t want to be named, makes the point slightly better. Forget the ideology, they just want UK TV to be available to UK expats who miss it, and UK residents, who have missed it. Why not? If there were a legal route, they say, they’d pack up shop.

We’re getting there. Finally, I speak to Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of future media and technology. He’s the man behind the much-trumpeted iPlayer (which is essentially a legal way of doing all this, only without worldwide reach) and is also involved with the recently announced Kangaroo (which is something similar). ‘Non-availability is what we don’t want,’ he says. ‘That’s when the pirates step in.’

Ultimately, he says, the solution lies in intelligent video content, which knows in which country it is being watched. Email Heroes IX to Korea, and the advertisements will be in Korean. Then the distribution won’t need to be controlled, and pirates (myself among them) will have no reason to bother.

And for now? Who knows? Like everybody else, I guess I’m part of a wider internet trend, where legality has limited reach, and the providers of content have to use their presentational wiles to make sure readers experience it in the right way, with the right advertisements. With some mediums, this already works. Possibly, you’re reading one.

Crikey, what a paragraph that was. It really did turn into geek stuff, didn’t it? Sorry. Sneaky bastard out.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

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