The BBC has weighed in on the Australian piracy debate, revealing along the way that at least 13,000 Australian IP addresses were used to download torrents of leaked Doctor Who episodes.
13,000 IP addresses is probably the low end of the scale in terms of counting audiences, considering each IP address could equal a copy watched by numerous people, and it wouldn’t cover anyone using a VPN to obscure their torrenting activity.
The BBC, it seems, is in favour of a scheme to monitor user downloads at the ISP end. It’s an interesting story covered by Josh Taylor over at ZDNet, and well worth your while reading, especially as Doctor Who sits at the interesting intersection between availability (those 4:30am Sunday starts are really starting to hit me) and the usual piracy excuses.
So go and read it now!
Source: ZDNet
But it *also* sits at the intersection of copyright theft and public property. It’s very hard to justify any kind of crackdown on content that is not just transmitted free-to-air in both the source country and the destination, but also paid for by (almost) all the residents of the UK and all the residents of Australia! And it’s not ad-supported either.
There’s some kind of “artistic imperative” argument to be made for not leaking the pre-complete episodes, but you still have to admit that everything the BBC Wales office does and makes is paid for by the tax dollars of the UK and Australia — so I’m comparing the situation to US government materials like NASA that are in the public domain.
The final reason for Australians to continue torrenting the show is because of poor decisions that ABC makes that are out of our control — i.e. plastering ABC brand marking all over the content and broadcasting it at 20% of the original high definition in image quality. The government allocated ABC and SBS each enough space to run their premium content in high definition but only the ABC has made strategic decisions to compromise all their high definition output. As for putting the ABC logo on everything, it’s not as if the ABC actually created the content — can you imagine if a Van Gogh painting was on loan to the NSW Art Gallery, and the gallery put their logo onto the actual painting? There’s plenty of ways to find out which gallery you’re inside or which TV station you’re watching, without having to stick a logo on it. Which leaves torrenting the only way to watch new episodes as the director intended (to return to the earlier theme of artistic imperative).