UK’s highly-regarded doyen of the digerati stuns audience at an Apple iTunes event by admitting that he downloads TV shows via BitTorrent!
Did you jump onto BitTorrent to fetch episodes of
24? What about the finale to the fifth season of
House? Well, you’re in good company – and you may have even been sharing your torrent of bits with Stephen Fry.
Fry stunned and delighted the audience at yesterday’s iTunes Festival in London when he admitted during a speech that he had used BitTorrent to download both of those shows, among others.
It’s one thing for any public figure to ‘fess up to pirating. It’s something else when that person is themselves a creator of content. And Fry creates a lot of content – he’s a writer, actor, director, producer and raconteur – a true renaissance man.
More significantly, however, Fry is an uber-geek. A self-proclaimed ‘digital addict’ who claims to have owned the second ever Mac sold in the UK, and famously described as being “deeply dippy for all things digital”, his musings on tech are both entertaining and well-informed. Fry is an active supporter of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, maintains a blog at
stephenfry.com and has some 650,000 followers on
Twitter.
So when Stephen Fry says that he, like you, pirates TV shows on BitTorrent, it’s bound to get attention. In his speech about copyright and the future of music, Fry lashed out at the music industry for attacking the public in file-sharing cases. “Making an example of ordinary people is the stupidest thing the record industry can do” he said.
Fry drew a distinction between “casual” downloaders and those who download illegal content on an “industrial scale”. Asked how he felt about his own media output being pirated, Fry admitted “I’m against cynical bootlegging but I work in a very molly coddled, overpaid business.”
While the fast-tracking of TV shows from the US and UK onto local TV networks has no doubt help stymie BitTorrent downloads – witness last weeks screening of
Torchwood: Children of Earth, which aired here on pay TV channel UKTV the day after its debut on BBC 1 – there’s still no convenient and consumer-geared commercial alternative to pirating TV shows.
Networks which force viewers to wait months or in some cases years for TV shows are virtually asking for those shows to be illegally downloaded.