I'll have no links to any illegal torrents on this site. Period. As Scratchs link says. Fans who download their "idols" work, I don't know how their minds work. But then again, I am not one who should raise my voice too highly in these matters, I'm not a saint and it's a ll a big dilemma so I'll just shuddup now...
I had an email conversation with Dirk Maggs about torrents and downloading, and he said the following:
Dirk Maggs wrote:
"If it's downloadable, it must belong to everybody" is a common
assumption these days and in most cases encourages breach of
copyright laws. Those laws were not put in place to protect mega-rich
corporations or extort money from people who happened to miss iPlayer
repeats but to protect the jobs of hundreds of thousands of ordinary
people working in high-risk low-employment creative areas. People whose work we all get pleasure from, yet some misguided folks would rather not pay for.
Think about all those names in tiny print on the credit crawl at the
end of the movies to which your Gran says "I can't believe it took so
many people to make one film". None of these earn millions per job
like Brad Pitt and George Clooney. They have to get by at 'scale'
rates - sometimes working for less than the minimum wage. If you
watch pirated or downloaded file-shared copies of those movies, you
stick it to those people first. Their jobs dry up first.
The iPlayer repeats are limited in avalability mainly because of
agreements with craft guilds and unions protecting their members'
livelihoods. The majority of actors, writers, musicians and recording
studios don't live charmed lives. They have bills to pay, kids to
feed, illnesses to treat, and the less money the BBC make from
commercial sales, the less it can invest in ambitious productions
like HHGG and DG - which in turn employs actors, writers, musicians
and recording studios.
On the basis of the arguments presented in the thread we should all
refuse to pay our water utility bills because water falls from the
sky for free anyway. But until Bit Torrent work out a way to fit some
kind of free water outlet on people's computers, people will pay for
their water, as by and large it's the best way to be sure of
maintaining a quality-controlled water supply.
Taking something for nothing without the permission of, or
compensation to, those who invest their time and trouble in providing
it is *wrong*, and whatever Douglas might have said in an amusing and
off-the-cuff way about file sharing, let's be clear - he never gave
work away for free, unless for charity.
Whatever one may think of the licence fee, the separate commercial
sale of programmes (with extra value material added by people like me
to make them more *worth* buying) helps fund BBC production. If that
income is undermined, the choice on BBC Radio will eventually come
down to either repeats, or new productions which are just single
voice readings with no FX and no music. And for those who say 'great,
we can listen to Douglas reading his own stuff' - sure, but Douglas's
original idea for Hitchhiker's would have died stillborn in a BBC
with no budgets for multicast productions with sound effects and music.
If ripping off other people's work was fair and acceptable, by now
there'd surely be a barter system where those ripping off creatives
by uploading their work would allow us access to the fruits of THEIR
labours. Free insurance, banking, clothes, food and books from all
the insurance workers, bankers, clothing manufacturers, farmers and
novelists who download OUR stuff.
It's not fair, it's not acceptable, it's just wrong. If you don't
want to pay, then find something else to do.
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