Pirates of the Multiplex

Under US pressure, Swedish authorities are going after the popular Pirate Bay Web site for illegal distribution of video files. But if Hollywood wants to stop online pirates—who cost the industry some $7 billion in 2005—it needs to join them, not beat them.

I was a reluctant convert, to say the least. When I got the call from my old friend Richard back in late 2005, he sounded far too enthusiastic about the latest Internet gimmick that was going to “change my life.” Richard, you see, is prone to great enthusiasms, and I was not particularly disposed to listen to his ravings about some Web site called UKNova, which supposedly let him download all kinds of amazing British TV shows completely free of charge.

I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a “torrent tracker,” a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they’re shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

Mock if you will, but I assure you that this was nothing but top-drawer telly: a typical evening’s viewing schedule might include an episode of Peter Ackroyd’s magisterial history of London, the upsetting documentary Rock Family Trees: The Prog Rock Years, and another on postwar British universities that made me feel vindicated for bypassing higher education. And thanks to the many kind souls who are digitizing their dusty VHS stacks for UKNova dissemination, I’ve acquired all manner of presumed-lost British TV classics, from the sci-fi mockumentary Alternative 3 to the groovy 1970 kids show Here Come the Double Deckers.

Pirates of the Multiplex

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