Swapping torrents for money

I regularly visit the Final Gear forums, a forum for Top Gear and Fifth Gear fans (that also happens to link to a few torrents). There’s been a lot of talk recently about the fact that the BBC has been removing clips from You Tube and when/if they’re going to go for full shows on torrent sites.

Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t rule that out. At some point they are going to have to defend their copyright (and MANY other people’s copyright - as I mentioned when talking about the backstage podcast).

There was also a lot of talk about the chance of the BBC selling episodes of Top Gear through iTunes at some point. Again something I wouldn’t rule out given that the concept of making BBC shows available on other services has already been mentioned a few times.

Although a more likely scenario will be that in the not too distant future the Beeb will launch an international, commercial version of the iPlayer and sell shows through that.

A good solution could be for the Beeb to give international fans a choice of a subscription (keep for a limited time) or pay to own model. The pay to own model could work in a similar way to iTunes, where you pay the BBC a fixed amount of money (say $1.49) and you get to download an episode of your favourite BBC show and keep it (no expire).

If that happens (and I think it will), then I expect the BBC will do EVERYTHING it can to get any BBC show taken down from Torrent sites and trackers.

But I have an idea, and this is a long shot but possibly a potentially good compromise for torrent creators who, and this is a case of looking at things from a different point of view for a change, think they’re helping the BBC with promoting the series.

Instead of just removing torrents with a heavy hand, demanding it be taken down, what about a affiliate scheme.

The BBC tells the torrent sites you HAVE to take the torrents down BUT here is an rss feed to those shows on the iPlayer with your own personal code embeded.

If you put that on your site we well give you money (say 5c) for every episode downloaded. Could be a way of helping the torrent sites with revenue, provide a heavy traffic advert to the BBC iPlayer AND build kudos among the ‘p2p’ community.

I like to believe people are for the most part honest. If something is available to buy, in a convenient form, for a reasonable price, I think people will pay for it.

This model would make it easier for them to find the legal alternative.

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