Tangled Mind

15 - minutes by which I missed the start of Sherlock broadcast on BBC1
45 - minutes spent attempting (without success) to install iPlayer desktop
04 - minutes watching via iPlayer online before the browser hung
00 - number of repeats of this episode on non-HD BBC this week, at least according to BBC site
14 - minutes to download ev0l illegal torrent (seeded by over 10,000 users)

There is one question very conspicuously missing from the BBC's online coverage so far:

So, is everything on PirateBay an illegal download?

That'd be a big fat NO, then.

My last three PirateBay downloads, all of which seem to me no more illegal than taping off the radio*:
- Primeval S03E03 (UK television, first broadcast Saturday: ITV, if that makes a difference)
- SF Library's Tepper section (attempting to grab e-text of a book I own 2 copies of -- one was on loan, one's in storage)
- Haydn - Nelson Mass (I have a CD somewhere but could not locate it)

edit to add
I was not intending the above as a list of legal downloads -- hence the phrase 'no more illegal than taping off the radio', which, yes, is illegal -- but as grey areas. Here are some less-grey areas:
- Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (PDF)
- complete works of Shakespeare as text files
- Rachmaninoff playing his own Piano Concerto #2 (1931)



There's definitely a great deal of pirated material available online, and there are many grey areas: I think it's disingenuous to report the matter as though everything downloaded is pirated content, robbing artistes of their rightful reward.

*for my younger readers: 'radio' is what we had before streaming music on the interweb; 'taping' is a means by which sound could be recorded onto magnetic tape. Kind of like ripping an MP3 but slower and less robust. Retro chic!