Controversy! So, This American Life, the astoundingly good public radio show, finally got around to ditching the irredeemable RealAudio format for its online offerings and put everything up as mp3s. Geeks, doing what they do, immediately created podcast feeds out of this newfound bounty. Then the trouble began.

TAL seems to be run by nice and generous folks, but they sell their episodes through iTunes and Audible.com. They also give royalties to their contributors and the folks they license music from (they have good taste in music). These entanglements mean that they can't endorse the free downloading of permanent copies of their shows — although they seem to be okay with old episodes being streamed off of their website (they wrapped the new mp3s in m3u playlist files; for the non-tech-savvy, this would conceal the downloadability of the underlying mp3s and appear to be a stream-based offering).

TAL has begun contacting the folks who put up the podcast feeds and politely asking them to take their feeds down. The feed maintainers have all complied, so far as I know. But folks aren't uniformly happy about this, or convinced that TAL is unambiguously in the right. BoingBoing has been operating a clearinghouse for the resulting discussion. See here, here, here and here. Folks seem to be backing off due to their fondness for the show, but the copyfighting contingent isn't particularly happy.

That sums up my position pretty well, too. I'm conflicted about this. I love This American Life and I want it to survive. And, after reading this glowing profile, I'm pretty much ready to pledge my undying allegiance to Ira Glass.

On the other hand, I don't really believe in the idea that content producers have a right to restrict how their work is consumed after it's been given away in one format. Consumers shouldn't be begrudged the right to time-shift programming and consume it as they see fit. That's the underlying idea behind DRM, and it'll produce an incredibly irritating system for interacting with our culture if it's allowed to take hold.

So what to do? Compromise — and be discreet. The dopes who submitted their homebrew TAL feed to the iTunes Music Store had precisely the wrong idea. If TAL doesn't want other folks to decide their distribution system on their behalf, I suppose that's fine. So long as they don't bother those of us who quietly make use of technology to more easily enjoy their show, everyone should be happy. I'll admit that it's not a very democratic solution, but it seems like the best one available at the moment.

And on that note, if you happen to have a web hosting account available to you that can run PHP scripts, you might be interested in the one I whipped up this afternoon (you'll probably want to secure it from prying eyes). Also: shhh!