I'm a data packrat. I live in fear of data that I find interesting disappearing from the world. When I started listening to the Public Radio International show This American Life in 1997, I decided that I needed to archive it as best as I could for my future listening pleasure. As such, I rigged up a spare PC w/ a portable FM radio and a sound card, installed a bare bones Linux distro, and started recording the show off the airwaves w/ a script. I'd transcode the resulting raw PCM files into MP3's and store them on recordable CD's when I'd acquired enough to fill a CD.
About five (5) years ago, I decided to chuck the FM recorder rig in favor of downloading the audio from the Internet. TAL used RealAudio streaming, so I used a streamripper for a couple of years, until I learned that the RealAudio files were available in a directory to download via HTTP (not linked, of course-- just there). Every few weeks I'd fire off a script to download the next few RealAudio files, then I'd rename them and archive them away. Sometime in 2005, I remember that there were some postings on "the blogs" that publicly disclosed the availablity of these RealAudio files. I thought that I'd be going back to the FM recording rig, for sure.
The RealAudio downloads continued until sometime in the last few months, when I stopped being able to get them. Since it was a script that I fired off by hand, and since I'm fairly forgetful, I didn't notice or think anything of it until I saw this article on BoingBoing today.
Apparently TAL switched to producing MP3 files, and Jared Benedict started up an RSS feed to the MP3 files, thereby creating an unofficial "podcast" of This American Life. His blog post outlines the email he got from the show's webmaster, Elizabeth Meister, and I won't recap it here.
Jared's post calls TAL's "DRM" strategy "bizzare", but for me, it was always very polite and non-offensive. I rationalized my own downloading as an entitlement by way of my yearly contributions to my local public radio station, and kept the pangs of guilt suppressed. Still, I suppose that I never did feel completely right about it, insofar as TAL was always so very polite, and I like their show, their people, and the very idea of what they're doing so much.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens. Perhaps TAL will be able to unbind itself from the shackles of "old media" ideas of distribution, and perhaps we'll see a free TAL "podcast". I agree with all the posters who say that this will increase their listenership. I'd love to see their audio distributed with Bittorrent or somesuch. They are probably incurring hellacious bandwidth expense in their present arrangement, but they'll be stuck in that situation so long as their management is stuck in an old-world mentality.
For now, I hastily scripted a couple of downloads of all the MP3 content. I'm not going to chance that it's going to stay around, and it'd sure be nice to replace all those old RealAudio files with easily playable MP3 files. I'll packrat this data alongside the gigabytes of archived television episodes, "podcasts", and mirrors of web sites that I keep around.
