I hope you can work out the legaleze. TAL is (was) my favorite (by far) podcast. It’s possible for me to create a playlist in real audio and get all the episodes that way, buy it was so nice being able to includee tal in my iTunes pl’s. Ira, you are a great talent. It is my belief that you and tal will be recorded in history as educating us all to the news, info, and stories so human, that we all should be(and if not for you, wouldn’t be) privy to. (I hope that makes sense, I have had a few to many or a few to few!)

Good Luck!!!

One more thing, Don’t they (you know, them) realize there are a gazillion ways to get around their spy vs spy crap! When are they going to wake up and see the light. Just go to the iTunes podcast section and look at all the other great programming that is available FOR FREE!!!!!!

Sorry I promise I won’t say another word (maybe)!!!

This says it all “Either offer the content without barriers, or prepared to be replaced by someone else.”
Quoted from above

[...] Jared has the insider’s scoop here. Filed under: politics, technology, podcasting [...]

Well put–I would add that the CBC seems to have similar difficulties in adapting to podcasts. They have tons of incredible material that could have new life breathed into it by being made available online. Unfortunately, and somewhat understandably since their roots are in radio, they insist on applying old-media thinking to it.

[...] Jared Benedict honored This American Life’s request, but urges them to reconsider: Altering future contracts, and making the episodes freely available for downloading/timeshifting is feasable (NPR has done it.) Doing so would increase listenership. An increased listenership would mean TAL gets more money from advertisers underwriters, which can then be used to compensaate story contributors. Everyone wins. [...]

[...] Jared Benedict: “It is my position that hyperlinking to publicly accessible MP3Õs is perfectly legal.”  [...]

Controversy over “This American Life” RSS feeds (UPDATED)…

Update: Conrad, the “Unofficial American Life podcaster,” clarifies the reports other readers have submitted: I have decided to remove the Unofficial This American Life podcast at the request of TAL’s webmaster Elizabeth Meister. Contrary to posts …

Packratting, This American Life, and “DRM”…

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….

“…An increased listenership would mean TAL gets more money from advertisers underwriters, which can then be used to compensate story contributors. Everyone wins…”

I’m all for free content on the internet. And I agree that $4/episode is a ridiculously high price. (although I am a subscriber to the $40/year annual subscription also available via Audible, which is a much more reasonable

Just a couple quick comments – You say, ” An increased listenership would mean TAL gets more money from advertisers underwriters, which can then be used to compensate story contributors.”

That’s not how underwriting works. It’s a system of charitable contribution that is not tied to the number of listeners. That’s the whole point of not-for-profit operations, they are free from the “tyranny of the marketplace.” Even if their listenership goes up, the money they receive from underwriters will remain the same because it’s based on the level of tax credit their underwriters receive for making a donation.

You also say, “This excuse is a little strange considering This American Life writes the contract.” They may write the contract, but they are also bound by agreements with unions, etc. to provide specific types of compensation to their contributers based on the mechanism and process of delivery. This gets even more complex if there is music involved.

What is Public Content it it cannot be consumed by the public? If the TAL podcasts were hosted on another server, and if the server was owned by TAL, I don’t see a problem.

However, if you linked directly to the PodCast and not to the Page hosting the podcast (the bypass without the “via”) it might constitute an tresspass, but not an infringement. why? Simply because, there was no mention of their webpage and the users clicking your would never get to know where the podcast came from. On the other hand if you linked to the page featuring the cast, you might still be in the clear.

Not that I am too well-versed in legalese, mind you. But, you can figure out the way the lawyers would work their net, pun unintended.

Regards,
Shri.

I’m downloading one of their mp3’s now. It is 27 megs. I’d say that they’re making a reasonable enough request, given that the blitz that accompanies RSS downloads would cripple their servers or run WBEZ’s hosting bills sky-high. They’ve improved; used to be only streaming RealAudio on that site. Now, they link to m3u files, which link to un-DRM’d mp3’s, which you can stream freely. Pretty nice of them, I’d say. Basically, if you want the mp3, you can still get it; it is just a bit obfuscated. Seems to me like a stopgap measure until they figure out a more reasonable way to offer their shows freely and easily to the public. I’m sure they are aware of the benefits of making their show widely available, and are in no danger of being left behind or sticking it to the little guy with $4 downloads, if they can help it. Jared, you did the right thing by giving them a break, but I’m sure it isn’t just cash that is ruling their motives. Let’s not get them mixed up with ClearChannel.

DRM by asking nicely…

I’m a fan of This American Life; I never listen to it. It plays here a week late and at an odd hour. Had I known there was an Unofficial This American Life Podcast I’d have subscribed. It is no……

Here’s one way around the problem. My Linux computer is set up to record TAL off the air every week using a TV/FM capture card. Once recorded, it converts to mp3, creates an rss feed that is hosted on my local webserver, and iTunes on my Windows computer happily pulls it down.

And yes, I do contribute to my local public radio station (WNYC)

Pitty the link is gone
This was my most used podcast. Now will have to figure out some other way to get it.

I wish TAL would reconsider their distribution strategy.

[...] . Take a look at this do Deep Linking Rules Change If It’s An MP3, Not An HTML File? There’s been some talk today on various blogs after the producers of the public radio show This American Life sent an email to someone who set up an RSS feed linking to their MP3s, asking him politely to take it down (which he did). He makes it clear that this wasn’t a legal “nastygram,” but it also seems clear that the next step most likely would have been such a nastygram from the lawyers. A few details are important to understand what happened here. The radio show previously allowed a streaming RealAudio version of the show, but if you wanted to download a copy that you could take with you, it required you to pay money (and get a DRM-encumbered version). Recently, they changed the streaming RealAudio version to an MP3 version, to allow people with other audio players to listen. In other words, they voluntarily put up an MP3 version on their site. The guy who created the RSS was simply pointing to it. He was linking to perfectly legal content that was placed online by the copyright owners of that content. And they threatened to call in lawyers to stop it. As he notes in his own writeup, he decided to follow their wishes, even though he’s pretty clear they have no case, should they want to pursue it. U.S. courts have found, repeatedly, that if you put something online in a free and open manner, there is absolutely nothing wrong with anyone linking to it — even if it hurts your business model. A separate issue, of course, is whether or not this effort really does hurt their business model — and, again, at the link above a decent case is made for why that’s not true. It’s the same problem too much of the entertainment industry seems to have: pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability, undercounting the promotional value of the content and focusing only on the immediate fees it can bring in. « Judge temporarily halts Louisiana violent game law (Macworld.com)   [...]

thanks to Google, you can still access the links via the Google Cache http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:aWwahfM2YAMJ:redjar.org/radio/tal/archive/+&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&strip=1 or here http://tinyurl.com/ehapf

Sure, they could change their contracts with future contributors to allow for free download & distribution, but most of what you’re hearing on TAL these days are reruns — all that material is under old contracts. They simply don’t have the rights to let all that old material (10 years worth!) go for free. NPR does’t do as many reruns, so for them it’s less of a problem

Yes, it is a matter of money, but not exactly as you describe it.

This American Life gets most of its money not through underwriting but through the fees that subscriber stations pay it (through PRI) to carry the programming.

Stations that pay good money to broadcast the program (and thus attract listeners who will support the station with memberships) aren’t happy when listeners can get the programming without listening to the radio.

It’s a big problem that all of public radio is facing. They want to serve their listeners, but the real customers are the stations and if they are no longer seen as necessary, the whole funding model falls apart.

Thanks for doing this, BTW… since you decided to make your “podcast,” TAL has now changed the entire way they offer the MP3 episodes and now… guess what? NO ONE can download the files because they are no longer housed on TAL’s servers.

Thanks for screwing things up for everyone.

If you enjoyed the “unofficial podcast” that much, is it really asking that much to make the sacrifice and buy the episodes like some of us have been doing for years?

are you really arrogant enough to think that you know what model is best for TAL? You know next to nothing about how they work.

If you’re so confident in new alternative models for media, than why dont you stop pirating and actually develop content and distribute it however you want?

Nice job jackass!!!

Anyone with any web savy was able to figure out that just by changing the m3u to mp3 you can download the whole files. Because of YOU, and all the attention you have gotten TAL has now closed the loophole. Nice job!!!

I’ll just have to go back to streaming and recording. Sigh.

You can still download the episodes just fine. Just look at the contents of the m3u files, then use curl or wget.
http://wbez-tal.streamguys.us:8000/content/314.mp3

um — k. forgive me for being a moron, but whaa? i tried to download wget and realized it was way above my “computer pay grade”
for a layman — how can i go to this streamguys site and download the mp3s? i can seem to understand curl or wget (seems like something you’d manipulate with Terminal, which is not something i understand..) (ps: i have a mac, osx 10.4.5)
and when i go to streamguys with Safari, i get:
Invalid resource

how can i slurp up some of these TAL episodes? without, i hope, using a strsaming/recording thing, which seems pretty labor intensive…
any help would be appreciated…
thanks.

In Mac OS X, open up terminal, type:

curl -O http://wbez-tal.streamguys.us:8000/content/314.mp3

It will start downloading. Look in your home directory and you see the file 314.mp3

holy awesome. thanks Curl; that’s super-doable.

How would one go about utilizing/saving that stream via Windows?

Oh now I found out why the rss feed is not working anymore
Actually I had a one year subscription of TAL at Audible. I will not prolong the subscription. Instead I will pledge the subscription fee directly to TAL and download the mp3s. I will do this for a very simple reason: Audio Quality! The 32kbps files of Audible are awful. Especially compared to 64kbps mp3s on the TAL site.

Try these graphical versions of wget:
For Windows:
http://www.cybershade.us/winwget/

For Mac OS X:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15520

Grr…I have no problem getting curl to work on my Mac at work, but I can’t get wget to work on my PC at home. I’m finding the url based on the instructions above but I keep getting “ERROR -1: Malformed status line”

Nevermind. After tracking down a bunch of .dll’s (in some cases, trying multiple versions to get the right one), finally got curl working on the PC at home. Thanks guys! Incidentally, I agree with Stefan that I’d much prefer to have these higher quality versions and make a straight donation to TAL than to pay a premium for inferior quality, DRM, and Audible taking a cut before the producers and the authors see the money.

If you want other content for free, I’d suggest looking for other podcasts. Why not try Benjamen Walker’s The Theory of Everything? http://www.toeradio.org/

[...] In the end, TAL asked the deep-linkers to shut it down, which they did. And it sounds as if the show’s producers have finally found a way to close the loophole he was exploiting. [...]

It’s only $4? How much do you spend for cigarettes or coffee each day? If it was $10 or $20, OK, I understand, but $4? TAL is worth your $4, and if they say they need it to pay underpaid radio contributors, I believe them. This isn’t Enron or IBM or GE. It’s Ira. I’ll take his word for it and consider you cheap.

Until they name it something other than ‘public radio,’ I’ll still expect that the best way to make a copy of a program for the future is via tape deck on a boom box.

Just as an update: The lastest TAL e-mail update states that streaming shows will soon be accessible on the site using some sort of flash player. Meanwhile, individual show downloads on Audible and soon iTunes will be dropped to 95 cents a piece. That seems more than reasonable. Kudos to them.

The worst thing is, I’ve downloaded two TAL programs through iTunes and the quality is terrible! You can download free, top quality podcasts of Open Source and On the Media but have to pay $4 to crackly, staticy podcasts of TAL? TAL used to be on the cutting edge; now it’s starting to look prehistoric.

[...] There is an interesting conversation happening in the blogosphere about web content. I had seen this conversation begin late last week but since I was on the road, I did not watch how it has developed. iJim sent me a link to a story on ZDNet.com. It discusses the issue in detail. There is also a post on the Techdirt blog that provides a good summary. I was appreciative of this since I had missed this story as it developed on the Red Jar blog. [...]

Public radio is public and should be free. We donate to our local public radio station. I discovered TAL in 1997 when I lived on the west coast. It’s great. I listened only occasionally since then because of family obligations and a less than ideal local broadcast time. I’m an insomniac, so I listen to my mp3 player during the night. I was using Total Recorder and winamp to record the archive and xfer to my player. (Sure beats listening to Art Bell on am radio. I knew I had to stop the day I found myself trying to remember the three signs a person had been abducted by aliens!)

One day I listened to a TAL episode in WMP and noticed that the file was being downloaded to my PC, not streamed. Took 3 mins each episode. Okay, so it was downloaded to a hidden system folder which was not difficult to find. TAL was giving every episode away for free, so I’m enjoying them. As I understand it, Fair Use lets all of us record it from streaming internet radio or from the official web site. How many of us have listened to Ira say for years “where you can listen to all of our programs for FREE.”

It’s on tonight on WBEZ at 7 central, or you can record it from another affiliate station which broadcasts in higher quality and stereo.

That’d be a nice project: post a list of public radio stations streaming high quality stereo feeds.

Diane Rehm recently started making podcasts available. Each podcast starts with a 20 second ad. Of course, the ads are included in each episode anyway, but TAL could adopt this model.

Seems that PRI has decided to create an official This American Life podcast. You can find it here. The mp3s are available for one week and then streaming or purchase from Audible is your next option.

Good news?

[...] The news is rumbling across the web. I saw this BoingBoing post about it. The interested background is that several sites created their own podcasts of the show that simply pointed to shows located on TAL servers. TAL requested that they stop, and the unofficial podcast that was taken down as was another. STL blogger DiatribeR also posted on the news, too. [...]

[...] However, I really enjoy This American Life when I do tune in. The problem in the past is the show is on around 5:00 PM on Sunday afternoons on the local NPR station. And honestly, I don’t seek out radio programming any more. So, I don’t think to listen in. And, up until now, their show is available only in Real Audio format. And quite frankly, Real sucks. Their software is malware at best and their content shotty (except for something like TAL). They are the RC Cola to the world of new media. For a while, The Future is Yesterday posted unofficial podcasts of the show by linking to mp3’s on their own servers. Jared got in a little hot water and decided to stop as they made the shows available via Audible.com. The problem was they show is great, but not $4 a download great. [...]

[...] I love This American Life (TAL). It’s a wonderful public radio show. In each episode, they have stories that revolve around a particular theme, like this week’s theme, entitled “fiasco”. I’ve had my eye on their website for several years. They’ve made their shows available in the Real Media format for as long as I’ve visited their site. Real Media is not exactly handy for listening to with an mp3 player, but by using audio capture software like Audacity, it wouldn’t be hard to convert shows into the mp3 format for happy unencumbered personal listening, though this probably isn’t what TAL intended. At long last, TAL added mp3 files to the site. Then somebody went to the trouble of repackaging links to mp3s on the TAL website as an RSS feed, thus making it easy for anybody with podcasting client software like iTunes or Juice to get it. Apparently, TAL wasn’t too happy about this; they apparently contacted the poor sod and asked him to take down the feed. However, TAL rose to the challenge. [...]

I’ve added a new set of links that I don’t think require the firefox trick. Got them by decompiling the flash player on the TAL site. http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/SHOWNUMBER.mp3

Just replace SHOWNUMBER with the show number, like 314.

You can also use this
http://www.dirtygreek.org/stuff/tal.php?min=314&max=321