During a week long investigation into copyright issues by BBC show Newsbeat, one TV show creator said that illegal downloading actually increased the popularity of his show.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said that piracy helped the show to become more popular and increased “brand awareness” but added that a lot of people would have made more money had the downloads been legal.
According to weblog Torrentfreak.com, the show’s final episode was downloaded more than half a million times, with most downloaders coming from Australia, the US and the UK.
Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that 12 hours after the first copy of the episode appeared online, more than half a million people had grabbed a copy through one of many torrent sites. Never before have so many people downloaded a Breaking Bad episode, making it a strong contender for a top spot in the most-pirated TV-shows of the year chart.
Interestingly, the weblog also pointed out that many people prefer to download illegal copies even when the legal version is available. For example, despite the first episode of The Walking Dead being made available to stream free online, more than half a million people still downloaded it illegally.
However, Atlantis executive producer Johnny Capps said that illegal downloading is a “huge problem for programme makers” and they are “powerless with how to deal with it”.
He added that if a show keeps on being illegally downloaded then its value is worth less, so therefore budgets will go down and it will affect the show creatively. Conversely, however, if people are downloading it, they are talking about it, which helps to create fans and can drive people to buy the DVD of the show.