Free South Park!

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Can't wait for the day when all the episodes of your favorite TV shows are available online, so you can watch whatever you want to watch when you want to watch it? If you're a fan of South Park, the foul-mouthed, flannel-board-style cartoon on Comedy Central, that day is here. Scores of Websites, from Mr. Hat's Hellhole to www.YouKilledKenny.com are giving away bootleg copies of the cable-TV show. I smelled an intellectual-property-rights disaster in the making--how long can this go on?--so I called Joe Hager, the 19-year-old sophomore at Drexel University who was the first to put the cartoon on the Net.

It's easy, says Hager. Park-ophiles simply record episodes on their VCRs and squeeze the signals into their PCs using a nifty piece of digitizing software called RealVideo. A few simple instructions put the episodes on the Web, where anyone on the Internet can point, click and view them within seconds. Hager started distributing South Park in August, a few days after after RealNetworks began giving away its once pricey server software. Why did he do it? His justification is that while the show is enormously popular with 18-to-25-year-olds, most college students don't have cable. He figures he's performing a public service--and building an even bigger audience for the show. After all, anyone who has seen the grainy PC version knows that it's better on a big-screen TV.

Meanwhile, everyone interested in the intersection of TV and the Net is sitting straighter in his chair. South Park's low production values make it ideal for online distribution. But look down the road a few years when Net connections get faster and RealVideo-type technology improves, and you can see how easy it will be for people to give away everything from CDs to feature-length films. I figured Comedy Central would be thrombosing about this blatant theft of copyrighted material. As usual, I figured wrong.

"We really aren't sure what to do," says Larry Lieberman, a savvy Web user who happens to be the guy at Comedy Central charged with handling this situation. "We do want to protect our property, but we don't want to alienate our fans." Lieberman understands why South Park is ripe for the stealing: its surprise success caught Comedy Central in short supply. Fewer than a dozen episodes have been produced, and they are getting heavily recycled. "With a new episode every week, the itch gets scratched on television," says Lieberman. "But we can't create episodes fast enough." So in a curious way, the Net is helping keep the troops in line. That isn't to say the free lunch will run forever. Indeed, Lieberman says the network already has plans to shut down a few sites--the ones selling ads on their South Park pages. Some people!

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