There is an on-going battle to prevent hackers from piracy offences when it comes to internet downloads.
The iPlayer website provides music that is intended to only be accessible to people downloading to an iPhone or iPod but hackers found a way round it, like they always do and were using the programme for general free downloads.
These hackers would then save the downloads to hard disk thus enabling them to share, thus committing download piracy.
Programmes are available for downloads for up to seven days after broadcast but a service for PC users meant these programmes could be viewed for a further three weeks. This content is streamed as an MP4 file but does not have the benefit of copy protection.
Hackers quickly caught on to the fact that with a simple plug Firefox plug in they were able to access the files and copy them.
The problem of piracy and hackers will be continuous and the BBC, although having fixed the above problem, will continue to work on the problem when they release their download version of the iPlayer online video service for Apple Mac users later this year.
The BBC had faced criticism after only making the iPlayer available to Windows users but explained this as the company making the service available to the most people in the shortest amount of time. There had been debate over whether or not it would be available to those without Windows at all due to costings and demand but this has now been addressed.
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