The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said yesterday it would distribute one of its most popular shows on the BitTorrent networks, Cnet says:

On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year’s broadcast of Canada’s “Next Great Prime Minister.” This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.

Slashdot discusses the issue here.*

TV show they’re talking about is a reality affair where kids apparently offer solutions to the country’s problems. “DRM” is digital rights management, which restricts the ways consumers can use media they buy; “p2p” stands for “peer-to-peer,” which just describes programs that feed digital files between users.

So basically it means that the CBC is going to be throwing one of its shows up on the internet for people to download for free, without restrictions.

This development is a small but potential chink-in-the-wall story. Here’s why. In the file-sharing networks— the users of which the RIAA has been assaulting with tens of thousands of lawsuits—the technology is, in internet terms, slightly antique at this point.

Joe has a copy of Rihanna’s song “Umbrella,” Sarah does a search of the networks, finds the song, clicks on the song title—and a copy of the file is dutifully streamed into her computer at a speed that can range from the fast to the positively pokey.

Which is fine for a relatively small music file. BitTorrent, a protocol adopted by many sophisticated users but barely used at all by quote-unquote normal folks, is often described as “file-sharing on steroids.” It’s a powerful tool in transferring large files—like video. By tracking copies of the same files across many different computers, it “torrents” different pieces from different users into your computer in a rush.

Indeed, it can be dizzyingly fast. Folks aren’t transferring songs on the torrents; they are transferring whole albums, whole discographies, TV shows, entire seasons of TV shows, films, and HD films.

So anyway, my point is this: Any development that introduces more folks to torrenting, the worse it’s going to be for the media industries. “Come for the high-minded Canadian Public Broadcasting shows; stay for the pirated high-quality copy of the upcoming summer blockbuster!”

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* You gotta love Slashdot: In the comments section about this story, there is first an extended mind-numbing discussion about internet providers throttling BitTorrent downloads (“If by “locked”, you mean you need to pay an ETF to get out, you’re not really stuck. They’re required by law to offer wholesale service, assuming you’re hooked up to an ADSL or ADSL2+ DSLAM”). Then the discussion goes off into U.S./Canada pros and cons, as evidenced by Niagara Falls and, um, other things. (“Americans have the right to bear arms. Canadian women have the right to bear breasts.”)