Rogue internet sites devoted to a ratings-ripping reality show have sparked network angst. Angus Kidman reports.

Published in The Bulletin, July 17, 2001

For the Ten network, Big Brother has been a welcome boost. Not only has the voyeuristic reality game show produced a healthy television audience since debuting in April, it has also been a big success online, attracting 70,000 visitors a day to its web site and scoring 100,000 registrations in its first two weeks of operation alone.

Online chats with evicted residents (one is removed from the house each week) have sometimes been unable to cope with demand, and the average length of each web visit has been around 12 minutes, a healthy figure for any site.

Having already burnt through $44m with its failed youth venture Scape, Ten is eager to protect its first online success, even if it has to occasionally trample on the show's enthusiastic audience in the process.

Unofficial sites devoted to the show and individual housemates such as Perth nightclub manager Sara-Marie and Melbourne student-cum-model Blair have quickly proliferated.

"There are a lot of fan sites, and a very high percentage of them breach copyright," says Louise O'Donnell, executive producer of the official bigbrother.com.au site. Pages that take logos and images from the official site or which link to content designed exclusively for registered users have all been discovered, O'Donnell says. "We've been incredibly tolerant, because we think the whole cult of the fan site has been a fantastic thing. We haven't taken a lot of action."

Those pages that have attracted the wrath of Ten and producer Southern Star Endemol have been those that extensively violate copyright or that act in a manner that might endanger contestants (such as one site that published the home phone number of a contestant), O'Donnell says. "We also have to protect the rights of the companies and people involved in the show. Unfortunately, some people take the attitude that stars [such as the contestants] have no rights."

The most visible run-in to date has been with a fan site dedicated to nude shots of the housemates, captured from the live 24-hour feed of life in the house offered via the official web site.

Originally created as a spin-off of a net chat channel discussing the show, the site attracted a larger audience (around 1000 visitors a day) after it was promoted in a Big Brother-hosted chat forum devoted to fan web offerings.

Not long afterwards, it attracted the wrath of SSE executives, and business affairs manager James Talbot sent a cease-and-desist letter to the site's developer.

Canberra-based webmaster Mike (he declines to give his surname) responded by publishing the letter, which describes the site as "particularly offensive in both its name and the way it uses the content in a gratuitous and exploitative manner", and replacing links to the image archives with a picture displaying the text "censored". He has since relocated the site to a new overseas server, and says he intends to maintain it for both this series (which finishes on July 15) and any future productions, despite SSE's objections.

"It's not hurting them in any way whatsoever," he says. "We are simply sharing what we have collectively seen so that others can enjoy it. [SSE's] arrogance will see that they have a fight on their hands to try and shut the site down."

Ten has in fact co-operated actively with several fan sites, especially those devoted to individual housemates. The links page on the official site promotes nine external sites. One such site, BlairCentral.com, claims a mailing list of 9000 members. "Getting linked by us really helps their traffic," says O'Donnell.

Some of those sites have been granted permission to reproduce some screen captures and other material from the show, although many had initially overstepped the mark, she says. Many other sites make use of the show's "eyebrow" logo, which was one of the elements that Talbot demanded be removed from Mike's site.

For the next series of Big Brother, O'Donnell hopes to develop a set of guidelines for fan sites, including official logos for linking and rules about what material can be used, to avoid any legal run-ins. "It's all about being respectful," she says.