Unfortunately, even the BBC have substantially misquoted their Director General. What he actually said was:

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.

The full text is available here

It looks like they will be making short clips available for research/educational use rather than DivXing their entire comedy/sci-fi back catalogue. Lots of people got the wrong end of the stick!

Even then, I suspect the material will only be available via the BBCi Broadband peering network, where it is a no-cost exercise with regards to bandwidth.

Gareth