Paul Battley is a software developer from London who can probably lay claim to being the biggest thorn in the side of the BBC right now. No sooner had the mighty British Broadband Corporation announced that his hack which allowed people to download iPlayer TV streams meant for an iPhone to a hard drive and share them others had been fixed, than the 30 year old Linux fanboy broke it again.

Apparently his motivation in using plug-in requests to search Javascript code for the fixes, and then reprogramming the interface using Ruby on Rails, is simply a combination of the coding challenge and a hint of annoyance over lack of Linux support for the iPhone version of iPlayer.

The BBC, for its part, says that rights issues require them to offer streamed programming for no longer than seven days after initial broadcasting, while a downloads service enables PC users to keep those programmes longer, for up to 30 days in fact. "It's an ongoing, constant process and one which we will continue to monitor" The BBC said via a statement…