Graham Linehan is a man of contradictions: a successful writer of studio sitcoms for an ad-funded broadcaster who is nevertheless a huge fan of technology and an apparent defender of piracy. All at the same time as believing that bands and filmmakers should still be paid for their work.

He should be a bit of a muddle, but somehow Linehan manages to put all these thoughts together. In part, you can see that mix of ideas in his work. Linehan, who co-wrote Father Ted and Black Books and now writes and directs Channel 4's The IT Crowd, is a champion of Twitter – as @Glinner he has more than 50,000 followers – yet he remains a strong believer in old-fashioned sitcoms, recorded in front of an audience.

Linehan began his career as a music journalist, working for Hot Press in Dublin, before forming a TV writing partnership with Arthur Mathews that saw the pair create Father Ted. He describes his favourite audience as "me and my dad watching the same thing together, watching Fawlty Towers and being able to laugh together". That is not to say that Linehan's work is cosy or safe – quite the opposite. His story of Moss, Roy and Jen, hidden away in the office basement and shunned by non-IT staff, manages to combine superb lines with great warmth for the characters.

IT people are "geniuses", he says: "They're working in offices and they're barely noticed; they're tolerated because they do something that other people don't really understand." His own obsession with technology is evident from his excited talk about a pen that records when it writes even before the interview begins, then midway through he takes out his iPad to demonstrate a brilliant app.

The third series of The IT crowd pulled in average ratings of 1.6 million viewers on Channel 4 and won a Bafta for best situation comedy. The fourth series starts this Friday, with a fifth already confirmed.

Despite his earlier success, another sitcom had not been in Linehan's plans following Father Ted and Black Books. Instead, he was trying to write a film – admittedly without much success: "Basically if you're trying to write films in England you might as well decide to hide for two years. It's just meetings with people who don't really have any money but pretend they do."

Meritocratic medium

So he was amenable when Channel 4, the home of his previous hits, approached him. He agreed to a new sitcom when he realised: "Wow. If I do this I could have something on TV next year," and found the idea for the show after calling a man to come round and fix his computer. "My wife opened the door and instead of saying: 'Hello, I'm here to see Graham', he just said: 'You're not Graham'. Later, I asked him why there weren't more people doing this door-to-door IT stuff. He replied: 'They don't have the people skills.' And I thought, OK – there's a sitcom."

The IT Crowd's Moss, of course, would deliver those lines beautifully.

Played by Richard Ayoade, Moss is the ultimate geek – Linehan freely admits that "Moss was me when I was 14, and Roy was me in my 30s". Which might explain Linehan's emotional attachment to Moss: "We were shooting a scene where he was being bullied, and the kids who were bullying him really put their hearts into it. And I looked at the monitor and burst into tears – I don't know whether it was because I felt they were bullying Richard, or whether they were bullying Moss, but I felt really super-protective at that point."

This season The IT Crowd will feature extras sourced from Twitter – "they were brilliant, the best extras I've ever worked with" – and Twitter will also play a part in recruiting talent for the show's recently announced fifth series, for which he's hoping to put together a writing team.

"Rather than them coming to me and asking for a job, I'm tapping them on the shoulder and saying 'Listen, do you want to try this out'," he says. "If people can spot talent rather than the talent having to come to us, then I think you might find that the quality of stuff goes up."

Linehan is a great believer in the potential of Twitter both as a meritocratic medium in which new voices can be discovered and enjoyed, and as a social tool: "Facebook was just John the Baptist. Twitter is the real deal."

And he also has a faith in web users and filesharers as fundamentally honest, saying: "It's probably not been the best thing for people to brand themselves as pirates … the image we should be concentrating on is sharing" – a view that informs his opinion that the media, music and film industries need to stop regarding filesharers as thieves, and accept that trying to patch up their current models is pointless.

Linehan's argument that companies have got to stop trying to defeat filesharing and maintaining the status quo can be misunderstood.

"Someone the other day was introducing me to his wife, and he said 'Graham believes that newspapers should be free'. And I said 'No, no, no'". So what does he mean? "That the current system is broken and everybody is pretending that it's not. Can't we talk about this and try and come up with something that is good for everyone?"

The issue is not that filesharers just want everything for free, Linehan says, but that they want to cut out the marketing and promotional hype and judge things for themselves; they want to circumvent the rules that say everybody should be buying a certain hyped album on a certain release day, or that things are released on different days in different territories, or that consumers can't buy music straight from those who make it.

Cyber-utopian

"With piracy, people think it's about getting stuff for free," he says. "It's not – it's about getting rid of the middleman that stands between you and your enjoyment of the film or music."

Linehan says he doesn't advocate piracy: "But that's the reason for it – companies have to meet people halfway. I get contacted daily by people in America saying is there any legal way to download The IT Crowd, but the whole mechanism is too rigid to allow for things like that."

A reluctance to really engage with the issue is not going to make it go away: "Consumers aren't going to put up with the old system, because it fucks them over too much."

What Linehan does not have, however, is an answer as to what this new system might look like. He admits it with good humour: "It feels like you've bought a car and it's not working properly. And I can't fix the car but I can tell you when it's fucking broken."

It's a slightly infuriating position, although not entirely without logic – at the heart of Linehan's argument is the idea we need to throw out all preconceptions as to how these industries work, and create new ideas together.

He wants to start a conversation, rather than dictate the answers. Yet he says: "The world at the moment seems to be divided into the people who get it and the people who don't, and they're the people making the laws."

His position can seem a little at odds with his view of broadcasters. If we're no longer reliant on film companies or record companies to guide us to great content, do we still need television people telling us what to watch?

"I think I would rather see commissioners with a really good sense of what people want, rather than always asking people what they want," Linehan says. "I want a captain who knows how to land the plane, I don't want one who has to ask the passengers where he should land."

There's also the question of people pirating his content. While he appears relaxed about people downloading The IT Crowd once it has aired, believing that the people who do so are often fans who will buy the DVD box set, Linehan wouldn't want the series to be leaked online ahead of broadcast: "I'd hate that because they'd be ruining the experience of the show for themselves and others."

So there is a balance to be struck between sharing because you're a fan, and sharing because you don't care about an artist's work. But Linehan is convinced that the positives of the web outbalance the negatives, that eventually it will become a meritocracy, uncovering talent that would otherwise stay hidden.

"You often get accused of being a cyber-utopian when you come up with this stuff," he says. "But I'm not saying we can live in utopia, I'm saying we could live somewhere just a little bit better."

For a preview of episode one of the new series, go to http://bit.ly/ITcrowd4