Still works, though development has moved on from the original guy.
Relevant bit from the new projet's website:
"DRM
get_iplayer does not circumvent any digital rights management security (see the BBC’s website on how to do that with the Windows-only DRM content they provide). get_iplayer does not circumvent any effective technological measures. The BBC does not implement any such measures. They use RTMP which is a streaming protocol now publicly published by Adobe. Sometimes they use RTMP ‘SWF verification’ which has proven to be ineffective in its current BBC implementation (flvstreamer cannot handle such verification requests so the stream is dropped and is then automatically resumed). The iPhone streams are also unprotected and use plain progressive download HTTP protocol. The WMA and realaudio streams and likewise unprotected. The BBC may at some point choose to effectively protect their streams with DRM or some ‘effective technological measure’ in which case get_iplayer will no longer be a useful tool for those streams. The BBC do implement DRM on their Adobe Air downloadable files and therefore get_iplayer is not useful with those. The BBC iPlayer TV only works in the UK so that they can limit the reach of their output to UK TV Licence fee payers who fund iPlayer (although legally you do not require a licence to watch non-live iPlayer output)."
So all the many comment in this thread about what the BBC could not do without DRM seem to be contradicted by the facts. All the BBC need is something that claims to be DRM but really isn't.
