Downloading movies on the Internet is anything but new, however this avid film fan predicts that “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” will change the scene forever. I came to this conclusion when I saw a blurb about downloading the film on a CNN news report about the popularity of the movie. This will turn on many thousands of new people to the idea of downloading films. However I think that this moment is going to become the big rallying call of the MPAA.
In fact how did this movie end up on the internet? Well the copy that began to curculate before the film first opened to audiences is what is known as a ‘workprint’ This unlike most pirated first run films was not a camcorder aimed at the cinema screen. It was instead an internal copy of the film used for various post production reasons. The only way this could have got onto the world wide web was through loose security or down right internal theft by insiders.
Despite the MPAA’s recent rant blaming Bit Torrent for this movie showing up online, it seems as if this film first appeared on Usenet, something that is not exactly normal. In most cases a file finds its way online through something known as “The Scene”. Teams of people who go by such names as Centropy, or POT (Pirates of the Theater). These groups compete against each other in various catagories and have a complex set of rules and ethics that guide their behavior. The thing that may suprise people most about this upper level of internet piracy is that it is all done for fun and bragging rights, not any form of monitary profit. These groups run elite FTP’s where content begins and filters down to more common FTP’s, IRC, Usenet, and common P2P programs.
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