While Columbia Picture's new "Spider-Man" movie was breaking box-office records over the weekend, Internet movie pirates were busily downloading free copies of the film on file-trading networks.
By Saturday, pirated versions of the comic book inspired movie were showing up in "screener" format on the EDonkey, Kazaa, and Morpheus Internet file-swapping systems. The boot-legged "Spider-Man" was being offered in Windows AVI and MPEG file formats, with some versions of the complete movie exceeding 2 gigabytes, one version seen on EDonkey comprising of three CD bin/cue files...
Many Internet users apparently were undeterred by the huge file size of the pirated film. More than 12,000 copies of "Spider-Man" have already been downloaded from a link at the ShareReactor.com site.
When Columbia releases the DVD version of the hit movie in coming months, pirates likely will begin swapping "rips" or copies of the DVDs online. According to a description at a popular sharing site, rips offer "excellent video and audio quality. It's no guarantee though, but even the biggest idiots can't screw this up too much."
BUT, just wait until the weekend of the 16th May 2002, then the internet is likely to explode with StarWars fans wanting to grab a copy of the hottest flick to be released this year! Just how quickly the pirates can get this hot puppy up is anyone's guess, but I would not be surprised to see this available early!
News source: Newsbytes
