The downloaders strike back

By Jimmy Guterman - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Op-ed - News: "LIKE THOUSANDS of patriotic Americans, I spent Memorial Day weekend illegally downloading a copy of the new ''Star Wars" movie. I was shocked by how quickly I was able to locate a copy on the Net (less than five minutes) and how long it took for the whole thing to end up on my computer (two days and change -- talk about holiday weekend traffic). There were no secret passwords, no locations known only to the cognoscenti. All I had to do was Point, Google, Pilfer.

I won't pull out the ''I am a journalist and I was just doing research" defense. I acknowledge the indefensibility of my actions. Just because ''The Phantom Menace" and ''Attack of the Clones" insulted the intelligence of anyone over the age of 4 doesn't mean I have the right to swipe George Lucas's latest.

Others are playing the relative-morality card, though. Read the discussion groups on the websites that host free ''Star Wars" and you can read hundreds of energetic, typo-ridden postings from fans convinced that, as one put it, ''Lucas owes us." One Net service that uses the popular file-sharing program BitTorrent serves only unreleased material by established performers, as if distributing unreleased material without permission or payment is somehow more moral than distributing officially released material without permission or payment.

Looking to the Internet for a moral education is a dubious activity, but the new digital world -- in which copyrighted material can be had either for free (unofficially) or at a greatly discounted price (through licensed download services) -- makes me wonder what content is worth nowadays. The time when you had to pay $18.99 to own one great song on an otherwise mediocre CD is gone. Thanks to the licensed download services, you can get a digital copy of that one good song for less than a buck. Maybe this will encourage performers to put more than one song worth buying on a record.

Although the record companies entered this new era kicking, screaming, and litigating, they have started to accept it, experimenting with a variety of innovations to make physical product worth owning. On the film side, dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban is leading an experiment to have films open in theaters and be available on DVD the same day, at a sliding scale of prices. The age of digital media is upon us, and the film companies should stop hunting down individual filesharers (like, er, me) and just keep innovating until they find the right technology and business models.

So, the other night, after everyone else in my family was asleep, I snuck downstairs, put on my headphones, and launched my pirated ''Revenge of the Sith." It looked great, but I closed the file after less than three minutes. Watching Jedi joust across a laptop screen is not the way to enjoy something as loud, fast, and blunt as a ''Star Wars" film. I could transfer the file to a DVD and view it on a larger television screen, but if I want the real experience of seeing the movie, I have no choice but to see it at a theater. Forget legal arguments or feelings of guilt. Paying to see ''Revenge of the Sith" on the big screen is the best way to enjoy this sort of big entertainment -- at least until downloaders figure out how to steal entire movie theaters."