Amazingly you could have downloaded a copy of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith the day it was released, and not a bad handheld, darkened cinema copy either. From Boing Boing:
There’s a workprint of Star Wars Episode III on the Internet already. It’s got some timecode and watermarks, but judging from the 19 second XVID sample that Waxy has posted, it seems like it’s eminently watchable.
The link to the sample 19 seconds can be found here, it certainly looks good quality, but that’s amazingly fast and is obviously an inside source. So much for piracy, eh Hollywood?
In other news, Reuters say that with the movie opening on Thursday in China, by Sunday they were selling pirate copies:
But pirated disks were available everywhere by Sunday.
“These just came in this morning. The quality is very good, they’re not like those pirated copies that are filmed in the cinema,” a Beijing vendor said as he fished a pirated DVD from behind a bush and offered to sell it for 7 yuan.
Not only that, seems that those pirates in Malaysia were even faster:
Malaysian authorities seized illegal copies of the film on Friday, the day after the film’s release.
That’s quite amazing to be honest, and from all accounts the copies were good copies too, not the handheld ones. Perhaps there is a need to release the DVD’s before the movie in these countries, but that still won’t stop pirates.
