Firefly

First Pirated High-Def Movie Hits the Web

The first pirated version of an HD DVD movie has made its appearance on the Internet. As first reported by the website Ars Technica, the sci-fi movie Serenity, encoded in VC-1, takes up 19.6 GB on a hard drive. (It would take about a day to download over a typical broadband connection.) The appearance of Serenity on BitTorrent comes less than a month after a programmer calling himself Muslix64 said that he had been able to bypass the copy protection on an HD DVD disc and indicated that the same method could be used with Blu-ray discs as well. In its original posting, Ars Technica asked, "Now that the genie is out of the lamp, so to speak, what will the reaction be from the content industry?" Thus far, the Motion Picture Association of America has not yet commented.