NEW LORD OF THE RINGS MOVIE IS ALREADY AVAILABLE AT HOME

If you didn't get to a theater over the last week or so to catch the new Lord of the Rings movie, there's a chance you can catch it at home on your very own computer. I read this morning that there are at least 5,000 copies of "The Return of the King" available on the Internet through file sharing sites such as Grokster and Kazaa. Of course, you'd likely need to have a mainframe computer in order to be able store a file that large, but nonetheless, it's apparently out there for anyone to steal. Wired News reports that many of the available copies are high quality.

Just another way people, usually good citizens, fail to compensate artists, musicians, actors, and others in the creative arts. Too bad. Napster has it right (finally) - charging a monthly service fee that is then passed on to the creative artists.

The primary benefit to downloading the illegal copy after you've watched it three times in the theatre, b/c we all know that the types that are downloading it have already done the dress up and wait for two days thing, is that you can pause it during the final hour when the movie attempts to find an end. The film became an exercise in bladder control each time I felt the film might finally end.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the film...but damn holmes...learn how to END a film.