If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine

Hey, you haven't seen Star Wars Episode III yet? Well, you could go to the theater and pay $9 to see it. Or you could download it here and here and here.

But expect Fox to come after you with Vader-like vengeance. 20th Century Fox, the distributors of the Star Wars film, is now going after small-time downloaders.

Via BoingBoing, my source for all things tech...Fox has gotten a hold of BitTorrent file swapping records and are issuing infringement notices to downloaders of Episode III.

Small time downloaders used to be able to get around this by clearing out their shared folders. Those snooping around the P2P networks looking for pirates with megabytes of copyrighted files accessible in their public, shared folders, would tend to ignore the more subtle downloaders who go after one or two files at a time, a la BitTorrent. But when you use the BitTorrent software to download something, you're also uploading to others at the same time--that's what makes it such an efficient program.

Recently, authorities have begun targeting sites that host BitTorrent files. Earlier this week the FBI raided the offices of Elite Torrents, a filesharing forum that distributed over 17,000 different films which were downloaded 2.1 million times.

As has repeatedly happened in the past, I'm positive that measures will soon emerge to thwart the authorities on this. They're always playing catch up with this kind of thing, but they never remain caught up for long. Already, tips are circulating on how to mask the contents of your shared folder from your ISP, effectively blocking agencies from knowing what exactly you are downloading.

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