Serenity...but the first pirated HD-DVD movie has hit the torrents! According to an Ars Technica report the HD version of Joss Whedons Serenity has been ripped and posted - but at a whopping 19.6GB you're not going to be downloading that one on a whim.

While it's great that the studios are learning the hard way that the more effort and ingenuity they put into making peoples experience with media less pleasant the harder the community fights back.

It would make sense instead to be focusing on the quality and diversity of those productions and not fighting for more and more restrictive use and vendor/product lock-in (and I'm thinking movies, music and ebooks here).

Only time will tell if this hack is a genuine, repeatable opening of the flood-gates, or if the combined weight of technology that is in the HD-DVD format to present this sort of thing is able to stem the flow.

Either way, Serenity is a great movie so don't steal it... rent it, or better yet buy it!

Update: and it looks like Blu-Ray wasn't that far behind in the stakes to crack the encryption.

Update (Feb 07): And now it looks like the mechanism is fatally compromised and it's not even a hack