While thousands of people waited in line for the premiere of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," hundreds of others didn't wait in line at all. And they didn't have to pay.

They downloaded pirated copies of the movie, burned them onto DVDs, and watched the last and latest of the Star Wars saga in their homes.

Illegal? Yes. And also very, very easy.

What is apparently a pre-release studio copy of "Revenge of the Sith" was uploaded onto the BitTorrent file-sharing network. First hundreds, then thousands of people downloaded it. And one of the features of BitTorrent is that the more people who download the movie, the faster those downloads get.

Friday, more than 50,000 people were in the process of downloading it.

The availability of "Sith" - even before it hit the theaters - demonstrates the pressures industries are facing from file-sharing networks. Millions of dollars of potential revenue is lost to pirated music, movies and software.

Those networks, of which BitTorrent is the largest, allow users to share whatever files they have on their computers with other users around the world. And more often, those files are songs and movies.

"Fans have been lined up for days to see "Revenge of the Sith,'" Dan Glickman, president and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement. "To preserve the quality of movies for fans like these and so many others, we must stop these Internet thieves from illegally trading valuable copyrighted materials online."

And trade they do; BitTorrent is only one of the peer-to-peer or "P2P" networks - so called because they connect individual users directly to hundreds of their "peers" to share files. Others, such as the FastTrack and Gnutella, use different technology but with the same result.

In the early days of P2P file sharing, users worked with quirky software and had to spend time getting it to work. But today it's a whole new, user-friendly world.

Getting get a copy of "Sith" is fairly straightforward, and that's what has the entertainment industry in an uproar.

It requires downloading and installing free BitTorrent software, which is available at a number of Web sites. Once installed, finding content is as simple as going to other sites and entering the name of what you're looking for.

Entering "sith," for example, at one of them nets dozens of results, many of which are full-length, pirated copies of the film. A couple of mouse clicks later, you're downloading the flick.

There are caveats. The file might not be what it claims to be (although bad files tend to disappear quickly as users delete them). And inexperienced downloaders might not know how to burn the files onto a DVD.

Further, downloaded movies are often studio "screeners" that aren't Blockbuster quality. The most popular "Sith" download, for example, features an omnipresent time code across the top, counting the movie in hours, minutes, seconds and frames.

Then, of course, there's the size. Even with a high-speed connection, a full-length film takes hours to download - although thousands of users are willing to wait overnight for a free, first-run film.

While the motion picture industry is quick to attack file-sharing networks, Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, said a lot of the blame falls on the movie studios.

"I think the answer is: Guard your own back door, buddy," Boucher said. "People in the studios ... are taking copies out of the studio or from their offices, and they're simply, illegally putting this material on the Internet."

Boucher referred to a 2003 case in which a copy of "Hulk" was released to the Internet thanks to an employee at a Universal Studios' advertising agency. "Obviously," he said, "the studios need to crack down on their own staffs and on the people who they're hiring."