With the recent leak via pictures of key some moments of THE DARK KNIGHT, it has been an all too familiar scene that has been repeated countless times over the Internet in all forms of media.

Prior to the freedom that the Net now provides, leaks like this would rely on people being on the "inside" of some inner circle to take advantage of them. The same goes for everything that happens in the back-room, bootlegs, sessions, out-of-print books and so on. The Internet has leveled the playing field enormously in the search for illicit or hard to get material.

The bootleg industry has been gutted and replaced with a free-for-all -- a “no-charge required” pursuit enjoyed by hundreds of thousands.

In many ways, I think that this is an encouraging progression -- bootlegs hold little to no financial value any longer. They are not sold but freely distributed within the groups that would get the most from them. They are more an education tool now, aiding an artist's profile in the general public's eye that has perhaps fallen from lack of exposure. The Dylan site -- Expecting Rain -- is a unique case in that, while it contains an A-Z catalogue of Bob Dylan's concerts/sessions/alternate versions, it has received a "free pass" from the record company. Dylan's official website actually linking to it as one of their preferred resources.

This is however only one facet that "digital distribution" allows. There are of course hundreds of thousands of people who refuse to pay for anything and refuse to wait for anything. Everything is immediate gratification.

Paying for music has gone out the window as quickly as anything. It now seems to be mandatory to provide a link to download an album or a book if one wishes to converse about it on a message board.

There is a foolish and misguided mentality that we are owed something in instances such as Christopher Nolan's upcoming film, THE DARK KNIGHT. Much the same way as music/books/movies, anything attached to the production is expected to be a free commodity. Leaked pictures that were never meant to be seen at this juncture are seen as part of that “debt” that Nolan and company “owe” to us. The problem with how people see Art in the post-Internet age is one of viewing it as PRODUCT and nothing else.

Well, ya know what? It's not. Not by a long shot.

Hundreds, probably thousands, of hours have been poured into this production from every conceivable angle. You can build it up and rationalise it all you want, but if you had created something that you had spent countless days slaving over, sacrificing other areas of your life to commit to this one thing that you felt you had to create, and someone breaks into your home and plasters it all over the Internet, giving you the excuse "but yeah, I like your stuff, so I figured I deserved to see it" -- how would you feel? And more importantly, what would you do about it?

Here's a simple fact: You're not owed anything.

It's something that often raises the ire of certain crowds, but hey, it's true. The mentality which assumes that financial support (i.e. purchasing the comic books that you like) gives you a right take apart a creative process, step on that same creative process, and disrupt it because it is what you're owed is one FAT fallacy.

The only thing you're owed is what you get for your money. When you go to the cinema in July and pay your money, then you can bitch and moan all you like.

Prior support does not give you a right to interject yourself into the creative/marketing process in a destructive, spiteful manner. And I'm not talking about everybody here. Spoilers are part of the process. Spoilers can be really fun. What I'm talking about are the people who felt that this was some moral issue. That Warner Bros. coming down hard and handing out legal threats was somehow crushing someone's “rights.”

Give me a break!

On that same thought, you think that people who were handed these legal threats are somehow obliged to put themselves in financial/personal jeopardy for message board trolls who can't form a sentence? Please!

Warner Bros. put millions of dollars into this film. People have quite literally died in the process of making this movie so that you can pay your money, sit in your seat, and have -- quite possibly -- the greatest adaptation of this character in cinema history.

People who are insistent at these times in the creative process, that they know better than the artist, are the people who destroy great works with their nay-saying and obsessive criticism. You're the people who doubted “Blonde on Blonde” and those who killed “SMiLE.”

All it is, at the end of the day is a lot of bad noise. Don't flatter yourself.

This was an incident where someone who shouldn't have leaked some pictures (which from my point of view were pretty spoilerish) and did leak those pictures. End of story. Anyone who continued (and continues) to put pictures out there also knew that they shouldn't have. Wanting something and having a right to something are two very different things.

Learn to know the difference, please.