Student web-surfers in York have found a way to watch the new Star Wars film for free, weeks before its long-awaited arrival in British cinemas.

The Phantom Menace, the new prequel to the blockbusting Star Wars Trilogy, will not be released in Britain until July 16.

But students at the University of York have already seen the film courtesy of the Internet.

One student who watched the film told the Evening Press he had been impressed by the clarity of what he had seen and said he was sure it was the genuine article.

"I watched it with a group of friends last night after someone told me it was being shown in someone's room," he said.

"It was cinema quality and as far as I could tell it was the whole movie from beginning to end."

Geraldine Maloney, of Twentieth Century Fox, which holds the distribution rights to the film in Britain, said the company had no knowledge of the film being shown on the Internet and did not wish to comment on the students' claims.

But Marcus Austin, editor of Internet.Works magazine, said the practice of films being pirated for use on the Internet was relatively rare and would be technically difficult to achieve.

He said it would be an offence to copy the film and said it could also be a crime to watch a downloaded copy, even it the viewer did not realise it had been acquired illegally.

"Music copyright is often abused in the this way on the net," he said.

"But it is much rarer for it to happen with films, not least because the file needed to contain an entire film would have to be huge.

"I think someone would need to have a copy of the film on video and then transfer that on to the net.

"It may be one of these cases where someone has actually taken a camera into an American cinema when the film was being shown and recorded a copy of it that way.

"But that would mean it would be a pretty poor reproduction and there would probably be members of the audience wandering about in it.

"If it is of good quality it will certainly not be the result of some sort of backyard operation of that sort."

Richard Withers, of the City of York Council trading standards department, confirmed it was against the law to charge to watch the film and it would also be illegal to make copies of it from the Internet.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.