Right at the end of The Insider, Al Pacino walks out of the New York CBS building for the last time, the logo prominent on the lobby wall behind him. As he steps out of the revolving door, the film cuts to slow-motion; the sunlight hits him just as he flips up the collar of his coat in a practiced, unconscious gesture. The camera stays on the inside of the revolving doors and slowly pans left into blackness as Pacino becomes just one more man in a city of millions. The whole scene takes about thirty seconds. It's absolutely masterful.

But the crowning touch is the music, thirty seconds of something evocative and vaguely haunting with a driving beat behind it. I just rewatched the film last night, and I knew I had to have that music.

I Googled the soundtrack, narrowed down the possibilities from the reviews, and downloaded a couple of tracks via LimeWire until I found it. It's a remix of Massive Attack's "Safe From Harm" and it rocks. Damn, I'm good.

That success got me thinking about a track I'd heard in two movies: it's playing in Go when Timothy Olyphant makes Sarah Polley take her shirt off, and it's playing in Snatch when the trailer (excuse me, caravan) is burning and Brad Pitt's friends are holding him back. Not much information for a search, there. But I Googled the Snatch soundtrack (I know it's not on the Go soundtrack; I own it) and found it after reading three or four reviews. And guess who it is? Massive Attack.

I went to LimeWire and downloaded the song. I moved it to my iTunes player and gotcha! The RIAA had gotten there before I did; the Snatch soundtrack CD is copy-protected, loaded with extraneous digital noise. It sounds normal when played on a CD player, but when converted to mp3 and downloaded by someone else, it pops and skips so much as to be essentially unlistenable.

I deleted the track and downloaded another copy. It had also been encoded. I downloaded another. Encoded. And another. Encoded. That's when I fell asleep with all the lights and the computer still on.

I woke today with new resolve. I know that some dedicated hackers have already found a workaround for the problem; they must have clean copies of encoded CDs online. I logged back on to LimeWire, downloaded the song and transferred it to iTunes. Bingo! Thank you, whoever you are.

The RIAA claims that file sharing will kill the music industry. But without file sharing, I might never have discovered this deeply strange and wonderful band.