OK well that was much easier than I thought it would be. Ordered the Blu-Ray set while downloading it to ease my conscience. Now on to Parts V and VI ...
Sorry for the noise!
Thanks for the info; but my point was really to understand whether or not the various instructions out there, of which I am sure 95% are out of date and don't work any more, are worth following, with the alternative being that things have been shut down so hard that the only way to get this thing is to "know somebody" (and unfortunately, I don't "know somebody").
Anyway, I believe I have received ample responses now to indicate that yes, you can still get this from publicly available locations without special connections. Which is encouraging to me. I didn't realize that there were YouTube videos on how to approach finding the download, and thanks for the pointer there.
Thank you again for your time and your responses.
Hello there. I know there must have been countless questions about "where do I download this" before. So I'm not going to ask that.
All I want to know is, is it still possible to find a way to download the despecialized verison of Star Wars if one looks hard enough? I've never torrented or otherwise downloaded warez of any kind before (do people still call them warez? Or is my 1990s terminology showing?), so I really don't have a good way to gauge the availability of this download. I just need to know, is it worth my time to even try? Or has it all dried up by now and I'd just be wasting my time?
For what it's worth, I plan to show Star Wars to my son, who is 7, for the first time as soon as I can get my hands on a copy of this. I won't show him the bastarized special edition version or anything that Lucas screwed with since the original release. However, I will buy the Star Wars Blu-Ray and leave it in the case, never to be opened, because I personally would not find it ethical to download the despecialized edition if I didn't already own the Star Wars Blu-Ray.
I just need to know if I should even bother spending the minutes (or more likely hours, for me, since I am literally started from square 0 with regards to knowing how to go about finding this thing) necessary to acquire the despecialized version. I'm not asking where to find it, I just want to know if I should look.
Thank you!