The Torrent Droid app certainly has the potential to cause some mischief. It aims to turn Android phones into portable barcode scanners, that link directly to a BitTorent search engine for remote downloading.
This is not the first app to turn your Android based phone into a barcode scanner. The most famous is ShopSavvy. It can scan just about any product; search the web for it and link to a variety of online and street prices. It can even use the phone's GPS to locate your closest retailer.
^ShopSavvy works by scanning any product barcode and searching its database for matches^
According to the Torrent Droid's web site, the app only works with BitTorent site Pirate Bay and won't be released until next month. For now, with final ruling regarding Pirate Bay's future still to be delivered in the Swedish courts (the verdict is expected in April), we can only expect that other popular BitTorrent servers will be brought online.
In the meantime, we wonder whether hovering about DVD shelves, flicking through titles and photographing the DVD barcodes, is a good way to advertise yourself as a movie pirate. If you're going to download illegal copies, you're likely going to just as easily type in the movie you're looking for on you PC at home, rather than going through the hassle of scanning it. Marching into a store with your phone scanner is a bit like saying, "Look at me, I like to pirate movies!"
Torrent Droid is not a Star Wars app, but a DVD-Bittorent downloader for scanning physical barcodes.