I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.
So, I do it a bit.
I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.
This reminds me I have some film that I need to get digitized and uploaded to IA. From what I can tell they are clips from concerts in the Chicago area in the 1980s. And I think this proves GPs point, because to be honest I personally have no interest in live music, but when I found those in a can at a thrift store for $20, you bet your ass I bought them to be preserved and not turned into someone's ill-advised art project (or something equally destructive). When I see something that I know /someone/ will value I will always do what I can to save it from destruction/the trash/someone who doesn't know the value.
On one side, the dominant consumer society we live in is extremely busy churning through anything that can be sold as a product and then thrown away so that the new can replace them. Buildings go up as quickly as they come down, and we digitize books just to destroy them in pursuit of productivity gains we may or may not ever get. And of course, conflicts and war continue to destroy priceless artefacts, like they've always done.
On the other side, when you consider objective metrics, I don't think humanity ever spent so much effort and resources into preserving the past as today. Archaeology was basically invented less than 250 years ago, and now it's everywhere and continuously expanding. A lot of places are now not even allowed to change, museums are plentiful and overflowing, and the internet created a completely new world of human creation that we are increasingly trying to preserve (IA etc).
Yep, definitely! I know of instances where professional archives and libraries work with specialized torrent sites to archive content directly and these days that's sometimes necessary with how content is locked down, games are dependent on a server or DRM schemes don't make archiving easy.
You frequently hear of cases where the last remaining official copy got lost and only due to some fan service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694382) data could be recovered.
I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.
This is true but people also use it as a magic shield to (needlessly IMO) justify their piracy, even though they are 1) only downloading things they happen to like and 2) don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol, let alone anything remotely resembling SOP for preservation.
I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
> don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol
The swarm is the backup. You can't beat hundreds of hash-checked copies across the globe.
> I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.
I bet you're right. Isn't it wonderful, then, that those 1 in 1000 (who are overrepresented in tracker admin and release group/scene work) are able to harness those selfish impulses and turn them into the most complete, accessible, and durable distributed art preservation project in human history.
There are some preservation efforts on a couple of the big movie trackers. One is "donate Xtb of space and use this script to manage it" so you don't choose the torrents, they get assigned till your donated space is full.
In Another gives bonuses for adopting torrents where the original seeder doesn't want to/can't seed anymore.
Neither are perfect but as one of those 1 in 1000 its nice to help where I can.
> The Library of Congress is selective about what it preserves too, as is every museum. No single entity could possibly hope to preserve every film, it takes a community.
You can’t possibly compare this to yet another person downloading all of Friends to watch off their hard drive, and most of these people aren’t seeding back anyway, so they’re not even part of the swarm.
I don’t object to piracy but I do object to preservation arguments made for/by people who are in no way thinking along those lines. I can’t buy tailgating on some clearly inapplicable altruism argument.
Meanwhile, there's examples of long lost footage being found again precisely because people were recording/copying/pirating for their own purposes. I'm thinking explicitly of Doctor Who footage that the BBC overwrote (tape was expensive), but years later was found on privately recorded video tapes left in someone's shed.
Personally, I enjoy pirating less well-known scifi/horror films and series. It's surprising how relatively recent productions can "disappear" when there's no streaming company interested in it. My usual example of disappearing TV is the third season of "Monkey Dust". The music rights weren't agreed, so the third season never made it to DVD and is impossible to watch legally, but hopefully people like me will keep it available nonetheless.
There's also companies that like to censor previous output, such as Disney and their pro-Nazi propaganda.
They were in no way pirated, they were recorded under the UK's copyright exemption for this purpose.
Also that is a vanishingly small amount of content, the vast majority of recovered Doctor Who episodes were found from broadcaster archives, not the public.
Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.