I feel like I can interpret what your saying in two ways:
- Archivism is an important goal
- Often cannot be accomplished in a way that meets the creators interests
- Important enough that sometimes it supersedes the interest of the creators
- Therefore, when all these preconditions hold, piracy is justified to accomplish the goal of archivism.
The other way:
- Morally, piracy is preservation
The former is a line of reasoning I think most people could get behind. I think we could work to outline what cases meet the criteria at each stage, handles cases that other goals might have more precedence (for example the right to privacy might trump the right to archive). This is a lot of work. I would expect multiple lifetimes of energy and activism would be necessary meaningfully move the needle on copyright law in a way that benefited society over all.
The later is a dogmatic statement that steamrolls over any other interests. While there are clearly exceptional cases where the current system fails (that you point out), it's not clear that clinging to this position above all others will result in a net benefit.
It's hard to imagine an expert in Archivism doesn't have some understanding of the moral boundaries of their field. As such, I would expect most experts to take the former approach.
So when the second approach is _exactly what you say_, it's hard to take the "Piracy is preservation" as a meaningful stance to advance Archivism, and instead leads me to interpret it as talking point to justify piracy.
And this isn't to say an individual _couldn't_ start from a dogmatic position, do a ton of work and make the world a better place. Stallman for example has taken a pretty extreme position with free software, done a ton of work, contributed to ton of valuable institutions. All this swimming upstream into much of the rest of societies existing policies. But it seems the exception. And I think in most of these cases the burden of 'demonstrating net societal value' correctly falls on the activist, for example in areas other than free software, Stallmans dogmatic positions haven't been well received and I think appropriately so. (And to be fair, I think most great activists have some of this approach, at least in the storied version of their work, but as Ziwe would say, "How else do you compare yourself to Martin Luther King?")
So yeah, if Archivism is your life's work, good luck. I hope you can find ways to increase the net value of society.
But really I think most people just want free stuff and will say whatever to justify it.