I’m not in the piracy scene, but my impression was they routinely pass full res movies around the Internet without much barrier to discovering and downloading them, at least to technically competent users. Is that still true?
Plus, while it's definitely the case that with sustained interest, old data tends to linger around... the moment the interest wanes, it's gone. I've been on the internet for a while and there are so many hobby sites, forums, and software projects from the early days that are simply gone for good (and not on archive.org).
The difference is that a few people with lots of resources take on legal risk. In the piracy example many people with few resources take on risk, which works out since no one wants to sue people with no money.