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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a bit of a grey area as IIRC videotaping TV was allowed for "time-shifting", but not for keeping long term. Whether that counts as pirating is debatable.
> Also that is a vanishingly small amount of content
Yes, that was one instance that I was recalling, but I think there's been other examples of missing episodes such as Hancock's Half Hour. I just think it's a shame that productions of historical value are lost due to the legality of personal copying although that's more relevant to shows from the 80s/90s/2000s when copying technology was widely available.