There was documentary done a few years back on the comedian Bob Monkhouse and about his obsession archiving media, a lot of which were thought to be lost forever. He had multiple VHS players set up around his house to record things in an era where not many of the general public had one. He also kept tv guides and had written into the margins if there was a change in the schedule. He was actually taken to court in the 70's for copyright infringement but the case was thrown out, though quite a few items from his archive were seized and never returned.

I knew what this was from without reading the description. Such a sad portion of a wikipedia article to read.

I wish there were something like bittorrent that worked better as an archival mechanism. The weakness of bittorrent is that material tends to disappear completely when there is no longer widespread popular interest in it.

Don’t even have to go that far back. Look at Netflix removing the DnD Community episode because Chang dresses as a drow elf (black skin, white hair). He even says he’s a drow in the episode yet Netflix removed it from the series since it was “racist”. Without pirates that episode would quickly be forgotten.

While I agree that piracy can be preservation of media, it's most often not the case.

Streaming torrents directly or through real-debrid doesn't help preserve media at all. Leeching only without keeping torrents alive also doesn't keep media accessible.

Some people might store media for a few decades and then reupload, but most people never create new torrents.

I'd say the pirates who help preserve media are a small subset of pirates.

There's all the remasters and tweaks as well. Star Wars is the obvious example, but even things like Red Dwarf got messed with with awful looking CGI plastered in.

Reminds me of Fraggle Rock. Due to the television station that produced the show being taken over many times over the years, most of the original broadcast masters have been lost. I think all episodes have been found but they're mostly at home VHS recordings.

I had the brilliant idea the other day of passing an amendment to the copywrite laws to include "independent distributors" for media that is abandoned or removed from active sale/distribution by its copywrite holder. The stipulation is that "independent distributors" are not allowed to make money in any way from the provided service and if the holder wants to rerelease something or remake it, the ID has to pull that title until the holder pulls it from circulation again. I would also put the stipulation on holders that any release has to be materially similar and at a fair market price. They are not allowed to re-release a game from 30 years ago at full modern retail, remakes have to be the same game to count (FFVII:remake would not count, but the updated PC releases of FFVII would), and the sales must be readily available to all citizens in the country (so releasing something on your JP store exclusively does not preclude the independent distribution in the states).

The concept is exactly this. Legalize the preservation of media and art for future generations and allow free access to it, something akin to a digital online museum of games, movies, television shows, and commercials. If a content owner is not willing to make money from it, then there can be no damages.

I don't have the originals, but I am happy to say I have all of the 1963 and 2005 Doctor Whos (with the exception of some new stuff... I should really get sonarr.) They are on i2p and I am still seeding if anyone wants them.

This is extremely common with media that is seen as "artless" mass market as well. Dr. Who was pulp and not deemed worth preserving.

Another example is the show that made me get into model making: Art Attack. A disney show made in the UK that was never collected or released in the original version.

There are some torrents of the Hindi version apparently, but that's all.

Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker's logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who

Sorry to be that guy but if the tapes were never preserved it's probably because nobody cared...