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I know this is the easy take, but there really are people who are passionate about preservation beyond just acquiring things for their own use.

I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.

by MomsAVoxell5 hours ago|

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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.

by ChickeNES3 hours ago|

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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.

by theK4 hours ago|

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> to record the nature of the world around you for the future

That's cool.

> The future needs it, kinda.

Agreed but we seem to be in the minority seeing that most people nowadays seem to be speed running to make Asimov's Foundation into a documentary.

by dewey5 hours ago|

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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.

by Waterluvian5 hours ago|

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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.

by Forgeties795 hours ago|

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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.

by hamdingers2 hours ago|

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> only downloading things they happen to like

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.

by deadbunny1 hours ago|

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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.

by Forgeties792 hours ago|

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> 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.