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.

> 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.