HBO Max: so basically we’re going to erase most of our shows as a tax dodge in a week and you can’t stop us
A Youtuber who makes two hour long & strangely ominous video essays about Lost Media: it’ll all be on Archive dot org by the end of the week you son of a bitch. Also the forbidden original pilot of Caillou and the French dub of the long sought after August 27th, 2001 Spongebob bumpers
Lost Media Indiana Jones swiping the last copy of Batgirl from the CEO of Discovery and shouting “it BELONGS on Archive dot org and sketchy torrent sites!”
This is all fine from a consumer perspective but it utterly screws creators.
Did you know that if a company writes off your show or movie, you don’t get residuals from it anymore?
If I were a creator, I’d rather my stuff be pirated than become lost media and cease to exist entirely. Just throwing that out there.
On Twitter after the HBO Max shitshow, showrunners were literally begging archivists to pirate their shows in order to preserve them. I don’t have screenshots on hand, but Owen Dennis of Infinity Train and all the crew of Summer Camp Island come immediately to mind.
Like, at this point, the creators have already been screwed. The networks are hanging them out to dry. This isn’t a “if you pirate it, it doesn’t get renewed” situation, this is a “if you DON’T pirate it, it might become completely lost” situation.
It’s like how the original 1931 Frankenstein movie had scenes cut from the completed film by censors under the Hays Code. The original film wasn’t rediscovered until the 1980s, and then only because someone had stashed away an original copy somewhere.
Media piracy and media preservation are two sides of the same coin, and there’s not really a universal code of ethics that can be applied. Sometimes piracy is a gray area. Sometimes it’s vital.
You’re not a pirate, you’re a Rogue Archivist.
archivists are like adventure game protagonists.
we’ll take anything not nailed down or guarded.
and if it is nailed down, we’ll look for a crowbar
if it’s guarded, we’ll find a way to distract the guard.
ALT