For me, a huge justification for piracy: archives. If the content license holders won't do it then someone has to preserve this stuff before it disappears.
I've never understood why a content creator would not digitize their archives and then offer it through streaming somehow. After a while it would seem the eventual revenue might offset the cost of the archiving. Free backup.
Imagine if one of the older studios suddenly offered every bit of content they had in their vaults, that still could be digitized, on Netflix, Hulu or even their own site? In some cases that would be five decades of content. We're talking hundreds/thousands of movies and tv shows that the current generation doesn't even know exist.
But no, the film sits in a salt mine somewhere slowing rotting away.
For me, a huge justification for piracy: archives.
Not just you, but also the US supreme court. If you already own a copy of that movie on any format it's legal to have 1 digital backup and you can acquire that backup by downloading it. Where most people get in trouble is by re-uploading it. If you do that, you're distributing something you have no right to distribute. And the most successful aspect of bittorrent is how efficiently it turns you into a distributer.
That's true, but not quite what I meant. It's conceivable that if everyone made a digital backup of content then it almost certainly be available in one form of another.
I'm speaking more of the topic of the article. If the content holder has decided to no longer make content they control available to the masses then it is almost a moral obligation for someone to digitize that content for uploading to the Internet so that is not lost. How much content have we already lost that should be in the public domain but no one has the content any longer to digitize?
But I'm not talking just movies and tv shows. This could easily cover other mundane topics of life such as sporting events, interviews, documentaries, newscasts and so on.
This is the time that someone in the future, say 100 years, could have a near perfect record of what's going on today with the sheer amount of data we are producing on a daily basis. Not just video content but emails, texting, forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If only we could keep copies of content somewhere convenient so that people can get to them whenever they wish.
Now, be clear, I'm not saying that this content should be freely available the moment it is completed. The creator should have the right to recoup their costs plus make profit. Especially since profit might be required for the creator to create more. But we should have saner copyright laws in place so that it doesn't take near 100 years for something to become public domain. That kind of nonsense guarantees that something we feel is not important today may be lost and missed later. The missing early episodes of Dr. Who that keeps getting mentioned is an excellent example.
I've never understood why a content creator would not digitize their archives and then offer it through streaming somehow. After a while it would seem the eventual revenue might offset the cost of the archiving. Free backup.
Imagine if one of the older studios suddenly offered every bit of content they had in their vaults, that still could be digitized, on Netflix, Hulu or even their own site? In some cases that would be five decades of content. We're talking hundreds/thousands of movies and tv shows that the current generation doesn't even know exist.
But no, the film sits in a salt mine somewhere slowing rotting away.