I have a friend who doesn't only preserve media, but also makes it more accessible. Specifically DVDs of the non-english sort are digitized, translated, and subtitles added, without removing any of the existing content. If there are space limitations, existing content is slightly compressed (for example audio commentary tracks). Additionally great care is taken to strictly adhere to (or even make adherent to) industry standards, so the resulting files, when burned to any dvd, will work with any player regardless of age or compatibility.

Some would call it piracy.

But effectively media from the 80s and earlier, that would otherwise become completely unavailable, or rot, becomes preserved and available for many generations to come.

I absolutely love that, and hope that I can one day contribute in a similar way. It's a shame that these people get clumped in the same camp as that college kid who watches bootleg theatre films just so they don't have to pay for an admission ticket. There is a community that attracts these people: https://www.reddit.com/r/datahoarder

Yeah, said friend has long overtaken those and is working with way more professional and safe storage solutions than anything i see browsing over that reddit. :)

Though that's secondary to the focus on quality and value of the material.

Going off of that, it'd be really cool to have a wiki for movie transcripts that covers multiple languages. I just searched real quick for a wiki for transcripts and found transcripts.wikia [0] but it doesn't seem to have transcripts translated in other languages. Would such a wiki for transcripts be legal anyway ?

[0] http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_VI:_Retu...

https://subscene.com/ are pretty good. Lots of spam and duplicates, but you can find most anything. They probably don't get much trouble since they don't distribute actual movies.

I believe it, this reminds me of this rapper called Benefit that got popular using Napster:

'Benefit is up there with MF Doom when it comes to being mysterious. He popped onto the scene in the early 2000's when Napster first blew up, when (by a longshot) he won a rap contest out of over 1000 MC's put on by Napster. This made him the first MC to truly use the internet to blow up (seems like forever ago, huh?). He never really put an album together, just happened to make enough tracks out of his $18 setup to release 2002's Benefit, which is filled with too many dope tracks. ' [0]

I can see how even without the help of a contest, indie artists could use sharring platforms to get traction.

[0] http://djbooth.net/news/entry/underground-rappers-vol-3