I understand that it's their right to do whatever they want to with their "treasures" but the point of a lens is to take photos, the point of a game is to be played, the point of music is to be listened to.

Maybe you're complaining that he didn't distribute copies for others to enjoy, but copyright law would make him a criminal for doing that, why should he take that risk?

It's funny that this guy would is considered a criminal for making copies of these games, but once they are old enough and lost forever by the original copyright holders he's suddenly a hero for having these old copies. Copyright law is fucked.

But the collector in question very specifically didn't want other copies to exist, and threatened to never upload rare games again if it were shared outside the small, private community:

> According to a screenshot uploaded by Saint, the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked Labyrinthe

He very, very specifically wanted to deprive others.

We recently had a magic the gathering old cards discussion internally. People were showing off their collections, many of which were in the mid five digits price range (full beta power etc).

People keep those things in bank vaults. If they play for fun they just use proxies. The odd time they go to a real tournament they take out the cards and use them.

To me the desire to collect these things doesn’t take away anything. It is still a game, but it is also something to collect and enjoy just owning something rare for some, and that rare thing happens to also have other utility.

The point of a thing can be multifaceted, and collection is as valid as any other point is, to me at least.

I guess, however, the collectors can just as validly suggest that they hate photographers who USE (and, hence, run the risk of scratching, chipping, breaking, whatever a classic lens which really, really belonged in a collection!) the lenses they'd rather collect...

Besides, if it wasn't for those pesky photographers ooohing and aaahing about how lens such-and-such was fantastic, prices would be oh-so-much-lower for those true lovers of vintage optics, the collectors... :)

If the leaker had any bit of sense, (s)he would've copied everything first.

“It's a weird situation because this really is not a great way to be preserving games, just collecting things that leak out,” he said.

There's a similar situation with availability of service information for appliances, cars, laptops, phones, etc. --- a lot of it is out there if you look hard enough, but almost all of it comes from leaks.

Either way, archive.org is certainly a very good place to put things like this.

One assumes so, but it's hard to know the specifics here; if it was on some sort of proprietary forum, there might not have been an easy mass-download option. Maybe there was some sort of credits system. Maybe it was on a tenuous internet connection. If was a private torrent site -- the article's not clear but does mention bittorrent -- none of these restrictions would be that unusual.

He probably didn't

http://unmamed.mameworld.info/non_atari.html

> NOTE ON PROTOTYPES:

> As many of you know, some of these 'most wanted' prototypes are in existance but haven't been made public.

> The owner acquired these rare prototypes through contacts at Atari that let him use parts to REPAIR his machines only.

> He's kind enough put his machines on display at the California Extreme show every summer.

> He's put a lot of time and money into assembling these machines, the ROMs are indeed safely backed up, and his wishes should be respected.

> At the very least, angry/begging e-mails to him will make sure that these ROMs will never be released to the public.

> So calm down and enjoy the Atari prototypes that ARE in MAME such as Sparkz and BeatHead!

I know we've lost a lot of big movies from the early days of cinema because Hollywood studios didn't think of archiving the films, or even the scripts, responsibly but I thought we'd learned from that.

I know that studios exists to make money, and that they do that by controlling the distribution of the media, but it’s very sad when parts of our culture can get lost like this even though it’s preventable.

As it stands now most preservation projects start looking for copies of work once the copyright has expired, which is long enough for many things to already be lost, unless copies are found from so called "criminals" who made their own archives in violation of copyright law.

Sadly, I don't think there is a reasonable way to do this...

Why not? A hypothetical preservation law could require the submission of all servers, assets, and instructions required to make the game useful. Doesn't matter which version as long as the submitted package is usable as a whole.

Many other countries do the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes