> These are digital assets though. Him "squirreling" them away doesn't deprive anyone else from having their own copy to play.

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.

So? What if it was a short story or a poem? Do we have the right to read it? If someone doesn't wish to share their work, that's their own prerogative.

It's not his work, at least not in the sense of him creating it.

Copyright law is a mess, but there are archival services, like the Internet Archive, that can effectively advise someone on how they can, in a way that does not cause one to risk legal liability (a problem much more real to the average person than generally-theoretical and mostly-breathless chances of criminal charges) to them, preserve those artifacts for the future.

Collectors prevent prototype hardware emulators from being created too, and those are legal.