I maintain a cultural archive of about 60 terabytes for this purpose. I have both the original and upscaled Simpsons and Seinfeld, but I mostly focus on stuff that people never think about (ever hear of Jon Benjamin Has a Van, that sort of thing). As storage mediums and formats change I carry it forward, last year I started adding YouTube creators. Eventually I'll hand that task off to my daughter if she also sees that work as important.

You can always ship it to the Internet Archive if she doesn't and you can't find a way to maintain an independent copy. Maybe by then you can set up some kind of organization like IA for the replication value.

That's a fair point, the idea is also to preserve the media that we as a family consume. Growing up my dad would take me to the video store and find old classics from his childhood, the archive contains many of those as well as all of the stuff important to me. I hope that she will add her own media and then pass it to her children (should she choose to have them that is). What we choose to read, listen to and watch tells us so much about who we are as a culture and as a people.

One of the tragic effects of the MAFIAA's legal efforts to stop piracy, was that, though they could never reduce the amount of popular stuff being pirated, they did manage to shut down a lot of niche sites or private trackers, where people had meticulously curated rare and obscure content that was impossible to get anywhere else.

I recently discoveree the "kai" version of popular animes, meaning a recut of the hundred of episodes by fans to remove repeatitions, fillers, useless flashbacks and long stares or empty dialogs that just waste time.

You can now watch the entire Dragon Ball and DBZ in half the time it should take, missing nothing from the original, saving on frustration.

There are gigabytes of content, it's crazy to me some people spend years on those and just give them away as torrents, doing a better job that the right holders swimming in money.

Naruto Kai made the series watchable for me.

That was a good show. Got any Exit 57?

First I've heard of it, but that is exactly the sort of thing I'm going for, I'll check it out. I thought I had most of the UCB related stuff, but it goes to show you how much of this stuff will fall through the cracks once we have a generation or two of streamers. My white whale is Viva Variety[0], I've even requested it at some of the private clubs and nobody can find it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viva_Variety

Hey thanks. I never thought to look there as I thought everything they held was past copyright.

Absolutely. Preservation can only be achieved properly through passion not money. The copyright holders of these cultural artifacts don’t care about them enough to properly preserve them.

Only passionate fans or enthusiasts care enough to make sure things are preserved to an acceptable quality. Companies will always do dumb things like change aspect ratio, remove scenes, ship low quality video, audio or subtitles.

BBC throwing away or taping over all those Dr Who tapes.

I sometimes dream of there being a license to pirate, kind of like paying for Netflix. You'd pay 15 bucks per month to an agency that monitors the well known trackers and divides the proceeds accordingly. Or maybe a cloud service where scene releases can be uploaded and people can pay for monthly access. Just anything that lets the copyright holders to have their pound of flesh, while allowing the people actually invested in the quality of the product and its distribution do their thing.

There was something that was known as DVD or BluRay, Digital download release for the same. Do u think having available to download is something which is not possible in this age? Studios and companies just went full greedy, they just want to milk you constantly for every time u watch it.

That and/or owning DVDs/BRs.

Most of my friends laugh at me for still buying physical media, but the reality is I don't trust streaming services, or IP owners in general really. There is no way my kids are growing up thinking that Han didn't shot first.

I hope your kids get to watch Han shoot first in 4K - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

Oh man thanks for this link. Hadn't heard of this project. I only had Harmy's despecialized. I'll definitely compare them.

Yes, another example is the 90s show Beavis & Butthead. A big part of the show was the two characters watching music videos and making fun of them. It’s a licensing nightmare so a lot of them got cut out in subsequent releases of the show.

Anything with musical guests also suffers from this issue. There is no legal and complete copy of SNL that you can buy, no matter what you are willing to pay. A great deal of MTV's content isn't able to be sold, and MTV was probably the most important television station from a cultural perspective during it's heyday.

Arrgh, matey! Conservation ahoy.