Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either).

Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one.

Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...