I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.

With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of it", while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.

The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.

In that realm, the terms as I understand them:

Cam: Some regular at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.

TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.

Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge a film at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].

In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.

[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...

CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.

They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.

It's rightfully romanticized when companies fail to make their products easily available for purchase and usable far into the future.

Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:

https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed

Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu.

I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.

I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:

If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work or is no longer for sale in a manner consistent with its original form of sale, people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work.

> For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price

So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.

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

I’m not a lawyer or anything, but aren’t these all public domain?

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

They are under public domain. But they still could theoretically distribute them. Theoretically, pretty much anyone could, but most of this list is just essentially lost to time. They couldn't even if they wanted to for a lot of these.

But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?

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

If you transpose back to a similar time period, post-nascence, of the film industry, they were basically trashing irreplaceable film reels for kicks.

EA: “You software pirates lack honor, you do it just to make a quick buck, just for money! We do it, for glory, for integrity, for respect!”

Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”

When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?

Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with other or additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.

I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.

you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers

You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that

Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.

I’m talking about what motivates people, not the benefits of piracy. The vast majority of people engaging in the practice are doing it to get free media. If someone isn’t even practicing basic 321 I don’t want to hear the word “preservation” or “archive” lol

In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.

Agreed! Although i will say i believe you are meaningfully contributing to preservation when you permaseed torrents, especially in private trackers. These are geographically distributed copies available for others to grab and contribute to keeping safe.

Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.

it's still love of the game tho?

donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary

I miss the days when you could earn enough for rent with a part-time job and support the piracy ecosystem in your off-time.

[delayed]