I don't want to hijack anyone's post so I'm putting my two cents about media piracy/preservation here.
As someone who literally grew up in the era of "Keep Circulating Those Tapes", I have this thing about keeping things. About "owning" them.
If I like something, be it a fanfic or a tv show or even a yt video, I save it. I literally pay money for a yearly subscription to one of the best stream ripping programs out there because I'm obsessive about this. Before that, it was ripping websites. Before that? P2P. Before that it was literally copying and pasting text into a MS Works document and printing it out.
I have fanfictions still printed out from 20 years ago. Catherine Semerjain, one of the biggest authors of Shane McMahon fanfiction in the 90s... I have her stories printed out and saved in little books. Encyclopedia Xenaica, a proto-version of a fan wiki, I have printed out and saved in it's ENTIRETY from before it was taken down.
Yes, I printed a WIKI.
This was 2000, the internet was small back then.
This behavior has never stopped.
It has, however, transformed.
So damn many data discs. SO MANY. I have volumes upon volumes of data discs of media that I saved because you literally never know when or where shit will vanish. Somewhere, I have a full series burn (absolute potato) of "You Can't Do That On Television" because that series evaporated for decades until someone uploaded the converted tapes, only for it to vanish again.
But it is preserved. I have it. On disc. On file. On backup.
I have FIVE external hard drives, the smallest of which is 3 TB. That's also the oldest and everything on there is backed up at least one other place.
The point I'm making is that I am obsessive about hard copies of things and I have even more digitally.
And it's all because I remember the 90s.
I remember before the internet, before there was streaming, before TV on DVD. Back when if you liked a show you damn sure better have your VHS running when it was on because you might not get a second chance. (I'm looking at you 90s Shanie who accidentally taped over the original broadcast of Xena's banned episode). I have been hardwired to distrust the internet as an archive because I've gotten hurt so many times.
Streaming has never been a savior.
If it's on the internet it is, by definition, temporary. They say "the internet is forever" but that's a lie. Very few things on the internet are truly forever. Everything ends, everything fades, and if you don't preserve these streaming shows while they're around you're gonna find yourself empty handed the moment that the winds change and the mood shifts.
Seriously, there's tutorials out there on how to do piracy right. Read them. Learn them. Love them.
Because it's been made very clear that corporations don't give a shit about preserving media. It's up to us.
It's always been up to us.
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