“This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”
Piracy is the reason why video games survived what I call ‘the early creation purge’. Basically if you look at the 20th century and see various media that was created, most of the early stuff is gone. Like in the silent film era, 90% of all the films made (if we are using Hollywood movies as a metric) are lost, and probably also the film of other countries, too. Even 75% of all early sound film is lost, and for TV, the earliest broadcasts were never recorded, and many from the 1940s to 60s were also never recorded and are lost forever.
Video games? They’re the sole exception. Thanks to piracy and emulation, we can play computer and arcade and console games from the 1970s without issue. This has never happened before, and we have emulation devs and software pirates to thank. Ironically the overwhelming majority of abandonware video games online were not the originals… they were copies of copies that someone not only pirated back in the day, but also cracked. As a 90s kid, I smile whenever I see the RawCopy screen when I load up an old MS-DOS game.
Archive.org is doing God’s work for a lot of stuff.
It’s a crying shame what happened to early Doctor Who episodes, to be honest.