Why does purpose or ethics matter. It is called piracy and not robin hood.

Whatever the intent, it incentives archival even with selfish purposes across different decentralized sources, which is pretty valuable with that huge amount of data that would be expensive for a centralized entity to archive on their own. Not to mention a single point of failure. So even selfishness is leading to helping history not be lost.

And you think 100 years from now or longer if some random historian comes across some still working storage containing long lost media that a pirate had kept they are going to care about the legality of that at the time?

And don’t forget how much game versions change from launch, so new version is history too. Same for movies and shows and books with how editing has been done that’s led to loss of the original copy. And led to reliance of fans to restore content like Star Wars.

It is happening now with Netflix too where now the pirated versions of some Netflix show is the only way to see what was originally shown.

“We have George Lucas’d things also that people don’t know about,” the siblings told Variety, referring to the Star Wars director’s much-critiqued altered re-releases of the original franchise. “It’s not, like, story, but you’re essentially patching in shots.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/netflix-retroactive-editing

The MCU’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is barely a year old, but even the Marvel superhero miniseries isn’t immune from Disney’s re-editing efforts. In March 2022 some devoted Reddit fans discovered that a scene where Bucky throws a pipe through a woman’s shoulder had been altered so that woman falls back on the pipe instead.

https://screenrant.com/tv-shows-films-edited-after-original-release/

14 years… Time doesn’t stand still for that long.