The Pirate Preservationists

[Kamaji]

The Pirate Preservationists

When keeping cultural archives safe means stepping outside the law

JESSE WALKER
FROM THE OCTOBER 2023 ISSUE of Reason Magazine

Long ago, when telephones were attached to walls and Sam Goody clerks roamed the earth, I stumbled onto a website whose proprietor possessed some of the sessions that Bob Dylan recorded with Johnny Cash back in 1969. One of the songs had gotten an official release, but the rest had been left in the vault, for most fans little more than an enticing legend.

It was 1996. In those days, acquiring illicit music on the internet was a low-tech, largely analog process. I sent the man an email, he agreed to share the recordings with me, I mailed him a blank cassette, and two months later the tape came back. It now contained one great performance—a cover of Carl Perkins' "Matchbox," with Perkins himself on guitar—and several endearingly sloppy ones.

The music's journey did not end there. I belonged to an email list for fans of the Kinks, and someone on it had promised to ship me some rare material by the band. In exchange for those tapes, I sent him copies of several items from my own stash of music, including the freshly acquired Dylan/Cash bootleg. Revisiting our 27-year-old correspondence, I see that at one point he told me that he could dub videotapes more quickly than audiotapes because he could copy the videos at his job.

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But while we shouldn't want to return to those pre-web days, there's something to be said for that online-offline hybrid space where my old tape-trading network dwelled—if not as a world to recreate, then as a way to think about cultural preservation. And there's something to be said for the bootleggers and pirates. Whether or not they mean to do it, they're salvaging pieces of our heritage.

We Are the Contraband Preservation Society
In the wake of WarnerMedia's merger with Discovery last year, one of the conglomerate's arms—the streaming service then known as HBO Max—canceled a bunch of shows. I don't merely mean that the company stopped making new episodes: The old episodes disappeared from the website too. Some of the missing programs popped up on other video-on-demand sites, but others, from the science fiction satire Made for Love to the family sitcom Gordita Chronicles, seemed to exit the internet entirely.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2023/09/10/the-pirate-preservationists/