Book publishers are filing suit against archive.org for lending copies of books out to users. This has restarted the argument against piracy as a broad concept, and I am incredibly frustrated by the shortsightedness of the arguments against piracy. I’m not here to dissect this particular lawsuit, but to explain my thoughts on pirating, the ethos of which is pretty simple.
Piracy is good, a moral imperative for the preservation of art, and can be done responsibly. But, so the people who create the art you love can survive, you should also pay people for their work if you have the opportunity. And the way to explain this best is to start with the Wii-U.
Xenoblade Chronicles is an RPG released for the Wii, 3DS and Switch that is shockingly popular. I can’t buy two out of those three versions new anymore, but the Switch version is better anyway, right? There’s more content, it runs off the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 engine, and almost everything has been upgraded in terms of presentation and gameplay.
The Wii version has historical value in examining the career of writer and executive director Tetsuya Takahashi, of course. His changes in storytelling from Xenogears to Xenosaga to Xenoblade showcase completely different storytelling styles, and the way he chose to handle a game within the Wii’s limits allow for a greater understanding of the way art is produced. And yes, the Switch version does have presentation differences like not having the trees blow in the wind that alter the tone set in the original, along with other differences in character models and music. But there are even three more Xenoblade games for the Switch to look at, so what’s the big deal anyway? That’s close enough to everything as it is, all consolidated on one system. Except it isn’t, because there’s a fourth Xenoblade game that’s not on the Switch…
Xenoblade Chronicles X.
It’s sort of a side-story to the main Xenoblade games, but with the way Takahashi tends to tell his multi-game epics it’s hard to know that for sure. It’s a massive game that had a foundational impact on Breath of the Wild, it’s fun, it’s enormous, easier to lose yourself in than Skyrim, has only one load time that I’m aware of, and it’s a Wii-U exclusive. Shocking, I know! The Wii-U did have exclusive games that were never ported to the Switch, and according to interviews, it’s not going to be ported because of the expense involved. And it’s an incredibly good game!
But let’s say you, like me, heard of this game and were amazed you hadn’t before. Let’s say you were to buy a Wii-U right this very second, get your hands on a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles X, and pop in that disc – you wouldn’t be able to get the loadless experience that was part of what made the game so remarkable. This is because the Wii-U’s eShop had about 15 gigabytes worth of optimization to apply to the game. And I’m not talking patches, this is free DLC that you won’t be able to access because the eShop is going to close.
Anybody here know how to get pirated DLC on to the Wii-U? I certainly don’t, and pirates don’t seem to have a clear message on how to do that with console or handheld games. That will change now that Nintendo’s closing up the eShop, I’m sure – pirates will realize that this stuff needs to be accessible in a different way, and there will be changes.
Okay, maybe one game isn’t to your taste. Let’s say you’re going to play Pikmin 3 and want the paid DLC to have the most complete experience on the Gamepad. Which is what the game was built around despite its excellent Switch port. That’s not going to happen either for exactly the same reason, and the game will not be playable in full in its original form.
But that’s just the Wii-U, an entire Nintendo console that has a great deal of DS emulation, allowing you to play games that are no longer supported in any way by Nintendo and has the exact same problem. Nobody bought that console and a bunch of it was ported to the Switch anyway. Let’s look at Metal Gear Solid.
Oof. My man, you are going to have troubles here. Sticking just with the Solid series, let’s run down how to play these games.
The original Metal Gear Solid is currently available on GOG in a port that I’ve heard has compatibility issues. The original is not the Playstation Store that I could find. Maybe I missed it, I don’t know, but I can’t find it. Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, the Gamecube remake, has not been re-released in any capacity.
Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are pretty much in the same boat – they have HD ports for the PS3, XBOX 360 and Playstation Vita. The 360 version is the only one that’s currently backwards compatible, and nobody owned a Vita, but it’s missing content from the original Playstation 2 versions. These are still really good ports in all other respects, and worth buying. Even TOM said so! And if you can’t trust a robot man who hosts a cartoon show, who can you trust?
Except you actually can’t! Licensing issues with some of the live action footage means that Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 cannot be sold by anyone. This could be resolved by Konami, a notoriously stingy, abusive, anti-creator company, paying rights to get the footage back for these games, or by finding new footage and altering the original intent of the game. Either way it would mean Konami paying somebody money, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. And if Konami does pay for the footage again, the ports will remain compromised if they’re re-released. While they have announced that they are working on re-obtaining the footage for release, an announcement costs nothing from a company without credibility.
Metal Gear Solid 4 (along with its updated version in the Legacy Collection) is a Playstation 3 exclusive and I have no idea how they’d manage to get that on any modern console considering its byzantine architecture, which is why it’s so good that the PS3’s system is being studied and emulated today.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a Playstation Portable game which is really Metal Gear Solid 4.5, also has an HD port – in the same collection as Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. There is no North American standalone release, and it is missing DLC.
Metal Gear Solid V is a last-generation game that is currently available on multiple platforms.
And if you don’t know this already, there are retro games that have been available for purchase are taken from ROM sites, even using full emulators without the consultation of the original programmers.
The Gameboy Advance ports of Donkey Kong Country required the use of ROMs to recreate all assets – even game companies don’t properly archive their material due to obsolete formats and other issues. Don’t worry though: you can’t buy them anywhere, so all extended story scenes, additional material, galleries and even an entirely new soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country 3 are entirely lost unless you have the original carts. It’s only a hundred dollars or more for the trilogy. I mean, Nintendo doesn’t get a cent from it, nor the original developers, but that’s just $100 worth of details.
Even games made as late as the original Kingdom Hearts have lost their source code – like the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, the remasters for newer generations had to be remade from scratch. And the physics on that game feel just off enough that playing it on the PS2 is a relief.
Lost Odyssey, one of the last RPGs of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, is a brilliant game – but almost requires the guidebook for some of its more absurd sidequests, which at times involve backtracking to the very first area of the game. Fortunately, it has been preserved – by archive.org.
So this is looking pretty bad, but I’ve been talking video games and we can barely get people to agree that’s art at all (it is and people who disagree are wrong.) Let’s look at the central focus of this blog: comics.
What about a comic series that ran from 1992 to 2017? It’s an Archie thing, and has a Guinness World Record, so it’s certainly not nothing – and yup, it’s out of print because of rights issues, the newsprint it was originally printed on is yellowing by the day, and the digital releases of early issues and various tie-ins were garishly recolored and are missing hundreds of pages. Sonic the Hedgehog is becoming more and more lost as you read this article, including the ten years of material that Ian Flynn, writer of the upcoming Sonic Frontiers, wrote prior to its cancellation.
And as it so happens I have an entire article about how badly a different multi-million dollar global franchise has been ill-preserved across most of its lifetime: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And that’s without the other ways they seem to have screwed this process up in the mean time. I assure you the situation has not changed in a number of critical ways since 2019.
Crazy, right? But that was an indie comic, at least for much of its publication. And only a fraction of comic book titles in the world have been digitized, let alone re-released in a physical format. That sounds like a problem when I write it down, but hey, it’s just a century’s worth of history that’s mostly lost, with titles like Pogo requiring that Fantagraphics track down the original Sunday strips from old newspapers since no other archive exists. I’m sure that will all work out somehow.
Clearly, we must turn to the internet to see true preservation. What about Red vs. Blue? This webseries has been running since 2003, and is mostly available… but rarely in its original format. Ignoring that the first five seasons were remastered to look less like a closeup of Rocky’s face at the end of a fight, a choice that even I don’t mind, there are now versions were also edited to flow together ‘like a movie’ and it destroys the pacing. Even the official website has post-episode “Subscribe to our youtube channel” skit, which is just embarrassing.
Add to that, almost every complete Red vs. Blue watchlist, including the official Rooster Teeth website, fail to include some pretty critical miniseries like Recovery One (the lead-in to Season 6), trailers that are actually just prologues, and various one-shots. There are also different cuts of the episodes, though sourcing them is difficult. A number of these are viewable if you know where to look, but nothing is centralized, and a lot of it is on various DVD sets that are out of print. I’m actually planning on grabbing the Blu-Rays and DVDs to do my own edit for my collection, just so I can watch the thing as originally intended.
Don’t worry though, there will be a TV recut of Red vs. Blue to make them fit television segments… without the involvement of creator Burnie Burns, who had already edited the first 13 seasons into 95 episodes for El Rey Network. Those are lost too, by the way. I’m not even sure if they ever finished airing these edits, or if they included the miniseries I previously discussed. These are the only clip of the series I was able to find, a trailer from the El Rey facebook page and the new intro for the first five seasons.
Moving on. Did you know that Stephen King, who is a pretty famous writer all things considered, rewrote the first novel of his epic series The Dark Tower? Crazy, right? Turns out he had some later books that totally contradicted what happened in The Gunslinger, so he just rewrote pieces of it. Have you ever seen someone rewrite their work five years later? The sentences don’t flow together, and the clash is stylistically like an itch on your back in that one spot you can’t reach.
As it was originally a series of interconnected novellas kitbashed into a book, he even added a new story. Afterwards, he took the original book out of print.
And The Stand, which recently got that TV show, has two versions of the book! Well, three. The original version, based off his manuscript but edited down pretty heavily. The ‘unedited’ version – which was mostly his original draft, but with more modern references and jokes, along with other material that appears to have been changed from the original book and the manuscript he submitted. And the original manuscript, which no one but him and his editor would have necessarily read.
What about The Shining? Yup, a little research shows that there is in fact a 40-page prologue only published in a limited edition in 2017. It goes for hundreds of dollars on the rare occasion it ever does get out for sale.
Now here’s a fun one: kitbash novels, taking short stories and grafting them together to create a full book. My girlfriend loves Ray Bradbury, particularly Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles. Both books were made up of different short stories that Bradbury published over several years, with some original material. And that’s not something your English teacher’s probably going to mention. As I was talking about this article, she wondered if the original stories had been edited. After twenty minutes and eight internet windows she managed to confirm that yes, they were at least published under different names, and had and managed to track down exactly one story in a digital archive. And she has a degree in literature and history, and spent most of her thesis tracking down random journals and magazines from First World War soldiers.
Also he was part of a song and I think we should just remember that, now and forever, because this article is becoming more and more horrifying.
Moving on, The Boy’s Own Paper, a British periodical that was critical to her thesis and to understanding an entire generation of English schoolboys, isn’t available in any digital archive she could find. That meant the only way to read them is crumbling physical copies stored at places like the British Library, and are not open to the unwashed masses – which is to say, anyone not working towards their Masters. She was able to get a hold of them and other pieces in tales of deception, trickery and sneakiness, because when they say “library” in academia they actually mean “place with guards who will restrain you rather than let you read the books inside the building.”
Okay, but everything I listed was perhaps limited due to manpower, money, time, etc. What about a corporation with limitless resources and has been known to edit their series after releasing them under suspicious circumstances: Disney (which has promised this was ‘human error’, uploading an edited version of the episode that had no reason to exist. I’m sure they’re not doing that right now for other series. Right?) Disney has got to be good about preserving stuff. Especially their mascot, Mickey Mouse, who got his own series Mickey Mouseworks in the style of his Disney shorts and would you look at that, it’s not even on Disney+. If you’re more in the know, you’d be aware that almost all of the shorts were re-used in the House of Mouse TV series – but not all of them! And certainly not in their original order, which had a set formula for how the series worked.
I almost found a complete copy once. I mean, technically I did. It was just in Russian.
How about the original extra-sized series premiere of Darkwing Duck? The character has been getting a lot of push in recent years from DuckTales, the new Chip and Dale movie and looking through everything I see that it is… also is not available. Hm. Neither are any of the comics, including the annual with a story written by series creator Tad Stone.
Okay, a digression from Disney to check in on yet another network they own, FOX, because anti-trust is just a made up word in the US of A. What about something that we know is getting a revival? Futurama! Futurama had a video game written by a number of the series’ writers and was written as “the 73rd episode of the series”, as noted by Futurama’s co-creator David X. Cohen. And it is a bonus feature on one of the movie-length DVDs, unavailable for streaming. Weird for a show that’s about to get new seasons on Hulu, right?
Surely movies, Disney’s bread and butter since Snow White, would get a better treatment. And looking through – no! Let’s do a quick quiz: What color is Cinderella’s dress?
If you answered blue, you are probably incorrect. If you answered silver, you probably watched it on VHS, which occurred before further restoration work was done on the film. The color was incorrectly believed by Disney to have faded from blue to a whiteish-silver, further discussed in this article, and recolored according to their incorrect assumption. Notably, the article does not mention early merchandise, which does indicate a silver color to the dress, which I feel was a rather large clue because silver and blue are pretty difficult colors to mix up when you look at them.
Of course, this isn’t something we have concrete proof of today. This is largely conjecture from animation students and some historians, but regardless, we’ll never see the dress in its original colors due to poor preservation.
Treasure Planet and Fantasia were edited for theaters and home video releases, removing blood from the former and racial caricatures which were either lost or removed on account of the racism in the latter. More imporantly, Fantasia’s audio wasn’t kept properly, so Corey Burton was brought in to re-record the conductor’s in-between material. And even at the time, shorts intended to be included in Fantasia were cut and repurposed for other shorts and movies, most of which are incredibly hard to find.
And yes, Song of the South is about as racist as Disney gets – you know, as of right now, I don’t want to downplay whatever they might pull next week – but surely it’s got to be available in some collection somewhere for historical purposes, allowing animation students and historians to watch it… but not really. It has some VHS and Laserdisc releases, but their legality is in question and their availability is limited, with Japanese subtitles. Now the sheer, rampant, CRAZY racism does get into a discussion about what art we allow ourselves to release in to the world and consume today, but that’s literally two other articles I’ve already written so let’s move on.
I’m not going to lie, it’s looking bad. This is some pretty big stuff that’s slipping through the cracks, or purposefully ignored. Maybe I need to think bigger. Maybe I need to think about bigger movies. Maybe… Star Wars.
Oh. That’s right. The original three movies are the most infamously lost pieces of media due to re-releases changing the original cuts. The changes start the second the original film begins.
Maybe that was a bad example. George Lucas had much more control over the prequels from their inception, which – yup, Episode 1 was changed so that Yoda was no longer a puppet, but a CGI rendition of the character instead.
Heading back to TV, did you know that the 2005 Doctor Who has a documentary about the making of each episode in the first six series called Doctor Who Confidential? There are 102 episodes, including specials. And all of them were released on home video… cut down from an average runtime of 28-42 minutes to 10-15. Some of them were DVD-only too, but I’m not sure which ones at this point.
Did you know that Sym-Bionic Titan lost an entire scene from the master tapes? It was only ever shown on the original broadcast, and after speaking to Jason DeMarco (head of Toonami, and responsible for the reruns of Sym-Bionic Titan), he wasn’t able to find the version of the episode in question, indicating that something happened with the masters. It wasn’t his fault, it’s not on any release. I personally would have tried hard not to misplace a scene by the guy responsible for working on Star Wars: Clone Wars (one of the best pieces of Star Wars media ever made, and one of about five EU pieces I actually like), Samurai Jack, Primal, and Dexter’s Laboratory. But maybe that’s just a special piece of TV Network Galaxy Brain logic. Or some guy in the archives who just plain screwed up.
Let’s not forget Dawson’s Creek, Quantum Leap, WKRP In Cincinnati, Daria, Birds of Prey, Scrubs, Mission Hill, The Muppet Show, this list goes on for awhile but the point is they all lost some rights to the original music and had to be re-edited for home video.
I’ve covered mostly popular material so far. But this doesn’t really get in to lesser known works, because irony of ironies, I don’t know what might have been lost! I know that IGPX, a Toonami/Project I.G. collaboration, was so difficult to find that I actually rented the DVDs from Blockbuster to rip rather than pay secondhand prices. While I was in the middle of figuring out how to do that, rendering them for I think the 18th time, the news broke that the series was getting a remaster. It involved editing the original Production I.G. cuts to match the American broadcasts frame-by-frame, a crazy undertaking that I have to salute. And when I found out about it, I did exactly what I’d wanted to do in the first place…
I pre-ordered the box set and enjoyed every second of watching the best version of this show possible. Because look, I’m in favor of people actually getting paid for their work. And eating! I’m big on people being able to eat. On a personal note, please buy this DVD set. It’s a really great show and the Toonami cut is WAY better than the Production I.G. cut.
I’m a big believer in buying things and paying for things when it’s possible to do so! It’s not because corporations need the money for another MC Hammer-esque golden toilet seat, but because people need money, and buying things is what corporations use as proof that real, actual people should be paid and allowed to eat. And that’s pretty fucked up but I need to move on to my original point.
I have zero moral issue with piracy as a concept. I’ve used it to preview things I wanted to buy, to get a hold of things that weren’t available from the original creator/publisher, and to preserve content that may be lost later anyway. And let me tell you right now: it’s important that piracy start early. Why should we work to emulate the Playstation 3 to the level of Near’s byuu emulator? The same reason that Near worked on the emulator to begin with: it is, in many ways, the only method by which we can preserve pieces of art. And we need to start the day it’s released.
Your hardware is going to fail. Your NES, your computer, your XBOX, your brand new Playstation 5 – and the sooner we get started on emulating these pieces of hardware, the better we’ll be at preserving the material. Your mylar bags will eventually stop protecting those comics, no matter how good an acid-free backing board you have. And the paper in your books will become so brittle they will no longer be readable. That may not be a problem for you now, but that’s not the point.
I bought my Wii-U to get Xenoblade Chronicles X and the DLC before the eShop closed. Nintendo didn’t make any money off of that. Monolith didn’t make any money off of that. The only people who made money off of it was a dude on eBay who didn’t want it anymore, and the company I paid for a heavy duty replacement battery for the Gamepad.
And as I was writing this article, HBO Max’s new CEO appears to have lost his actual mind, removing cartoons without warning from streaming services and leaving people without recourse to watch these beautiful pieces. There are endeavors being made to allow people to buy the series like iTunes, thank God, but that’s only a few of the series being erased from the catalog of history – particularly ones made by and starring BIPOC.
Art has a preservation problem, and one of the solutions is piracy. Whether the problem stems from a lack of resources, a lack of care, it doesn’t actually matter. We don’t know what’s important a hundred years from now. We don’t know what’s important ten years from now. But pirates, above anyone else, are dedicated to the mass preservation and sharing of material that is likely to be lost. For lack of better options, for lack of ability to pay, for lack of foreknowledge, piracy is good and I will not say otherwise – with the simple caveat that we should pay for legitimate releases when we have the chance.
Also to any bootleggers holding on to material because they feel like they win by doing so, I have this message: you are hurting the preservation of art itself. Stop it.
One thing I’ve never been able to get an answer from the anti-piracy crowd is this: if I want something, and I can’t pay the people who made it in order to obtain that something, what specific harm is being caused? And when should people start working to preserve things that companies won’t bother with, can’t bother with, or will undoubtedly fail due to hardware/software issues?
Let me end with Kid Radd. It’s a great webcomic/video series. Someone even managed to take this Flash-based IE6 comic and make it readable on newer browsers. At the time it was archived, at least.
https://www.bgreco.net/kidradd.htm
There’s no guarantee that this will last, of course. Eventually even this will need to be emulated through some virtual machine running legacy Internet Explorer hardware.
Even ignoring the comic’s historical value, I love Kid Radd. When it no longer works, a piece of art will be erased from the world. Something that gave me a piece of my moral compass will no longer exist.
I’m not okay with that. I don’t understand the people who are. And honestly, as curious as I am to hear an answer to my question, I’m not sure I ever will.
Mathias DeRider