The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
Gabe Newell
I recently attended the “Save the Games” conference at New York’s Strong Museum of Play, which was (arguably) the first-ever conference on the subject of electronic game preservation. It was a wonderful opportunity, as it felt like a way to wrap up my nearly year long internship at the Strong while also capping off my Master’s degree, by being able to share some of my research from my thesis, “Save State: What Video Game Preservation Can Learn From Film Archives”.
It was fun to see a bit of debate around the topic of piracy occur at the conference. My talk was a bit controversial— and I would have it no other way. In fact, the talk immediately proceeding mine was a defense of piracy as a form of cultural preservation.1 My perspective is quite rigid for the sake of the topic of preservation: I am speaking only in regards to what is expedient towards creating long lasting archives. Piracy has its own benefits and can be even have a positive relationship with the archival community.
To accept my thesis, you need only accept the fact that piracy and preservation are two different things. I would suggest that this is common sense for those who work in GLAM institutions. But in the realm of online discourse, which still seems to reign as the main cultural influence on “gaming” culture— the consensus is that piracy and preservation are one and the same.
My basic problem with the discourse happening online is the idea that video games are some sort of privileged medium; as if the approach we have taken to cultural preservation of other mediums no longer applies in the realm of the digital.
You can see my presentation here:
There exists a rhetorical strategy and a grassroots movement among those wishing to promote "free culture" in the digital age. It is called piracy. One of the foremost projects following this strategy is called Z-library, an online file-sharing website where copies of numerous publications are available to torrent or download for free. The website most notably contains numerous copies of expensive textbooks. Such services are called "shadow libraries," and in an age where attending university is increasingly expensive, students often seek to cut financial corners wherever they can, even if it means a criminal offense.
The service received viral promotion on TikTok, where it came to the attention of the publishing industry. The Authors Guild asked the Office of the United States Trade Representative to take action. When they did, Z-library's domains were seized and largely shut down. In response, a new website was launched called Anna's Archive. This was an open-source project that acts as a crawler for various shadow libraries. It works in a legal grey area by not providing the pirated content itself. On their website, the project is described as "the largest truly open library in human history. We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 30,453,135 books, 100,357,111 papers— preserved forever."2
“[P]reserved forever" is an interesting phrase and provides a start to our inquiry into the relationship between piracy and preservation. If we look at the site’s "Frequently Asked Questions", we can discover more details about the site’s stated goals:
What is Anna’s Archive?
Anna’s Archive is a non-profit project with two goals:
Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.
Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.3
Anna's Archive also received some amount of press coverage when it first emerged. TorrentFreak and LA Weekly both refer to the website as run by a group of "anonymous archivists". These descriptions of a pirating project should be of interest for archivists working at institutions. While the work of archivists at public and private institutions is generally not well-known, projects such as these become increasingly visible in popular culture. The dubbing of these activities as "archival" is not insignificant and little has been done in popular discourse to combat this characterization.
Similar projects exist and are even more popular for video games. These file-sharing websites deal in "ROMs". These are shareable files that one can run in an emulator to play classic "retro" video games. We can similarly find that one of these major sites, "Vimm's Lair," has the tagline "Preserving the classics since 1997". Again, the language of preservation is used. Yet, in June of 2024, the site was recently pursued by major companies such as Nintendo and Sega and they buckled in response, posting on their website:
Vimm's Lair has been asked to remove many games from The Vault on behalf of Nintendo, Sega, Lego, and the ESA. While most of these games (and the hardware to play them) haven't been sold in decades, ultimately it's their prerogative so these games are now gone for good.4
This provides another example of an ambitious attempt to "preserve" media through file sharing, and, ultimately, of a major restriction for such a project due to legal action. What are archivists and preservationists working in the field to make of such occurrences, not to mention, the general public? Well, first, it must be demonstrated that a weak definition for preservation is being drawn upon. Turning back to the "Frequently Asked Questions"page of Anna’s Archive,5 we can find a working definition that many of these illegal projects would likely find agreeable:
We preserve books, papers, comics, magazines, and more, by bringing these materials from various shadow libraries, official libraries, and other collections together in one place. All this data is preserved forever by making it easy to duplicate it in bulk — using torrents — resulting in many copies around the world. Some shadow libraries already do this themselves (e.g. Sci-Hub, Library Genesis), while Anna’s Archive “liberates” other libraries that don’t offer bulk distribution (e.g. Z-Library) or aren’t shadow libraries at all (e.g. Internet Archive, DuXiu). This wide distribution, combined with open-source code, makes our website resilient to takedowns, and ensures the long-term preservation of humanity’s knowledge and culture.6
According to Anna's Archive, what it means for something to be "preserved forever" is to be "easily duplicable" and to be able to do this "in bulk". This definition of preservation is quickly becoming the norm among individuals whose only exposure to such a topic is likely through the internet. In this article, I turn once again to the history of film preservation in order to reject this definition for "preservation."By looking at how the issue of piracy has been addressed by the establishment of long-standing film archives, we find clear solutions to the question of what preservation means for electronic games. While seeking a more robust definition of "preservation", I will also address why piracy is not the solution but could very well be the beginning of one.
For much of the 20th century, collecting feature film prints was considered an invariably criminal act. With the establishment of the studio system in Hollywood and the practice of movies being distributed nationally, the legal system which was constructed to support this system operated based on rental. The theaters would never own the rights to the films they screened, the prints would be there as a rental, and when usage of the film was complete, the film would be shipped off to the next client who had rented the rights to screen the film. To retain the film, even if it was not requested to be returned, was technically a criminal act of piracy. James Card, in Seductive Cinema, described this era of film collecting as defined by a form of paranoia,
Private collectors are wary of revealing their holdings, and many of them cherish pictures known to exist only to their circle of closest friends. Their paranoia is understandable. Possession of copyrighted films by an individual who has not purchased rental rights from the corporation that made and copyrighted the films has been considered illegal, and collections of such films have been subject to seizure by the FBI. The FBI has not been shy about swooping down on private collections and carrying them off.7
Under the threat of prosecution by the FBI, film collecting became a secretive world, and the illegality of it made the possibility of preservation uncertain. The rights to the films belonged solely to the studios, so that even those who worked on the films were under the threat of prosecution. As Card recounts, "Roddy McDowell, one of the few Hollywood actors who cares enough to have amassed a large and important personal archive of prints, was given a rough time defending his treasure from the Feds".8 If even a major actor holding onto film prints starring themselves is seen as illegal, then something about the practice must change if preservation is to be achieved. Accordingly, there were two options forward: change the law or change the practice. It is unlikely that one will be able to change the law around the collection of film prints which are technically owned by their respective studios, just as it is unlikely to change the laws around downloading ROMs. Instead of advocating for the abolition of any laws, the world of film collecting adapted and developed into the world of the film archive.
For James Card, this transformation was not an easy one. While he was working at Kodak, he caught wind of the formation of a new museum at the former residence of George Eastman. Card's route towards being involved with the museum was only through his own conniving. A sound engineer named Chum Morris showed James Card a hidden room in the Eastman Theater where organists would practice for screenings. The room had become a storage place for nitrate film and housed many unique and rare prints thought to have been lost. Card attempted to convince Morris and the man who put the films there, Johnny Allen, Sr. to give the films to him to preserve. But the Eastman Theatre was planning a Gala in which they would use the print of Disraeli (1929, dir. Alfred E. Green). James Card met with the man in charge of the theater, Arthur M. See, to convince him to turn the films over to him. Card said that Kodak would destroy all the films the moment any decomposition occurred, but this did not convince him.
As a last resort I tried revealing to him a well-kept secret [...] that in a year's time, the former residence of George Eastman [...] would become a museum of photography and motion pictures– an institution that would be hunting all over the world for films like those in his own vault, about to be melted away by Kodak. At this, he looked at me with alarmed skepticism. I begged him. "Call Iris Barry at the Museum of Modern Art! Ask her about these films and their importance.” That much he was willing to do. To their eternal credit, the good folks at the Museum of Modern Art urged him to send the films. They agreed to care for them against the day when there might actually really be a museum at Eastman House.9
This strange tactic paid off and Card was able to preserve his collection of films along with this massive depository hidden in the Eastman Theater. While this particular anecdote is quite serendipitous, it is just one instance of many where private collections were turned into archival material fit for preservation. In fact, the holdings of film archives are largely made up by what were formerly private holdings or "pirated" material. At the Eastman Museum alone, one can find large sections of the collection that formerly belong/belonged to William K. Everson and Martin Scorsese. If a film was not given to an archive by the studio itself (which rarely happens outside of the Library of Congress) or by an independent filmmaker who owns the distribution rights, you can be assured that it originated from a private and technically illegal collection.
Similarly, many archives around the world were begun by film collectors, such as Card and Langlois. The transformation from film collector to archivist was something of a global transformation.
The importance of insuring the legality of archival efforts cannot be overstated. The greatest threat to cultural preservation has always been government entities, second only to natural disasters and time. The need to maintain a non-criminal status is of utmost importance. This is why Anna's Archive is not an archive at all, and if they want what they have to be "preserved forever", they will have to utilize offline storage that is not immediately publicly accessible and will not invite prosecution. It is the real concrete actions of archival institutions that make them archival, not their ideals. An archive is an archive when it occupies physical space in the world, when its holdings are safe from the elements, and, ultimately, when its actions are not halted by the government. It is difficult, but not impossible, to be a pirate and an archivist at the same time, but it is nearly impossible to be an archivist from a prison cell.
Is such a transformation possible for electronic game preservation? Could those running ROM databases be the archivists of tomorrow? I believe it is not only possible; it has already begun to occur.
The excerpt you just read was section 2.2 of my paper, entitled “Piracy is Not Preservation”. It followed by some discussion of archives building trust with studios and of the surrounding cultural ecosystem required for preservation efforts to be maintained. If there is interest in these following sections, I’ll gladly post them as well.
A few final thoughts. This subject has become even more interesting following the decision on the Internet Archive lawsuit. I admire the work down at Internet Archive but wish they would be more careful.
The subject of the relationship between piracy and preservation seems to me under-researched. I would like to see further writing about it and can think of several different directions to take further research: (1) the preservation of piracy cultures, (2) a genuine ethical evaluation of the role of piracy for consumers, without “flattening” the entertainment industry, (3) the usages and limits of online storage for research purposes, (4) the relationship between online archives and techno-optimist thought, (5) the dynamic, paradoxical relationship between anarchist thought and preservation theory.
Feel free to take up any of these ideas and write on them yourself.
That presentation was done by Joanna Blackhart
“Anna’s Archive,” Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - Anna’s Archive, accessed July 29, 2024, https://annas-archive.se/faq.
Ibid.
“Vimm’s Lair”, Announcement From June 6, 2024, accessed July 29, 2024, https://vimm.net/
I am so tempted to abbreviate to A.A.
“Anna’s Archive,” Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - Anna’s Archive, accessed July 29, 2024, https://annas-archive.se/faq.
James Card, Seductive Cinema (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1999), 72.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 97.
Piracy is not preservation, but what is the point of preservation? The article makes fair points to separate both concepts, but in practicality there is no alternative way to preserve electronic games. The example of the films is different because they required physical maintenance. Paintings are physical objects preserved in museums or by careful collectors, but their preservation in the "spirit" (I mean, in minds and hearts) happens when they are printed to decorate rooms everywhere, or seen in a publication, or presented as part of a history course — if they are "seen", they are preserved for practical purposes. Back to movies, I don't know where Metropolis was preserved, but I know it keeps being an impactful object of the human world because we can see it in YouTube. Now, the videogame experience only occurs in the act of playing it. A print of it in a history book means nothing, seeing a video of it in a website means nothing. There is no physical care needed besides the same servers that keep all our online information stored. Ok, someone could try to found an institution, or a department of an existing one, to keep games and make them legally available. Why it was not attempted yet? We can think about the mess of cross-borders IP rights. Anyway, if someone manages to pull this off, I do not think the sharers (by the way, I do not agree this is piracy, piracy means selling the loot) would hesitate for one minute to turn to the legalized institution instead of torrents. And they would not even need to send the material, as it is already being shared. Anyway, you are right: one day laws may change and legal, undisputed preservation will be possible. But there will be some more decades, it seems, of users sharing media between themselves so that games can be actually preserved (physically and spiritually — the most important, be cared about) for, one day, be handed to a museum.
Piracy is not preservation, but, ironically, preservation can be piracy. Google "British archaeology theft"