Pure digital has significantly simplified the archival problem for a lot of this stuff. Back ups can be backed up, things can be regularly copied over to avoid bit rot, copies are effectively free to distribute. Distribution online effectively means it lives persistently in the cloud. So long as some one remains interested in hosting or seeding. So new copies can effectively be pulled as needed at low cost. If something stops being online it can be put back up by anyone with a copy. DRM can be and has almost always been defeated. Digital copies don’t lose fidelity as copies are made or through use, so a copy is a copy is always a copy. A lot of that operates in legal gray areas.
But nothing is forever. Physical books rot, vinyl gets brittle and wears down, stone buildings fall down. Proliferation is really the only thing that’s preserved information in the really long term. And digital media has just made proliferation cheap and easy, and significantly reduces costs for preservation.
And as a result a lot of stuff is just out there now where as it used to be rumored and hard to find. To see something like Bambi vs Godzilla you used to have to know a guy who got a tape off a guy who knew the creator, or copy a tape from a professor or some one at a convention. Now its on YouTube. Todd Haynes Superstar used to be impossible to find. I first saw it as a 6 gen beta copy a professor bought in a sex shop in Berlin not long after it came out. If you wanted to see it again you had to copy his tape. Now its on YouTube.
Its the gray market aspects of this that have stalled it out. Like what i was talking about with Denonoid. The fact that it was a key venue for the release of pirated recent media is what got it repeatedly nuked over the last decade. But the core of that site was a deep database of active torrents for some really, really hard to find shit. Orphaned works, out of print material, content for dead platforms.
When the people stopped seeding that, and then the site relaunched after years of down time without it. Demonoid was pretty much dead. Cause unexpectedly that was its major attraction, and a fair bit of its purpose. And a lot of stuff that could only be found there still hasn’t filtered back online after all these years.
