Downloading your favourite stuff is absolutely what you should do, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem.

Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves.

EDIT: Many good comments, but they all suffer from one blind spot, so I answer here instead of individually.

A lot of content is only legal because it is on YouTube (or any other platform that has deals with the content industry). Sure, we can share illegally in a way that is obscure enough that no one gets sued. But what help is that, eventually it will get either popular and sued out of existence or forgotten and fade.

Then there is old content that is not legally shareable at all, like old game ROMs. Plenty of millennial stuff there but the Gen-X world is already half forgotten.

Cooyright is just too long and too unreliable. What we need at least is exemptions from Copyright for archivists, otherwise a lot of stuff will simply be lost in the coming decades.

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asdff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seed it. That is how you share it.

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zetanor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suppose you can distribute YouTube videos the same you distribute Linux ISOs. Something like IPFS (RIP(?)) would work even better for random videos than it ever did for Linux ISOs.

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Apocryphon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Put it on the Internet Archive and let the future discover it.

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jasonjayr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I went down an IA hole a month or so ago, and discovered someone uploading random Jaz + Zip drives images, that appeared to be backups from random businesses and people in the late 1990s There were diary entries, letters to a lawyer about divorce, business accounting data, invoices, and period-era porn, that if i were to guess, was organized to be offered on BBSes. tl;dr: encrypt that data at rest, you never know where it will end up.

	▲	EvanAnderson 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have mixed feelings about that stuff (which I've seen there too). There's historic value in it and I think it should be preserved. It also feels a bit icky and wrong for it to be publicly available so soon after its creation.
	▲	keeganpoppen 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		honestly, for stuff that old i kinda like the idea of seeding it anyway... i know that is a naïve PoV in the modern era, but i kinda miss the days of the internet being innocent enough that you got a real slice of someone's life sometimes.

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cowlevel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

IA accepts and follows takedown requests from almost anybody about almost anything.

	▲	Apocryphon 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Certainly, but many don't bother to check, let alone file for removal.