One claim made by the pirate hordes is that they preserve things that otherwise would be discarded by the owners. So for example, MAME is a project that illegally collects arcade machine ROMs, whereas The 365 Day Project collects old recordings. On Hotline you can find albums that aren't in the stores any more. The claim is often made but doesn't get tested.

Cinemaware was a company that made games such as Defender Of The Crown and It Came From The Desert - they peaked in the days that Amiga was a viable company and then died sometime in the early 90's. Not sure why. The original owners have realised they have a lot of valuable property and have recently relaunched with a new Defender Of The Crown - can't say if that's worthanything - but I was impressed to see that they've made available all their old Amiga titles for free download. Which I did.

And doubly impressed to see that they're cracked copies. Here's a company that's distributing the titles that somebody stole from them years ago. Which means that they hadn't archived them - and relied on the underground to keep the data. So, use -that- in your next debate.