https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akww84/archivists-are-saving-the-history-of-internet-piracy

An ongoing project to catalog the history of piracy has just topped the 300 gigabyte mark, with a goal of offering a searchable index of more than 5 terabytes of piracy-related metadata once complete. It is now the largest searchable index of piracy metadata in the history of the internet.

The “warez” scene is an old as the internet itself. From the earliest days of BBS (bulletin board systems) to the rise of BitTorrent, the piracy community is as vibrant as any on the internet. From the ASCII and other art included in the .nfo files that accompany group releases, to piracy group logos and brands, there’s decades of residual data documenting the rise and fall of an ocean of different groups and subcultures that might otherwise be lost to the sands of time. Enter The Eye: a pet project of a man who calls himself the Archivist, whose obsession with cataloging the ever-shifting, impermanent history of the internet has ranged from archiving a petabyte of porn and the entirety of Instagram to preserving 80 gigabytes of old Apple videos deleted by YouTube. The Archivist told Motherboard his efforts are funded entirely by community donations. “These files contain unique artworks, information about scene groups, the trials and tribulations of those groups be it inter-personal feuds, issues with being raided by law enforcement, law trying to infiltrate the groups, how the groups acquire media, how they crack games and software, how the work on early movie releases to get then looking the best they can for wider release and so on,” he said. “Without archives like this so much history of a huge online world vanishes and that's simply not acceptable,” he added.