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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, March 02, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | Prometheus the Pirate

Aside from the basic utilities—electricity, water, internet, and mobile phone—one cannot live without, I have some subscriptions I pay monthly or annually: [1] Netflix, [2] Disney+, [3] WOW Present Plus—intermittently, [4] an Adobe Suite containing Photoshop and InDesign, [5] the New York Times, [6] Letterbxd, [7] Spotify, [8] WordPress, and [9] GoDaddy. You can say that, more or less, I do pay for the things I think need to stay alive and informed in this increasing consumerist world.

But I am also a pirate, mostly of movies, and I make such admission without regret or self-recrimination. As of the moment, I have 14 external hard drives that contain—as of this writing—16,727 movies of all sorts [short films, experimental films, and documentaries included], but not counting TV shows or filmed plays. [I used to do the same for music, but I have done away with that, now relying mostly on Spotify for that need.] This movie library evolved because I do teach Film at the university, and must have certain films at my disposal when needed. It’s also really because I am an avid cineaste. This library has also shifted platforms over time. In the 1990s, I used to collect titles in VHS, often spending godawful amount of time recording things off TV via my trusty VCR. These were my college days, and I used to look forward to the Holy Week, because I could then record the classic Filipino films ABS-CBN used to air over at Pinoy Blockbuster Channel, their movie channel on SkyCable. This was how I was introduced to inaccessible titles such as Kisapmata and Himala and Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? and Oro Plata Mata—titles you could never rent at your local VideoCity, and titles I only read about but never got to see.



I stopped collecting VHS tapes because of the sheer issue of lack of space that eventually happened. Then I shifted to DVDs. But then I began to notice that the silver plating that held the digital information eventually faded away—leaving only the useless plastic discs behind, and I realized I was hoarding material that faded. So finally I shifted to torrents. Torrents gave me sizable library without the inconvenience of physical storage—with the only concern being the care of these hard drives, which can be easily damaged. I once dropped one such hard drive, and erased 2 TBs worth of television shows.

It’s a painstakingly assembled collection, and a worthy effort. Last year, during the birth centenary of Eddie Romero, a couple of film archivists came to Dumaguete to participate in the celebration, and in their talks at Silliman University, they held out something to the audience that most archivists actually believe: piracy is good, especially for archiving purposes. Pirates are the modern Prometheus.

I think about Prometheus often—the god who, out of defiance and compassion, stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity. He did not ask for permission. He did not wait for the gods to share fire and all that it entailed. He simply acted, knowing that the gift he brought down would mean the difference between darkness and light, between mere existence and civilization. And for that act of piracy, he was punished for eternity.

Piracy, I believe, has always been this way. It is Promethean. It is a defiant act of preservation against forces that would rather keep the fire for themselves, letting the rest of us grope in the cold. In an era where digital media vanishes as quickly as it appears, where books go out of print, where films are unceremoniously scrubbed from streaming platforms, and where video games disappear behind a wall of corporate bureaucracy, piracy stands as a quiet, radical form of conservation.

It is no secret among archivists and media conservationists that they rely on piracy to do their work. When HBO Max (or whatever it calls itself now) removes shows from its platform as if they never existed, who ensures their survival? Pirates. When film reels decay, when early television broadcasts are wiped, when companies refuse to re-release or even acknowledge the existence of old video games, who steps in? Pirates.

If not for piracy, the first seasons of Doctor Who—253 episodes in total—would have vanished. Every early master videotape of the program was destroyed by the BBC, which thought that TV shows were at best ephemeral products, and were not worth storing. But these episodes eventually survived, often only in audio form, recorded off-air by fans at home.

If not for piracy, the audio of the TV broadcast of Dragon Ball Z might have been lost because of corporate mishandling. The audio of subsequent airings of the TV show sounds terrible and muffled, because it was in mono, and because Toei decided to use cheap audio tapes and not the actual recording. But pirates recorded the first airing of the show in Japan, and kept them on tape, and soon uploaded online the crystal-clear audio of the first broadcast—and the difference is night and day. The Mr. Potato Head Show was also considered lost for many years, until members of the Lost Media Wiki found all the episodes of the series online. As of 2016, the series in its entirety has resurfaced.

If not for piracy, the pioneering works of French filmmaker Georges Méliès would have vanished. In 1923, when he was facing financial ruin and his studio was taken over by Pathé, Méliès burned his films in a fit of frustration, destroying many of his film negatives stored at his Montreuil studio. Luckily for us, many of his films were duplicated by early movie pirates—which is why we still have a good number of his films with us today, including the great early sci-fi Trip to the Moon (1902).

If not for piracy, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) would have disappeared. It was plagiarized by the filmmakers from Bram Stoker’s famous book, Dracula, changing only a few details to create their own version. Sued successfully by Stoker’s widow, the filmmakers were ordered to destroy every single copy of the film—and they did. But pirates had already stored away their own duplicates, which is why this great silent German Expressionist vampire film is still with us today.

I actually call piracy—especially in its manifestation as an archiving effort by regular people—to be an act of cultural hoarding. The best example of such cultural hoarder is Marion Stokes, an American access television producer and businesswoman, who hoarded and archived hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012—shows that these television networks never archived. Her effort started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and soon she amassed an archive of 70,000 tapes of news reports, operating nine properties and three storage units to keep them all. Why did she do this? In Recorder, the 2019 documentary made on her life, Stokes’ son says she was fascinated by “how media reflects society to itself”—and, according to Brooklynn Shively from Establishing Shot of Indiana University, “not only was [Stokes] motivated to record primary news cycles for decades through this fascination, but that she also felt a responsibility to create this personal archive for fear that history would be erased.” She pirated to preserve vanishing news.

The frustrating irony is that the industry that fights piracy the hardest is often the one that fails to preserve its own art. Video games, once released, are often abandoned—trapped behind expired licenses, outdated hardware, and corporate neglect. If anyone wanted to play The Amazing Spider-Man from 2012, there is actually no legal way for me to do so. The game, once sold in stores, is now a ghost, a relic of commerce rather than art. If I were to find a second-hand disc, its downloadable content—pieces of the game that were meant to complete the experience—is gone forever. How can we claim that piracy is theft when, in reality, it is often the only way to save these works from oblivion?

I do not dismiss the concerns of artists whose livelihoods depend on their work being purchased. I understand the impulse to defend intellectual property, to insist that piracy undermines the value of creativity. I am also a creative, a writer and artist, and I do would like to be compensated properly for my intellectual property.

But I also believe that piracy is, at its core, a service issue. If something is available, easily accessible, and fairly priced, people will pay for it. The resurgence of vinyl records, the success of digital bookstores, and the proliferation of streaming platforms all prove that people will support art when it is within reach. But when that reach is restricted, when entire swathes of culture are locked behind artificial barriers, when access is denied simply because a company decides it is no longer profitable—so what choice do we have?

This is not about entitlement. This is about history. The Iliad and Odyssey survive today in written form, but the rest of the so-called Epic Cycle—a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems including the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony—are now lost to time. We do treat the written word with reverence, yet we fail to afford the same to digital media, which now consists most of our contemporary outputs. Super Mario 64, the Mona Lisa of video games, exists today not because of corporate preservation but because of cultural hoarding. Most of the early Internet is now gone, except as ghosts in the Internet Wayback Machine. I once moderated the largest collection of everything Philippine literature in a website called A Survey of Philippine Literature in the early 2000s. I hosted it on Geocities. And when that platform was scrubbed in 2009, so did my website—and all the important archive of Philippine literature I placed in it. On 31 January 2024, CNN Philippines quietly signed-off—and with that, their website, which contained hundreds of important news and feature articles that were important to the culture, also disappeared.

Nothing digital in official channels survive—trust me.

Let me end with two stories. When Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper between 1494 and 1498, he did the work in a process that would not keep, and in conditions that were not conducive to the painting’s survival. For example, the wall the famous fresco was painted on was at the back of a busy kitchen, which allowed for moisture to seep through and slowly destroy the painting. Soon, the paint began to peel. Within twenty years, the painting needed restoration. How did restorers know how to bring it back to its original imagery? This was only made possible because copies of the fresco by Leonardo’s students—such as that by Giampietrino—existed, so everyone knew how the original looked like, and Giampietrino’s copy has come to be a great aid in The Last Supper’s constant restoration efforts over the centuries.

I once saved a short story by a writer friend of mine—not only because it had won a Palanca, but also because I happened to love it very much and had included it in one of the anthologies I had edited before. But this was also because I like hoarding pieces of Philippine literature in my hard drive, where you can see them catalogued according to genre, and arranged alphabetically by authors’ surnames. I have tons of poems, short stories, plays, essays, and even novels by Filipino writers in my archive. Now this friend of mine wanted to expand that short story into a novel—but to her horror, she found she no longer had any copy of her original. And so, when she needed it, when she thought it was gone forever, I was able to give it back to her. This, too, is piracy. But this, too, is preservation.

Going back to Prometheus, I think of piracy not as the theft of fire but actually its keeping. It is not an act of destruction, but an act of care. I want to believe that someone, somewhere, many years from now, will still be able to play Super Mario 64 and marvel at the strange, brilliant excess of a civilization that once was. If that means we have to steal fire from the gods for that game to still be around, then so be it.

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