The Internet Archive hosts several high-quality resources and strategy guides for the classic Sid Meier's Pirates!
The pirates had a surprisingly coherent philosophy. On the Internet Archive’s now-defunct forums, they argued:
So, if you download a show today, thank a "pirate" from 2005. They built the library.
They saw themselves not as thieves but as time-traveling librarians. Many were part of the larger “abandonware” movement, which argued that commercial copyright on digital goods should expire after the hardware needed to use them becomes obsolete—roughly 10-15 years, in their view, not 95 years under the Copyright Term Extension Act (the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”).
The Abandonware Archivist: These users focused on commercial software from the 1980s and 90s whose publishers had gone bankrupt or vanished. Titles like Oregon Trail Deluxe, SimCity 2000, and Myst were uploaded en masse. Their logic was utilitarian: If you cannot buy it new, and the maker is dead, it is not theft—it is salvage.
represents a pivotal moment in the history of digital property and the "Right to Read." The Digital Commons vs. Controlled Lending