Piracy Is Preserving Films Studios Won't Fix

Devan Scott documents how fans break Blu-ray encryption locally to rebuild MGM's mangled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a case MUBI uses to show preservation piracy in practice.

The technique is not remote exploitation but local circumvention of AACS on purchased discs and LaserDisc captures.

Affected systems span 1998 DVDs, 2014 MGM Blu-rays, 2021 Kino Lorber and 2025 Arrow Video 4K UHDs that each carry different editorial and audio flaws.

Scott and editor Willa Ross first failed in 2011 when the Italian cut proved more divergent than the extended edition they tried to fix.

Spencer Draper, the YouTuber known as Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader who audits disc masters, tells MUBI studios routinely ship decade-old audio with reversed channels and frozen grain.

James Flower, director of production at Arrow Films, says the bottleneck is often directors who demand degrained, oversaturated revisionist grades.

That constraint forced Arrow to ship a director-approved master Flower considered vandalism to meet a deadline.

Fan projects bypass those contracts and budgets, from Harmy's Despecialized Star Wars to Team Negative1's Project 4K77 scanned from 35mm prints.

The remux community extends the model by losslessly recombining the best video and audio streams from separate official releases.

Every rip violates Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans breaking digital locks even for noncommercial preservation.

Flower defends copyright as Arrow's funding model yet calls noncommercial manipulation a gray area, while Draper cites a pirate code that requires owning a physical copy and forbids resale.

The workflow remains local, legally exposed, and dependent on enthusiasts willing to compare dozens of discs for years.