If it exists, it can be ripped.
These days nearly anything with a copyright gets pirated within minutes of its release—and, with leaking a constant problem, sometimes even earlier than that. Archival music and movie torrent sites collect these rips, building massive libraries that contain the large majority of our collective cultural output. If you want a piece of media from the last 50 years, and you know where to look, you can find almost anything.
Almost.
Certain works are difficult to source, and in the digital underground, they can achieve almost legendary status. Lost movies; shelved albums; out-of-print books — the harder they are to find, the more the pirates want them. These are the Holy Grails of Internet piracy.
The Lost Short Stories of J.D. Salinger
Pirated? Partly
Nestled inside Box 14, Folder 26 of the special collections archive at Princeton University's Firestone Library you'll find one of the most desirable collections of unpublished literature in the world: six original manuscripts by J.D. Salinger, written several years before the first publication of Catcher in the Rye. Three of these stories later appeared elsewhere; another, "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls," surprised everyone by surfacing online in 2013. But the remaining two—"The Last and Best of the Peter Pans," and "The Magic Foxhole"—have never made it out. The latter, a surreal fictionalization of Salinger's experience storming the beach on D-Day, is said to be one of his favorite pieces of writing.
The six manuscripts can't be checked out. They can only be read by qualified University patrons, under supervision by the Princeton librarians. No recording devices or writing implements are permitted in the reading room. And Salinger's will states they can't legally be published until the year 2060. Still, someone's gotten access to this folder before, and leaking a copy of either of the two remaining unpublished stories to the internet would be one of the greatest capers in the history of piracy.
MANDEL NGAN / Getty Images
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling
Pirated? No
The Canadian music collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a cult favorite, best known for their 12-minute post-rock crescendos. But way back in 1994, they released this, their first recording, in a limited edition of just 33 audio cassette tapes. The legend of this obscure piece of media grows by the year: no one's ever been able to source a copy, and no one really knows what it sounds like. Numerous hoax copies have surfaced; all have been debunked. But perhaps somewhere, at some Montreal flea market, or in some aging music fanatic's basement collection, arguably the internet's single-most desired piece of unpirated music is still waiting to be found.
YouTube
Matthew Barney's Cremaster (video art installation)
Pirated? Partly
The pirates make quick work of mainstream cinema. Press screeners, studio work prints, in-theater camcorder shots, streaming web rips and clones of warehouse Blu-Rays all make their way to the underground torrent networks weeks ahead of official release dates. Arthouse flicks can take longer, but with time almost any movie with a distributor, no matter how obscure, gets digitized, compressed, and posted illegally online.
Video art is a harder target. Take, for example, Matthew Barney's five-part Cremaster cycle. Named after a muscle in the penis, and loaded with striking, sexually-charged imagery, Cremaster earned Barney comparisons to surrealist masters like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Praise wasn't universal—many critics were repelled by Barney's lack of subtlety, and his self-congratulatory tone—but the work crossed over into mainstream popularity, and this made it a natural target for the pirates.
So how to find a copy? In 2002, Barney released the original Cremaster cycle in a limited edition of 20, selling copies of the complete DVD set for over $100,000. By 2007, Sotheby's was auctioning off a single copy of Cremaster 2 for more than half a million. And, seeking to preserve the value of the work, Barney has promised never to release the series to mass-market DVD. As he told an interviewer in 2006: "It's not right for them to be available to be owned in an unlimited way after they've been sold in a limited way."
In the age of digital reproduction, Barney's explanation sounded more like a challenge. Cremaster 2, 3 and 4 all appeared online as early as 2008; in late 2014, a cloned DVD of Cremaster 1 was mysteriously posted to Pass the Popcorn, an invitation-only movie tracker. (In the film, two Goodyear blimps and a synchronized dance troupe re-enact the process of human ovulation.)
That leaves Cremaster 5: a climactic opera about a pair of descending testicles, still available only as a low-quality VHS rip. The work is still out there and, digital or otherwise, perhaps someday soon the reproductive cycle will be complete.
Matthew Barney
Posts
9 Rare Works Of Art Internet Pirates Are Obsessed With