[LocalH]

Staying within the bounds of copyright to do vital preservation work is the best way to set oneself up for failure before you even begin. Piracy is preservation, always has been, always will be, and is always moral for that reason. Large rights holders have zero interest in being stewards of their content for the eventual public domain transfer. They'd rather the work cease to exist than the public own it. That is direct theft from the public in a way that mere copyright infringement, and even monetized copyright infringement, doesn't actually approach the concept of theft. If a rightsholder releases a work, and refuses to preserve it, it is the public's moral imperative to ensure the work endures until copyright lapses.

This does not apply to unreleased work. If you create something and keep it private, I don't consider you to have a moral obligation to ensure your work eventually becomes public domain. If you do distribute that work to the public, at that point I do consider you to have that obligation, and if you won't do it, then someone else has every right to ensure that the public will gain ownership of the work at the appropriate time of copyright expiration.