“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Personally, I wouldn’t do what I do if I thought there was a very realistic chance these films would be preserved via normal channels at any point in our lifetimes. So everything I do here is under the assumption that we are the only preservationists these films will see for many, many decades.
Because we’re acting in an unofficial capacity, we can’t do as much as official channels can to preserve this content. However, one thing that’s relatively easy to do is distribute it broadly, to increase the chances it will survive. In biological terms, because we’re not strong enough to be K-strategists, we are instead r-strategists.
Project Threepio in many ways was designed to amplify this strategy for other preservation projects. To make existing projects have more appeal beyond the English-speaking world than they already did, increasing distribution outside the linguistic and legal boundaries of the English-speaking world, with the goal of long-term survival of these films on a global scale, even if legal forces manage to effectively erase them within certain regions.
I’ve designed Project Threepio as a “torch-passable” project. While I’m certainly still engaged in maintaining it, I’ve also fully documented my processes and made available all of the tools I use to do everything in the project. It would be fairly easy for someone, years from now, to download Project Threepio, dig into the gory details, and become the next CatBus.