fallenorder0392 said:
The reason why we “gatekept” this in the first place was out of fear that the absolutely pristine restoration work that these people were doing of the Original Trilogy would be publicly leaked, and be pulled out of release by Disney and Co., and that these projects wont ever see the light of day. It would put the fansites (us, TSWT, etc.) in jeopardy as they might go on banwaves trying to silence us, or finally break that “legal gray area” that we’ve all been operating on for years in terms of restoration projects and fan-edits. It wasn’t really out of hoarding or keeping them to ourselves, we knew the implications if this would leak (given this is some very high level technical stuff involving teams of people working across different departments, allegedly) and we wouldn’t want these people to lose their jobs because of a shoddy autouploader that was posted to a random YouTube account.

I’m still not convinced an automated system accidentally created a youtube account and shared clips tbh. Does such a thing even exist, does it happen to other YT users? Is there a ghost in the machine at LFL? It seems more likely this leak was a test gage who much niche interest (and therefor profit) might be gained from such a release. Ironically the release of the real OOT would “silence” fans doing their own work… because the lack of any official release is the reason for the bootlegs.