Pirating the Pirates
- ID
- 29500
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Sep 2026, 11:54 PM
- Fetched
- 29 Sep 2026, 4:59 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 29 Sep 2026, 5:00 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Devan Scott's MUBI Notebook piece recounts trying to reconstruct Sergio Leone's 1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by combining audio from a 1998 DVD with video from an Italian Blu-ray after MGM's early-2000s restoration inflated the English runtime from 161 to 179 minutes and replaced mono with a surround mix. The attempt failed because the Italian cut was even more dissimilar, restructuring the torture scene and missing shot heads and tails, so Scott gave up for nearly a decade. The article uses this to argue that studio home-video versions often alter aspect ratio, grain, audio, or runtime, and the Hacker News thread drew 299 points and 130 comments.
Why it matters
For builders, the transferable issue is canonical-source drift: a vendor 'restoration' changed runtime, audio mix, and scene structure, making the original commercially unavailable for nearly a decade. Decide whether your product's source-of-truth—media, datasets, API outputs—needs immutable snapshots; the text offers no direct AI, agent, database, SaaS, or Malaysian angle.
Discussion angle
Use the 161→179-minute MGM example to ask: if a vendor can silently change the canonical version of a film, what stops the same from happening to your model weights, datasets, or API contracts—and do you keep an immutable copy?