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[Your Name/AI Draft] Date: October 26, 2023

The Infrastructure of the Undistributed: A Case Study of cs.rin.ru as a Digital Preservation and Piracy Nexus cs.rin.ru forum

The study of digital piracy often focuses on economic loss or network topology. However, a nuanced understanding requires examining the cultures of sharing. The forum cs.rin.ru (hereafter, CS.RIN), named after the Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 character, has operated since the early 2000s. It is unique because it hosts no direct game files on its own servers but instead facilitates the distribution of cracks, emulators, and Steam “Smart Steam Emulator” (SSE) tools. [Your Name/AI Draft] Date: October 26, 2023 The

Existing piracy literature (e.g., Lessig, 2004; Karaganis, 2011) frames DRM circumvention as a legal violation. More recent work (Maher, 2021) explores abandonware as preservation. CS.RIN sits at the intersection: it preserves active software by neutralizing its access controls. This paper asks: How does CS.RIN construct a technical and social order that legitimizes circumvention among its 1M+ users? It is unique because it hosts no direct