I also hope, that you are aware, that these things you are "aquiring" via various, and often not so official channels, are copyrighted, and trademarked, and in some cases you have zero rights to even have them, or use them for any reason. Just for the record...
But if we are getting over this, and you REALLY want to do something about arts, and education, and something like this, why don't you try to start to organize and discuss something OFFICIALLY with the copyright holders, and the authors? I think that should be the way, rather than this "underground movement"...
I am...? I already said I was working towards a Ph.D. in Information Studies right? Well, I'm studying this. The thing is, I can't say a whole lot about who I'm working with, because NDAs typically prevent me from saying a whole lot about it. Still, in the next two years or so, I will be able to talk about it more and who I'm working with. That said, The Library of Congress recently took 30TB of tweets right? Well, they can't speak much to the content of those tweets, because even though they have the information, the information is still owned by Twitter, and to a lesser extent, the people who created the information (end-users).
Still, even the paper I just quoted stated that there is a great deal of importance in end-users keeping old stuff and preserving it. Even if they are amateurs, they will likely be a very real group from which academic institutions acquire old things in the future (because temporality suggests that most stuff created by corporations will be lost in time, either due to break-ups or mergers, or simply a lack of care). And the end-user is very important in keeping cultural heritage, in fact they are often the progenitors of its appreciation. See
http://themade.org as an example.
Archiving current information, rather than old information, is a much more complicated process than I think most people imagine. More complicated still when a lot of that information can often disappear into ephemera. A big reason why Good Old Games doesn't release a lot of old games is often because the source code is lost, and therefore the game would have to be recoded or hacked in order to work on modern systems.
As Blitz has mentioned, though this may be a smaller movement here, it's clear that certain Russian/Persian and other sites do a lot more trading in this stuff than occurs in the English-speaking world. Though it also seems like a lot of this is done illegally, it's probably better that it's at least being done.
Everybody's Golf
TL;DR - Anyway, I'll move back to our regularly scheduled programming.