If it’s for preservation they should probably look into tape or optical storage. Realistically your friend is not doing it for preservation considering that there are way better equipped individuals and organisations for that (the BBC for example).

I really don’t get why people have started to say that they only do it for preservation like they run a museum or an archive. Come on man, that movie is available literally everything and your hard drive will fuck up the storage of the files long before humanity losses access to that movie.

I download movies because I like free movies.