"broken" has not been given an official commercial release (according to reznor, because they wanted to avoid the film overshadowing the prominence of the music), thus adding to its mythological status in alternative culture. the original hand-dubbed tapes were distributed by reznor to various friends with dropouts at certain points so he could know who distributed any copies that might surface. reznor, commenting in the "access" section of the nin website, implied that gibby haynes was responsible for the most prominent leak. this copy was traded on vhs tapes for years (resulting in many poor-quality, high-generation copies), and was later encoded in mpeg and avi formats and distributed extensively through peer-to-peer networks and nine inch nails fan websites. these are generally not of the highest quality, as they are not first-generation copies.