Show HN: movies.io — torrent search like it should be

Because they so clearly suck at both UI and content distribution.

I don't want to jump through hoops to watch a movie. And no I don't want to wait for the release window to clear.

I want you to give me the rights to get it by my owns mean, because I know how to do it better than you. Just let me pay for the damn thing: I got money, I'll pay for all I want to watch.

Torrented files have none of these arbitrary restrictions.

It is of course the exact opposite: it is very difficult to innovate when you have guaranteed monopolies, because they are effectively money for nothing, and the easiest way to keep the business going is to focus on manipulating the law and enforcement in your favour instead of working on innovation -- which is indeed exactly what the MPAA/etc. lot have been doing.

What are you going to do? Work hard to create new ways to improve the service, or call a lawyer and have the government shut down your competitor overnight? It is an all too easy choice, and it is one the media industry has been taking year after year.

Because the terms are offensive and anti-consumer.

Let us count the ways:

1. Overpriced

2. DRM encumbered

3. Bad UX (by way of 2)

4. Platform lock-in (by way of 2)

5. Geograhphy lock-in (again, by way of 2)

So basically, if I live in Europe, I can pay downright extortionate rates to access content in a format which goes out of its way to make my life difficult, (IF i can access it at all)

Or,

I can key in a random torrent site, search for what I want, it will be available in multiple, DRM-free formats, and I can click a button and have it on my local machine in less than an hour.

Which sounds like a better value proposition to you?

I'd rather cut a check to the artist directly and know that I'm not supporting N middlemen who actively campaign against my interests.

Well if it was 15-20 years after I created it and it had already paid out for me then I'd feel mighty fine about it.

For me this argument works at the short-term and for the artists but fails to speak at all to why the government of a country should get involved in protecting the assets of those who have already received their living wage many, many times over for something that may well have been created by their great-grandchild's employee 100 years ago.

Edit: case in point http://www.humblebundle.com/ => how much easier can it get?

Same reason you buy stuff instead of stealing them?

> download movies - certainly a lot easier than

> torrenting.

The Oatmeal disagrees: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

That said, I suppose one nice thing about getting money is that it will stick around even after the spotlight goes elsewhere.

I don't think you can assert this without providing some backup. It's certainly the case that sharing certain information with certain parties is a high impulse, but the idea that we have a strong impulse for all information to be shared freely is highly unintuitive to me, merely based on my experiences.

Furthermore, that something is an impulse does not make it ethical. We have many impulses (sex, food, violence), and acting on them unquestioningly would lead to many unethical things. We also do not categorically say that all of these impulses must be fulfilled in an ethical society. For example, most people would not agree that I have a certain right to act violently at times, because of my violent impulses.

> As Rick Falkvinge is so eloquent in saying, this is our culture, and permitting monopolies on it is just disastrously bad policy.

That's not what a monopoly is. A monopoly would be if only company could “create” culture. (Or if it was group, it'd be an oligopoly, but I'd still understand your point.) But we're not in that situation. Especially with the internet, we're not in that situation. Anyone can create culture, and they have the ability to choose how exclusive it is. I would guess, though I can't back this up, that at this point in history we have more free culture than ever before. We have the opposite of a monopoly on our culture.

> Copyright is a subsidy to distributors, not artists. And the distributors know it. There's no need to protect the business model of content distributors in a world that has the Internet.

It's both, and why shouldn't it be? The studio executives behind making Game of Thrones play their part just as George RR Martin and Aidan Gillen do. There is an argument to be had that perhaps the compensation for these roles is skewed relative to their importance, but I don't believe that argument would lead to “therefore, no one has any right to make money on Game of Thrones.”

>I would say it's clearly ethical, even required, to share knowledge and information with other people.

How about your personal data ace?

This is a rather extreme argument. You really think the impulse to share is universally stronger than the impulse to be secretive, the exact inverse, for example? Specifically, what about private data?

How far does this ethical obligation to share go? How much effort is one ethically obligated to expend to share? Before I knew what I was doing with HTML and CSS, some stuff I did didn't work due to what I am now quite sure were browser bugs. Was it unethical for me not to share that knowledge? Is it unethical now for me not to be trying to figure out how to reproduce those bugs again to share?

Is it unethical for artists, writers, coders, even mathematicians not to share unfinished works, code and proofs?

Now, you're also certainly not giving them any benefit, and perhaps you believe that they deserve some benefit, but that still doesn't make you a parasite any more than anybody who just didn't buy a movie.

Put another way: to the creator, the utility of your torrenting a movie is the same as the utility of just not buying the movie. Now, obviously the utility of your paying the creator is higher, but that still doesn't make you a parasite.

You are at worst a symbiont, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Now, there are other arguments for copyright, but your point about being a parasite is just inaccurate.

    Among Canadians who engage in P2P file-sharing, our results
    suggest that for every 12 P2P downloaded songs, music purchases
    increase by 0.44 CDs. That is, downloading the equivalent of
    approximately one CD increases purchasing by about half of a CD.

You may say it's still wrong - and that's a valid opinion, 'though I don't share it - but "hurting the creators" is just false.

You say you "don't steal (physical things)" as if that makes it ok...

I don't think not stealing makes piracy ok, and I didn't say so. What I mean, and what I tried to say, was that I haven't decided whether I think piracy is ethical or not, and I care little enough that I probably won't decide for the forseeable future.

...but you are stealing. It's a different form of stealing, but you do steal...and you are usually hurting the creators of that material in one way or another. ... You do steal, and you do hurt people.

In my eyes (and maybe this is unreasonable of me, anyone else?), you lose credibility when you state, as fact, your own opinions that you know other people disagree on. The fact that everyone agrees on, is that you believe pirating is stealing, and that it hurts creators. Whether your belief is true or not, is not a fact that the participants of this discussion all agree on or stipulate too.

...you lack empathy for the act...

Minor point, but I don't think this makes sense, as a statement. My understanding of empathy is that it's possible to have empathy and do harm, if you don't realize you're doing harm and hence even though you would empathize, you don't. So I'm not lacking empathy "for the act", whatever you mean by that, but rather I think you mean that I don't realize I'm hurting people, as you say in the next part of your sentence.

Saying "it's wrong" and going no further than that makes you thoughtless, not humble.

I had trouble phrasing this, since I had two things to say about me saying "it's wrong": I wanted to both contrast with saying "clearly unethical", and explain how I would go further. To clarify, I definitely did not mean I would "go no further", in fact I later went further, and said I'd say it's wrong because it's hurtful, and I don't like being hurt.

Now, the one good point you made:

Even today, there are societies where it is "socially acceptable" to beat and murder women, to stone people for being heretics, etc. etc. "Socially acceptable" does not provide justification for unethical acts. [...] You just don't care, because people around you are doing the same.

Well, yes and no. Would I ever beat and murder women if it were "socially acceptable" to? I want to think I wouldn't, but I don't know that, and you don't know that you wouldn't. A couple decades ago, in some of those United States, bus drivers made anyone who was visibly of African-American descent sit in the back. Was that unethical? I think we all agree it was. Was the bus driver an unethical person? Well, we sure don't punish everyone who ever engaged in acts that we now consider unethical but engaged in them simply because it was socially acceptable at the time, like these bus drivers.

I want to believe that everything I do that's socially acceptable is ethical in some absolute sense, and that all those things that are socially acceptable that I don't think we should do (and don't do) are unethical in some absolute sense, but both of those things are almost certainly false. For those things that are unethical but I don't realize and do anyway because they're socially acceptable, how is "socially acceptable" not a justification? Surely it's unreasonable to expect me to know what is absolutely ethical and what isn't.

It may seem like a nit-picking distinction or technicality, but the law is made up of such technicalities.

With magnet links, the indirection is even greater.

Considering the amount of people out there that are torrenting, an argument can be made that it is an unwritten rule of society that this is perfectly fine.

You only have my word (and the lack of ads/monetization) for it, but I truly do.

I also wish the situation would change and we can all license stuff easily and legally. (See my other comments)

2. What's your working definition of "directly harmful"? Littering directly harms wildlife, does it directly harm people? Buying some drugs directly supports people who actively harm other people. Last I heard, there was mounting evidence that second-hand smoke was worse than what used to be believed; is smoking indoors "directly harmful" to other occupants?

3. I'm not sure what you mean by "counter-argument" (what are you arguing against? Your definition?), but you seem to be saying you feel like there should be intentionality in there somewhere but you're not sure where. I hope you don't need me to tell you that muddies the issue further, e.g. religious fanatics that really believe they're saving souls or the world when they hurt people.

Is there really anything that can be done with absolutely no affect outside of their self??

Maybe there would be more insightful discussions if people had more to say than "HN is dead" in response to a confused, imperfect person expressing where they are on the path to discerning right from wrong.

I think the difference is twofold: it's socially unacceptable, and empathically, I'd be offended if someone plagiarized my work.

2. I am not trying to legitimize piracy just because "I don't hurt people, and I don't steal (physical things)", and I didn't say so. What I mean, and what I tried to say, was that I haven't decided whether I think piracy is ethical or not, and I care little enough that I probably won't decide for the forseeable future.

As a business owner, should I really feel bad if I outsource to China and put 100 people in the US out of work? or how about if I automate people out of jobs?

I'm surprised you take it as a given that you should feel bad doing so. We live in a very capitalistic world, and I think most capitalists would say no, you absolutely shouldn't feel bad. Do you believe we should be employing people in obsolete jobs just to avoid putting people out of work? I will happily provide examples compiled by capitalists of just that, taken to the extreme, to prove how bad of an idea it is.

The fact that the GPL uses copyright is just an implementation detail. In a very real sense, the GPL is the opposite of normal copyright--it turns copyright law against itself. It goes further than not having any copyright (e.g. public domain/BSD/MIT): it not only ensures this particular work is free, it ensures all the works it can affect also remain free.

So the issue (from an idealist's standpoint) is not that the copyright of a GPL project is infringed but rather that additional limits are added on the project. The idea behind the GPL is to ensure that not only can everybody access the program, but they can legally and practically modify it. The people infringing are the ones who stop others from accessing the intellectual "property"--the very opposite of "pirates"!

In the open source world, the most direct analog of something like piracy is distributing a normally paid project for free, legally (e.g. CentOS vs RHEL). Not only is this legal, but it's completely reasonable--nobody's crying foul! (You are not allowed to use trademarks, but that's completely orthogonal to copyright.)

So really, the arguments against copyright and for the GPL are the same. If anything, the latter is actually more extreme: it ensures not only access but the ability to modify.

In the FSF's perfect world, copyright would not be necessary for the GPL--all software would just be free (as in speech) by default. So supporting the GPL and opposing other copyright is entirely consistent.

I don't feel think something being 'socially acceptable' in a group is a good way to measure if it's good.

I agree with that, I was more trying to say that I don't really choose my actions based on whether I think they're "good" or "bad". In fact, when I chide someone, I tell them what they're doing is "uncool". This made me realize I'm actually choosing my actions based on social acceptability, and I felt like, doesn't everyone? In fact, e.g. bus driver segregating the bus, we as a society even consider this ok.

If the existence or state of things is determined by groupthink in different circumstances the world is in a lot of trouble and doesn't have a strong foundation.

My impression is that throughout human history, the "state of things" has been determined by groupthink, and it will be basically until the Singularity (but that's any day now, right?). Now don't get me wrong, it's lead to all manner of problems (Godwin's law is relevant here), but it seems to me to be a fundamental element of the human condition.

We live in a strangely retarded relativistic and selfish world where everything is everyone's and nothing is anyone's.

Care to elaborate on "retarded"?

Do you not see this new relativistic, cosmopolitan world as an improvement over when people had absolute convictions? I was taught that they used them to justify what we now consider heinous crimes.

"selfish" being good is a capitalistic idea, but "everything is everyone's and nothing is anyone's" sounds quite socialist, so this seems contradictory.

silly rant about police making money

While I agree that a lot of people have an unfair bias against the police, it's not silly to be worried about unnecessary laws motivated by government revenues, do you think this never happens?

The rest of your comment:

Why do you avoid jaywalking, and why did you refuse to copy her answer? What do you think of people who jaywalk, and who copy other people's answers, and who pirate movies? Would you say what they're doing is unethical, or even "clearly unethical"?

I think the copying answers thing is especially interesting, because while there's controversial arguments about the hurtfulness of jaywalking and pirating, copying someone's answer to a problem you know how to do, with their permission, is the ultimate example of a victimless, but apparently in your eyes, unethical act. Is it just the principle of the matter, because you feel like you'd be presenting her work as your own?

There was a class at university I took where my friend and I would pair on working through the problems on the whiteboard, and she would write the solutions down, and I, who always procrastinated way more than her, ended up regularly copying her solutions (not verbatim, heavily paraphrased, but definitely not working it out on my own again). Would you do that? If not, would you judge me for it?

  > Selling alcohol to minors is unethical. Do I need to
  > get into that?

Example: The legal drinking age in Detroit, Michigan, USA is 21 years of age. The legal drinking age in Windsor, Ontario, Canada (right across the river from Detroit) is 19 years old. A 19 year old US citizen drives across the Detroit River and buys a drink at a bar.

Is the bar acting unethically? If not, how is it any different (ethically) to sell alcohol to the same 19 year old while in Detroit?

Discuss.

I am aware of, and understand the premise of the 'copyright is wrong' party, and I was perhaps remiss to have excluded it from my earlier response, but the point was more to give edw some reassurance that he isn't alone. He seemed genuine in his question, and as I took a long time to type my response, there weren't any like-responses when I started writing (I was in the middle of something.)

So, to the issue at hand, which is thankfully not the "can't copy a car" sort of tripe I'm used to dealing with... I suppose my biggest trouble with the 'copyright is wrong' argument is that it seems to argue from a point of 'morality', meaning that it "isn't right" to restrict information or, to coin the old phrase, "information wants to be free."

The only good reason I can imagine for that stance (and I'm happy to be informed otherwise) is that it deprives them of things. What I think is 'right' is to give the author of a work the ability to do with it what they will. If they choose to share it, then great for them. If they choose to share it without the ability to reproduce it, I'd suppose that was within their rights. Just as it is within my rights to build a fence and disallow people from knocking it down. Those who seek to encourage open source also make that choice, just the other way; But they've still chosen to have their work treated how they wish (or not, in the case of MIT/public domain licenses). Even in open source, the author's wishes are to be respected, and I don't fault them (or closed source products) for having made the choice that they have. It's their work, they should control it as much or as little as they like.

Whether or not copyright is right or wrong (and I am certainly not going to suggest that it's perfect, or even necessarily 'good',) the author of a work, even in open source, is effectively licensing their work, but with a particular set of constraints. If a company uses GPLv2 code and does not release the source, what is the expected reaction?

I think that the biggest issue for me is that (at least in the arguments I've had) the proponents of eliminating copyright feel that it will promote the arts, and that it will remove restrictions keeping artists from flourishing but, at least in every scenario I can think of, it also removes the ability of an artist to make a living from their work as well as they could otherwise. If artists can't afford to pay their rents on their art, then they'll either stop producing it altogether, or produce less of it. Perhaps that will be offset by the newly unencumbered artists doing covers of whatever the current hot song is, but that doesn't exactly promote new creation either, and leads to a losing proposition for originality in art.

Effectively, the distribution costs are so low at this point, and people can clone music / pictures / etc so quickly, that in the absence of a controlled distribution, it's quite possible that a new song could get 'link-jacked', and its creation could be attributed to a copier with better promotion skills, making promotion more important than originality, which takes us 360 to where we are, only perhaps worse.

The content industry has manipulated law-makers into giving them exactly what they want.

The way the political system works is that you can't just oppose something, you must have a counter proposal.

Statutory licensing is my proposal.

I'm not sure what you are proposing, but by the sound of it you think the status-quo is acceptable. Fine - but how do you propose to stop the creeping erosion of individual's rights?

We'll add a dropdown for alternative languages etc., and subtitles, but we got to breathe a little first. Lotsa things in the issue tracker.

No intentions to profit from this, except for the experience, the friends (and enemies) we make, and the excitement.

We plan to develop our own crawler (instead of relying on other search engines), and refine our heuristics for tags / flagging false torrents.

We'll try to get as much as we can right by default until we ask for help from users :)

Make watchlists! Share them with your friends. Nobody's telling you to download films you don't own.

Hopefully the minimalist side of movies.io attracts a different kind of people.

Also, the whole watchlist+sharing aspect is missing in tb.

Fair point, reworded the above to be more precise.

Point taken.

> Sure you are. You're directly helping people perform it. I'm not saying what you're doing should be illegal, but let's be honest here. You are "interested" in piracy. One could argue you're even involved in it.

To be, again, completely honest with you, no. If you could have that much exposure showing photos of shoes, we'd do it instead.

I see it as... a start-up without the worry to make profit. We use analytics only to improve the product. We use this as a product building exercise, that's all.

We don't upload movies, we don't run a tracker, we don't belong to any release groups: that's how not interested in piracy we are.

[1] http://mppp.it

movies.io is just a hobby.

We'd have to have a 'Report as NSFW' link somewhere to achieve that, and that seems easy to abuse.

There's so much more about movies than you can learn about from TMDb, some people do research, are passionate about a particular subject, especially niche movies that aren't available anywhere (not legally, even often not by torrent).

We'd love to nurture that. We're looking for a great way to manage that information: just 'comments' on the movie isn't going to cut it. Stay tuned.

We are (obviously) still refining our copy with movies.io, but when we're happy with it, there's still a lot on the plate: responsive design, releasing an API, mobile apps. RSS feeds are a killer feature: add a movie on your iPhone, it's downloaded when you go back home.

Once we have the "final" look of the website, we can apply the same design elements to finding TV Shows, etc. The sky's the limit, really. Oh, and one account for everything, of course.

The Torrentz guy seems paranoid indeed (lots of disclaimers everywhere) but that seems to serve him well, it's been online for 8 years.

Also, hamsters! http://torrentz.eu/img/hamster.jpg

Some method to let other users curate the content would be great too. On the TPB this can be done at looking at the colored skull or the comments. Improving on this method would be great. I don't know whether linking to a release site is practical and desirable?

EDIT: also order by date. If I type hunger, hunger games should be on top.

As for poor quality etc. here's our stance: by default, the first search result should be a release of 1) reasonable quality 2) reasonably well seeded.

For power users, we're working on user settings to adjust your preferences for release groups, etc.

Of course, working from a .avi/.mkv/.mp4 file would be optimal because we'd be able to get a lot of codec info from there, but we won't go so far.

I buy a lot of indie content, I hope that it helps them make a living. I'm currently contacting people to try and start a legal offer for indie content: apparently nobody got that right yes (if you know of any, let me know).

As for sharing my code, part of it, yes, open-source has been very beneficial to the software industry in the past... 30-odd years, and we plan on keep doing it since it seems to work out on everyone.

I probably shouldn't even have replied to that comment, but from all my comments here it's pretty obvious what I really want to happen: it's not movies.io, it's a 'Steam' for movies. Who cares if you don't have the latest mainstream crap (read: BF3, etc.) as long as you have a sort of 'quality seal' and very very easy payment/access ?

Previously, .torrent files were the preferred method to distribute torrents. They contain meta-data such as the size of the torrent, its name, whether it's a single file or a folder, the file structure, and more importantly, a list of trackers (think of them as "matchmakers" for people who participate in the torrent) and SHA-1 hashes of all blocks of the torrents.

However, recently, magnet links seem to be preferred: instead of sending all the info above, you just send the SHA-1 hash (20 bytes) of the torrent. (We add in some extra stuff, such as the torrent's name and size so it displays faster in torrent clients).

From that hash, torrent clients will join the Distributed Hash Table ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table ) and ask around if anyone has seen this torrent. If yes, the content of the .torrent file is transmitted directly from peer to peer, and you can start downloading it like a regular torrent.

It's a very neat trick, and it allowed bringing down the size of ThePirateBay to 90MB total: http://infworm.com/fit-the-entire-pirate-bay-site-on-a-usb-d...