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citricsquid

How do you plan on staying online?

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- Not based in the US: check

- Not hosting any infringing content: check

- DMCA-compliant: check

- Not selling anything: check

- Not doing ads, not tracking you [1]: check

- Not trying to sell your data elsewhere: check

Lawyers will handle the rest. We're not interested in piracy, just very very good UI/UX. Stay tuned.

[1] We use Gaug.es and Piwik with IP fuzzing. They provide enough high-level metrics so that we can improve the interface while letting you guys off the hook.

...but it's called movies.io.

So? movies are illegal now?

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

I liked the very very good UI/UX, good job!

What are the technologies involved ?

It's a typical Rails 3 apps, Nokogiri used for scraping, PostgreSQL db (migrated from SQLite originally), jQuery+ui for the aucomplete (lazy, yay!), and that's about it :)

If you don't mind me asking...where (and maybe how) are you pulling the super high quality images for each movie page background?

The http://www.themoviedb.org/ are doing an amazing job. Using their V3 API right now, it's very nicely designed.

Impressive. Your autocomplete suggestions are high quality, even in foreign languages. May I ask how you are ranking suggestions results? It can't simply be the TMDB api, right?

Right now our search/suggestions is a direct API request to TMDb. Yes, they are that good (props to Fanhattan).

Re: foreign languages, they store very tidy information about all the available titles (basically a mapping from ISO 3166-1 to the title), cf. http://help.themoviedb.org/kb/api/movie-alternative-titles

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for sharing!

Vastly superior UX at http://torrentbutler.eu/

Just heard of torrentbutler a few hours ago. It's interesting, and gets a few things right, but it's not what we're going for.

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

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

If you added TV shows it would be better. Finding movies isn't hard, finding episodes of TV shows is tedious and error prone.

cf. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054800, and you're absolutely right. We're working on reduce pain points, TV shows is an even more interesting challenge.

There's minimalist, and there's functionally incomplete. Right now you guys are the latter as a torrent service, whereas TB are not.

I'm confused. If you're not located in the US, why do you need to be DMCA-compliant?

Why create yet more problems for yourself?

The extradition of the British kid who only linked to external content, and the extradition attempt of Kim Dotcom makes you wonder.

> Not doing ads, tracking you, trying to sell your data elsewhere: check

With the absence of a "not" there, it's not quite clear whether you're telling the truth or not, but a http request to "track.gif" could be construed as, you know, tracking us.

http://secure.gaug.es/track.gif?h[site_id]=4fb448ea613f5d5be...

> We're not interested in piracy

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.

> With the absence of a "not" there, it's not quite clear whether you're telling the truth or not, but a http request to "track.gif" could be construed as, you know, tracking us.

Fair point, reworded the above to be more precise.

Point taken.

Wanted to clarify on:

> 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.

  > 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.

That's like saying "We don't sell crystal meth, we're not distributors for crystal meth, we don't belong to any drug production groups, but our site helps kids obtain crystal meth from those who do: that's how not interested in crystal meth we are."

In retrospect, you're right, we probably should blacklist Twilight from our DB.

Your analogy is paired because both piracy and meth are illegal in the USA. However, the pairing lacks equivalence in my view because crystal meth is clearly (and by nature, not by law) harmful to the user, while piracy is not.

A better analogy might be a website that helps others circumvent the Great Firewall of China. It is illegal in one particular country, but circumvention does not harm individuals (only the society, one could argue). "We don't circumvent the wall, we don't run a proxy, we don't belong to tor: that's how not interested in circumventing the wall we are."

Your censorship analogy is flawed, since copyright infringement is not legal in any country (im not sure, but Ethiopia might have started recognising foreign copyrights now)

I'm curious if you have a better analogy?

Downloading movies from torrents is legal in Canada (covered by a copyright levy on data storage media), for example.

In Poland it's also completely legal if you don't distribute (seed) it. Legal for movies and music, illegal for programs/games.

Same goes here in Switzerland. We have a tax on storage media that is supposed to cover that use case.

In many countries or at least Mexico, copying or linking to copyrighted material != copyright infringement , copying + profit does.

Linking is not considered copyright infringement in most of Europe.

Your analogy has no legs.

>since copyright infringement is not legal in any country //

Last time I looked there were still a few countries that weren't signatories to international copyright laws, PNG I think was one? Maybe Nauru, Tuvalu, Vatican City?

http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/summary.jsp gives details of those places that aren't party to _international_ IP treaties. Note Vatican City is in that list as "Holy See" and is a signatory to a few IP treaties.

"crystal meth is clearly (and by nature, not by law) harmful to the user, while piracy is not"

Methamphetamine is helpful for hyperactivity, obesity, and narcolepsy.

I am having trouble constructing parameters in which your statement is true, but does not apply to nearly everything. For example, Tylenol (APAP) is clearly harmful to a user's liver.

I find your comment disingenuous. I cannot take you seriously when you argue that you are not "interested" in the very thing you enable and are focused on.

I can see why you would think that. However, if there were APIs to license all that content on an invidual basis instead of linking to torrents, we'd do it instead. Can't really argue beyond that, you're right to some extent.

How about just linking to the movies themselves if they are available on Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Lovefilm, iTunes or VUDU instead then?

Actually, we're planning on doing that for US visitors.

The rest of the world is way too much trouble to serve legally so far (it's not even consistent across providers, it's content-dependant..)

A friend of mine runs a similar site for music [1]. I can't be sure, but I'm fairly certain he didn't do it because he was interested in pirating music (at least not entirely). He did it because he saw that others were interested in pirating music (er, finding links to music that may or may not be pirated), and that a service helping them do that would be useful/appreciated(/get him noticed).

[1] http://mppp.it

How are the movie screenshots and posters not infringing content?

Suddenly we live in a world where you need to go to a rights holder to reference an image for discussion or non-profit display? The law may be divided on the issue, but I'm not.

What do you mean by "the law [is] divided on the issue"? As far as I know, this is very clear-cut in the law.

What is your revenue model, how do you plan on paying said layers?

Very good friends, (less controversial) start-ups, that's about it.

movies.io is just a hobby.

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