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I don't know which I feel saddest about: 1. Whether or not this is actually illegal, it is clearly unethical and not in the spirit of good clean business and t

• spinlock 14y ago
  Jobs and Wozniak started by building freaking boxes.
  • there 14y ago
    "phreaking"
  • EricR23 14y ago
    Ahem. That's "phreaking"... As in phone phreaking. -- coming from an ex-phone phreak ;)
    • pixelbath 14y ago
      Unless he's talking about the first Apple computer, in which case, they were literally building "freaking boxes."
  • sgricci 14y ago
    I believe you mean "phreaking" boxes.
  • railsjedi 14y ago
    friggin phreaking boxes ;)
  • JoachimSchipper 14y ago
    Wait, what Steve Jobs does determines your morality? He was obviously a great CEO, but not exactly a saint...
• nddrylliog 14y ago
  Totally understand your position. Hesitated a lot about this, and finally thought "fuck it, let's do it". I think it's like people working in porn: they don't necessarily enjoy the industry, but at one point they thought "man, there's really something that needs to be done". I'd much prefer a legal solution. I'd much prefer content owners to expose APIs for the licensing of their content, and have them let us create the front-ends.
  • CJefferson 14y ago
    For much of this content there are 'APIs'. Why not link people to an Amazon link, or netflix, or iTunes, for films which are available at those places?
    • nddrylliog 14y ago
      EDIT: Read below before downvoting, in USA the situation might be better. We're (Europe) still waiting. 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.
      • dangrossman 14y ago
        On most of these stores, if you linked directly to the movie page, it'd be a one- or two-click experience between arriving and watching the video. On Amazon for example, you click the "Buy Movie" button, and it turns into a play button, which launches the movie player. As long as you're signed in, there are no intermediate steps, the purchase just goes to your default credit card or bank account and you get an e-mail receipt while you're already watching the movie. It's not that different anywhere else if you're already signed in, which many people will be. You haven't really answered the question of why you don't "let me pay for the damn thing" by linking to these stores for the movies available there. If you're only interested in helping people pirate movies even if they're cheaply and easily available to them online already, just come out and say it.
• quinndupont 14y ago
  Who let the MPAA in here? Seriously, unless you are a massive copyright holder, attempting to exploit every red penny out of your brainwashed masses, I don't see how any user would have a problem with this. Maybe the movie industry should try to out-innovate?
  • CJefferson 14y ago
    It's very difficult to out-innovate 'taking things someone else made and giving them away completely for free', when you have to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to break even.
    • canadaduane 14y ago
      Bottled water?
      • kevinrpope 14y ago
        Water isn't copyrighted.
        • pyrhho 14y ago
          And yet they still make a healthy profit.
    • chc 14y ago
      Apple bet against this notion and they won pretty big.
    • hxa7241 14y ago
      So the best way to encourage innovation is give companies big fat monopolies like infinitely expandable copyright? 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.
• biot 14y ago
  The real shame is that this could have been a good money-maker had it been built to link to instant purchase options on iTunes, Amazon, and so on using affiliate links. Or even taken a "pirate with a conscience" strategy and offered purchase links alongside the torrent links. That way, everybody who claims they only download movies from torrents because the experience is better can both purchase a legit copy and have the better download/viewing experience they desire.
  • nddrylliog 14y ago
    I hear http://www.dexy.tv/ http://www.dexy.tv/ is pretty good at that - dude just contacted me, we'll work together to bring that info over to movies.io for legal alternatives.
• Zirro 14y ago
  I think the film-industry should be inspired by this. If they offered something which is as easy to use and as good-looking as this, piracy will certainly decrease. Just put a "Pay here"-button before giving the user their download-link. Skip the DRM and the restrictions for different parts of the world and they'd have a killer-platform for selling their products. I am not saying that piracy isn't "unethical", but that there are many ways it could be resolved without resorting to harsh laws.
  • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    If Hollywood made this exact same product but with pay buttons, why would I as a user choose it over movies.io.
    • joshAg 14y ago
      1080p, surround sound, perfectly mastered instead of being ripped from a dvd or a cam, and no threat of being sued.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • Zirro 14y ago
      Because you want to support the making of more movies of the same kind. Because you have a conscience. That said, there will always be those who shoplift in stores, or pirate movies. I don't believe those people constitute the majority of the population.
    • jonstjohn 14y ago
      Convenience and (the perception) of safety, both from law and malware. Paying a reasonable amount for a movie that is easy to find and watch is a no-brainer for me. Of course, my time to income ratio is low.
      • jberryman 14y ago
        And of course quality.
• kvnn 14y ago
  "...and not in the spirit of good clean business and technology practices we should all be aspire to" Its not a business.
• rmc 14y ago
  Breaking silly rules if it makes things better is part of the hacker ethic.
• laughinghan 14y ago
  I'll bite. Why do you think this "clearly unethical"? I don't think it's clear at all. Everyone I know pirates movies, TV shows, and music. Everyone I know also jaywalks. I also know people who use drugs illegally, as well as participate in or facilitate underage drinking, and I don't have a problem with any of it. Are these unethical? Someone clearly thought so. Do I care? You know what the truth is, for me, and everyone I know, at least? The truth is, we don't care about "other" people's opinions on ethics (where "other" people=people on the internet, in the government, in anti-piracy ads, etc). The fact is, it's socially acceptable, among my social circles, to pirate, to use drugs, and to {participate in,facilitate} underage drinking. So I have no qualms with people I know doing so, nor if I were to do so myself. You don't pirate, ever? Because it's "clearly unethical"? Do everyone in your social circles hold similar opinions? Do you jaywalk? Have you ever used drugs, or facilitated illegal drinking? Those aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely curious. I guess my point is, I don't think ethics matter. I don't think about whether what I do is ethical. I don't hurt people, and I don't steal (physical things), because I have empathy. I guess you could say I have ethics in that if you asked me why I don't, I'd say "it's wrong", but I'd never say something is "clearly unethical" and try to argue why. I'd say it's wrong because it's hurtful, and I don't like being hurt. Is this just me?
  • jellicle 14y ago
    I would say it's clearly ethical, even required, to share knowledge and information with other people. That's pretty much the highest impulse a human has, right up there with "protect your offspring". As Rick Falkvinge is so eloquent in saying, this is our culture, and permitting monopolies on it is just disastrously bad policy. 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.
    • res0nat0r 14y ago
      It isn't a 'human right' to be able to watch Game of Thrones or Batman Begins without paying for it I don't believe. It is ignorant to try and claim otherwise.
• lightyrs 14y ago
  It tickles me to see a post on Hacker News decrying the ethical issues of creating a UI for a torrent tracker. If this attitude had prevailed 50 years ago, we wouldn't have Apple. This is Hacker News.
  • thebdmethod 14y ago
    Yea, if Steve Jobs hadn't played around with Blue Boxes, where would we be?
• J3L2404 14y ago
  Well we can all thank pg for the new tone of HN. Kill Hollywood? Might as well have Henry Ford saying kill horses. When a viable alternative exists it will gradually replace Hollywood, just like every other industry. But don't worry, the Internet is still the wild west, the sherrif has to follow the laws but hired guns don't have to. Good for the goose good for the gander. Enter torrent malware.
• tptacek 14y ago
  You said something a long time ago that has stuck with me: If you're willing to compromise your morals on something small, where will you ever draw the line? I agree, this is sad.
  • hughw 14y ago
    I draw the line at something big.
  • spindritf 14y ago
    Firstly, morals differ a little, as illustrated by the discussion around. Secondly, appreciating craftsmanship does not necessarily imply approving of purpose.
  • mistercow 14y ago
    "Where do you draw the line?" is almost always a trivial rephrasing of the slippery slope fallacy. We live in a world where there are no lines, and we draw them in arbitrary places so that we can make the world work. If that bothers you, you are just going to have to adjust your worldview to be compatible with the reality you were born into.
    • tptacek 14y ago
      Help me understand how your comment doesn't imply that all ethics are situational and relative?
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      • mistercow 14y ago
        As far as I can see, the two concepts have no bearing on each other whatsoever, but in any case, I can't help you to understand how something doesn't imply something else. You're going to have to justify how it does imply that. You can start by defining "situational" and "relative".
  • 14y ago
• yason 14y ago
  Conversely, I would say that (within current laws) it is clearly illegal but it remains unclear as to why would it be unethical. I kind of correlate bits with thoughts. Contrary to what some shady associations try to claim, you can't possibly cause conclusive harm to anyone by merely copying bits any more than by thinking about illegal things. Digital copies also obey the same law that thoughts do: you either keep them to yourself or let it out to the whole world. There's no middle point where you could selectively share your thoughts with certain people but prevent them from sharing them further. And last I checked, "ideas are worthless"; it's the execution (into a physical realm) that matters. Ditto with digital copies. I've been arguing for a while that the best internet breakthrough and source of income for MAFIAA would be to pay Piratebay to add a "Pay" button to their service. And to others' torrent search engines. Just sell licenses to movies and music and let people get their data in whatever format they feel like.
  • res0nat0r 14y ago
    If we are now trying to equate downloading a movie or tv show with some type of thought crime I think we've clearly run out of ways to try and justify our behavior.
  • krzyk 14y ago
    I don't know where it is "clearl illegal" but it must be a very strange law. Would anyone sane make illegal someone that says: "You can download Game of Thrones from www.example.com". That's basically what the torrents are, just a hint where to find the data you seek.
• pooriaazimi 14y ago
  I don't consider it unethical one bit. I live in a country that has no business relationships with the west, and I couldn't buy a movie, even if I paid 10 times the price (and I also have to change my ip to be able to buy it from any western store). I don't watch movies (except for Kubrick's, who is dead) and specially hate Hollywood movies, so I'm not really the target audience of this site. Ethics is not a set of rules fixed in stone. Killing is bad, but killing an animal beaten by a car is hundreds of times more ethical than letting it spend hours in pain and then die. Pirating/stealing is bad, but you should never fault a poor kid, or someone who is technically unable to purchase that in the first place.
• watsix 14y ago
  Here's hoping your current position as comment #1 means you're not the only one who cares. You certainly aren't! But this kind of stuff has become religion here: I'm seeing perfectly valid comments being downvoted if they take the side that these things are unethical, and admittedly I get pretty hot when I hear the roar of "piracy is a-ok!" that now seems to drown out any contradiction. I think the MPAA and groups like it bear the brunt of the responsibility for the creation of this mentality, though. I don't think they really understand how many enemies they made due to SOPA and things like it, or the level of bad will they're generating by consistently refusing to embrace better distribution models, or how much they undercut their own arguments by refusing to behave in an ethical manner while they demand ethics of others. And the worse it gets, the more they dig in to absurd positions. Their behavior seems to have led many to conclude--fairly--that they're simply a mafioso organization and that there is no validity to any of their concerns. And so copyright ceases to exist, and it's hard to discuss, even here, without being accused of being an MPAA shill. But it started with the copyright organizations: they started calling fans thieves and demanding they all be put in jail or fined into bankruptcy, and then they started demanding that the Internet be locked down and controlled without due process, and now people are firing back with equal vitriol, and often an equivlaent unwillingness to listen to the other side. Sad indeed.
• melvinmt 14y ago
  I'm confused, wasn't this what pg meant with 'Disrupt Hollywood'? /srcsm
• J3L2404 14y ago
  >That I seem to be one of the few that cares. Clearly many do care, but arguing is like facing an onslaught of Orcs.
• bmelton 14y ago
  I think that the crowd here is growing more pro-piracy of late. I've been in a number of lengthy arguments here about this issue in the past year arguing the 'morality' of piracy or how 'justified' it is because of whatever, whereas earlier discussions I've had on HN were all more academic in nature -- "If Hollywood can't figure out digital distribution, of course there will be more users who pirate." Even worse, the entitlement is much greater, and nobody seems to care that it's wrong, so I end up getting drawn into a million "can't copy a car" type of arguments and "I can't legally purchase" rebuttals. Worse than that, I've felt like I'm in the minority on how I feel about piracy and as such, have pretty much quit rehashing the same old arguments. So, while I hate that you're going through the same nonsense I did, at least you can save yourself some frustration by not being baited into the same frustrating arguments that deliberately "miss the point".
  • tikhonj 14y ago
    It's not that "nobody cares that it's wrong", it's that they reasonably disagree with that: not everybody thinks it's wrong! It seems the fact that copyright infringement is "wrong" is an axiom for you. Going from that position, I could see why the discussion seems poor: other people have different axioms! Of course, if people are arguing about something, treating it as an axiom is not productive. Also, there are people who hold the exact opposite stance: it's not piracy that's wrong, it's copyright. Take a look at the free software movement--not only do they believe you shouldn't legally limit people from distributing software, they actually go farther and believe you shouldn't even make it difficult to modify and reuse code! There are some very intelligent people in the FSF, and they've contributed immensely to the software world, all on the opposite premise: it's not infringement that's wrong, it's copyright. Now, I could see how you would disagree with them. An unfortunate proportion of HN seems to--look at any thread about MIT/BSD licensing. But you shouldn't just dismiss their philosophy out of hand and implicitly believe that spreading information in spite of copyright is wrong. Ultimately, it's not that "piracy" is justified, it's that it doesn't need to be justified in the first place. What needs to be justified is restricting distribution in the first place.
    • bmelton 14y ago
• JoyxBen 14y ago
  My rule is simple: anything I can get through iTunes I don't pirate. I also have a cable subscription. Yet living in a non-english speaking country MOST content I'm interested in is not available through these legal channels (No TV shows available through iTunes, also missing many new release movies (don't mean delayed release which I put up with, I mean released only to Blu-ray and never iTunes), most older movies, most documentaries, etc). Funny how I don't have that problem with, say, iOS apps (e.g. have never needed to jailbreak my devices because something I want is only available in the US App Store). If only all content was this easy... For profits publishers need to relax their control obsession and get on the ball.
• hxa7241 14y ago
  People really ought to stop and examine this idea that copying information is somehow underneath unethical -- and that the special word 'unethical' can be uttered and that will tell people to behave. Information is a nonrival good: it is an abundance with respect to access -- how on earth, in any rational conception of morality, can free access to an abundant good be construed as intrinsically immoral? It is unethical only pragmatically: only in that (it is proposed) the economy will function better with some restrictions on copying -- which is the main purpose of the law. That is: it is unethical no further than it is illegal.
  • ryanwaggoner 14y ago
    Agreed. I have a hobby of collecting different snippets of people's personal info, just for entertainment purposes. Please send me your name, contact info, and banking information. I'd like to have it on file.
    • hxa7241 14y ago
      Informational goods covered by copyright are ones already made public.
• option_greek 14y ago
  I would not consider it immoral as long as there is no other way to access the same content without committing an illegal act. As a non-US citizen, I can't even watch half the content even if I would want to pay. The fact that people had to pay multiple times for watching the same content in different formats and that it is considered perfectly legal is more immoral to me than any thing else.
  • dusanbab 14y ago
    Why can't you use a US iTunes account? How is that illegal? It may well be a violation of the Apple/iTunes TOS but that is different to being illegal.
    • pooriaazimi 14y ago
      I can't speak for the grandparent, but I have to change my IP address to be able to download from the App Store (or other stores including Google's Play, or even sites like code.google.com and sf.net), and that is illegal in my country.
• nl 14y ago
  I agree, and I hate this. Even more though, I'm sad that people are forced into a position where they have to run unethical services if they want to build services like this. It is time content owners were forced to provide statutory licenses for streaming video content, just as they are forced to provide licenses for streaming audio.
  • nddrylliog 14y ago
    Dear god yes, that is the whole point I've been trying to make. Thank you for that.
  • franzus 14y ago
    It is time for home owners to give up their ownership and hand over their property to the people.
    • nl 14y ago
      Do I detect some sarcasm? 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?
• tluyben2 14y ago
  I'm in the camp (which might be naive) that if there are alternatives people wouldn't download illegally (as much). I never illegally copy Indie games or movies simply as they are easy to buy. The perceived pressure of 'pirating' might get people in the EU streaming content at the same time the US gets it within our lifetime. Without that pressure, there is no incentive for this. All people I know would never download/watch illegally if they could watch legally. This is simply not the case and so pressure needs to build in order to force the issue.
• moe 14y ago
  That I seem to be one of the few who cares while most others nit on details. For me it's you who is nitting on details. The question whether filesharing is "ethical" or not is irrelevant. Because regardless of the answer: The cat is not going back into the bag. No matter how many rivers are cried. You could just as well complain that the job of the farrier has nearly disappeared because most people don't ride horses anymore. A much more interesting discussion could be based on the following questions: * What distribution and compensation model will emerge as the successor to the current "pay-per-consumption" or "pay-per-physical-copy" approach? * What are the consequences for artists and content-producers? Are million-dollar blockbuster movies still possible in the future? Will "making a living" as a musician still be possible? I.e. please discuss under the premise that the current model is dead, because that's what it is. We do have horseless carriage now, and the raw numbers tell you that most people consider the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages by far.
• samstr 14y ago
  Everyone pirates everything and no one feels sad.
• bennomadic 14y ago
  I don't know which I feel saddest about: 1. Someone calling this "clearly unethical" 2. On a site named "hacker" news 3. That comment being top 1.