From a legal aspect, how is this going to last at all? IANAL but I was under the impression most meta-search engines operated in at least a semi-grey area because they don't spoon feed illegal content to you. Most just index the big trackers and (conveniently) don't discriminate between illegal and legal content. I feel like when you are dropping torrents into buckets more specific than "video" and "audio" (e.g. linking multiple torrents to a specific movie, highlighting the HD versions) any conventional argument against aiding copyright infringement is out the window.
If the site operators open source the nice UI and their methods of selecting torrents from public trackers (assuming they don't hand pick each and every movie's torrents and other metadata...this is all scriptable/automatable) on Github, that's one way.
Yea, usually these meta torrent sites act kind of like a massage parlor. You pay for the massage and any negotiations between you and the masseur have nothing to do with the parlor.
Hopefully some of these torrent sites can have a better UI like this place. It really has a lot of bite. I like it.
This will be taken down sooner or later, while no legal alternatives¹ exist in many countries. Ridiculous. Movie industry: Okay, apparently you don't want my money, that's fine, but then please don't complain about piracy.
Basically, the Academy Awards rules are the only reason this can't happen. If you enter the video/dvd/download stage too fast, you don't qualify for the Academy Awards.
Because they make more money by forcing you to go to the cinema and pay $12/ticket each time you want to see the movie for several months, before finally releasing on DVD several months later, and making money from that when everyone buys it again. The movie industry would also be opposed to this idea as one of the only ways they keep films from high-quality piracy for any reasonable time is by restricting the distribution and format of the film to something that's not easily ripped and uploaded. Even an encrypted stream would be much easier to break and redistribute in most cases than hooking up a projector and ripping from that.
"Takedown Policy
Please include the full URLs to the infringing material; no categories or search queries.
We follow the same takedown policy that Google uses."
etc, etc
OK. So basically: want to take down something? try go faster than ligth's speed...
Aesthetically and technically this is very nicely done. But in terms of usability I actually find a plain list of movie names easier to parse - unless it lacks critical information and is drowned in ads like on most torrent aggregators...
My favorite interface is the "Overview"-mode in the iTunes store. I wish all content sites would look like this (in case you don't know it, scroll all the way down, then click Functions/Overview).
If they're going to link directly to torrents anyway (and thus discard any shred of legal deniability), could they link more directly to the torrents? If there was a button on/around the movie poster itself that linked directly to whatever they/users considered the "best" version of the torrent, that'd be helpful. Half of my problem with torrent aggregators like ISOHunt is deciding which version is actually going to be closest to my preferences (720p English MP4 with soft-subs/captions.)
I think the point is users are going to discriminate themselves and choose as from their own preferences. Some people (like myself) hate seeing humongous torrents if movies that don't fit the usual scene requirements. Others only use certain public trackers and not others, etc.
To satisfy most people, they could probably put one button for the highest-seeded torrent that contains roughly 700MB of content per 90 minutes of film, labelled "CD-quality", another for "DVD-quality" (if it exists), and then the rest of the people can click through. Actually, just filtering out any results that aren't in the Browser's Accept-Language languages would be a great boon to me.
That actually sounds great, and I agree that that'd cover the vast majority of use cases. Another argument for open sourcing it to be forked to the community's tastes :)
Why? Honest question, I have no idea. I haven't heard of hushmail in over 10 years, but I just encountered a guy I'll be working with that uses one, I honestly thought they shut down.
Nothing against hushmail. Just seemed funny that after a page of statements about how they aren't doing anything wrong, they use a service designed to conceal their identities. I'm not criticizing them - it's just funny.
I worked at a place that used hushmail for the corporate email. It was a business account, so they had their own domain, but it was through hushmail. So I guess they are doing some business.
Then you're better off using any of the other torrent (meta)searchers. This kind of view is excellent for those without access to any nifty streaming services.
If this is all automated as they claim, that's a hell of a good job. Poster, length, rating, credits, synopsis and trailer, everything one could ask for. And then they throw a full-sized screencap as the page background. Brilliant.
I’ll assume that this is a way to promote a global licensing solution — a great one, because the site actually manages to give iTunes a run for its money.
What surprized me was the lack of ranking by note. Assuming the legal challenges are overcame, I would also enjoy being able to have two lists: “Already seen” and “Would like to see” (that might include films not available yet, or even un-financed projects) to parse it all better. If they manage to make those lists work with my cinema subscription (I pay every month for a all-you-can-go-out-and-see plan) I’d be happy to spend more on that then most would pay for cable.
Awesome site but it's too flashy. My guess is that it'll draw too much attention and have to be taken down even though I would love a torrent site that doesn't make my eye's bleed.
This looks similar to myriads of Chinese websites (not the design, but the selection of hit movies by cover art). Many Chinese sites serve up streaming videos directly in the browser. They are too slow to be usable abroad so I guess they avoid litigation that way.
Judging by the amount of Russian covers for Western movies, I'm guessing the site is based in Russia - in which case they probably have quite a safe haven against copyright take-down etc.
damn you [developer of this], had this idea pending for the longest time. yeah, I know this crowd knows this line too much.
Anyway, my approach would be different by a single feature: movie sync. I've already watched many of the movies listed, and would be great to give you my imdb rating public url and you filtering those out. You could even implement a basic recommendation system using my ratings to give best matches.
kickasstorrents.com does the IMDB link which is cool but there's also a greasemonkey script that does it the other way and adds the torrent download links on IMDB (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38484) which is even cooler
