OK, so, it's that post.

Consider the following cases:

1. a company violates a FOSS license by incorporating GPL code and not releasing source code.

2. a company takes an image produced by an artist and sells T-shirts of it without the artist getting compensated.

3. a website/mobile app/elements of branding get replicated (or very closely reproduced) in a new website/app (think Zynga, Chinese/Russian clones of Facebook/Groupon and whatnot).

4. site content gets scraped wholesale, and fed into another AdSense-infested site.

In all these cases, noone lost any money when bits got copied (in fact, sometimes the offending party would produce original work to mimic the product in question), yet doing above things is a no-no, but downloading movies is OK. I don't mean to take a high moral ground here, but it's baffling for me to see the cognitive dissonance.

I do tend to disagree with the sentiment on HN regarding some aspects of the "pirating issue".

Common arguments are (as quoted from the text)and my symbolic translation to the HN world:

> "Movie theater incomes are in most cases enough to cover the production costs. Their business remains viable even if people continue downloading their movies"

in HN-speak: "Developer salaries are the highest in the economy, so their careers remain viable if people start copying their code"

> "Isn’t the main goal of content producers that their content is seen ? Well. If you would charge less for a movie I would be glad to pay for it. But prices for buying movies online are just abusively high."

in HN-speak: "The main goal of a developer should be to get the product/code in front of many people. If the price would be lower, I would buy it. Ergo, the price should be lower and if not, im just gonna take it"

> "If I buy a DVD I have the right to do what I want with it"

in HN-speak: "I know the terms and licenses of the code I am using. However, i dont like it, so im just gonna do whatever I want anyways."

My view is that this is just like any other market: If you don't like the product or the way its sold under specific conditions, you always have the freedom of not buying it. No one is forcing you to anything.

Also, before this whole downvoting madness starts, please consider that I'm just trying to voice my opinion and argument for my stance.

Avengers made money so piracy is OK in this case? Why don't you want to pay for the movie? Is the price too high? You don't like theaters? Piracy is not a good solution to this problem. Movies cost money to make and a lot of it, production through distribution. Yeah some make a lot money back but many don't make any. Working with movies I know that when you put little money into a project your chances of getting something good out of it are slim.

It's clear there is a problem with the business model and someone needs to start coming up with a better solution, other than piracy. The solution needs one goal ... to make money for those that create the movies.

I'm sorry for being cynical, but getting a million pageviews as a piracy site with a fancy interface is not really spectacular. You're giving away content that is normally sold -- of course people are going to use it.

Not really impressed.

One of the trends I've noticed more and more over the last few years, is that Design is now a USP in itself.

Take anything that already exists and execute it with better design / user experience and watch it become popular / successful.

That said, it once again highlights that as developers, we shouldn't ignore design or think that just getting the basic functionality working is all that matters. Design in a consumer market is a major influencer, often more so than the functionality itself.

Right or wrong, this site looks like it exists to facilitate illegal movie sharing -- it's just a matter of time before the takedown notice comes.

It's too bad because it's such a pretty site. It could use a better knowledge base (ranking and relevance are so-so) but it's really pretty good.

I still prefer the look of TorrentBulter.eu. It's default view is browsing the top movies, and displays them in a much more enjoyable manner. The details page on TB is also more feature filled, including a trailer as well (granted, these can sometimes be wrong).

Movies.io, honestly, doesn't offer anything more, other than being newer. Maybe I missed something.

You know what would be nice? If they added links to Amazon Streaming and Netflix when available. Some sort of nod towards paying for content.

I think the thing for me that movies.io has that others don't is the top 50. It's a beautifully designed site that gives me access to a whole load of well presented information. I don't even torrent, but I've used movies.io to look for films that I haven't seen that might be worth looking into, and I can see the torrent element almost as secondary to some users.

I hope movies.io succeeds, but not so much as to put it on the MPAA radar for a takedown.

Thank you for this, love movies.io, though how do you add movies to 'watch lists'? I signed up and found I could change a lists name but could never find any way to add movies to this list.

The trailer feature is cool, but in order to close the trailer requires clicking the link again. It'd be cool if we could also press escape or click on the backdrop area to close it.

So, whats the tech stack behind movies.io?

Hope we will hear when your first user gets their internet disconnected, or has to pay a large fine.

The look & design is great. I'd love it if you'd let me filter on rotten tomatoes ratings, discover movies in certain genres, especially more underground / art house type movies. Most of TOP50 is just cheap hollywood action movies that don't appeal very much.

I still want to know how you do the background images.

Congrats on building a beautiful product too.