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

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.”

Is it a right to make money off of Game of Thrones? No. Is it their right to charge for content they've created? In my opinion, yes.

I am a huge advocate of open source software. I'm not an advocate of taking other peoples' software and forcing it to be free, against the creators' wishes.

Sharing a book, or facts from a library or notes from a university lecture is one thing. Downloading a copy of a movie, a video game, or software is another.

Let's say you made a startup that, rather than SaaS, actually wrote a thick client. They're cool, so let's make it easy and say it's DRM-free. Let's say it's a cool, new IDE.

You spent the last year of your life working on this IDE, and you see that it's up on The Pirate Bay. Sure, at first you'll probably be flattered. Then you realize, wait a minute, this is getting 1000x the downloads my actual product is getting. Maybe your sales increase as a result of the "free marketing," but that is the best case scenario.

If sales don't increase, you've worked hard and not been compensated. Do I think that most movies (especially in theatres) are overpriced and a rip off? Hell yeah I do, which is why I spend my money on Netflix which seems more sanely priced.

You don't have a right to all the software you want without paying the people who made it; you don't have a right to watch the latest movies and TV shows without paying the people who created them; you don't have a right to listen to that new CD in the store without paying the artists.

I think that big business/media generally rips off consumers. I don't think that pirates are evil; I think that they're desperate and that business needs to adjust to their needs. Have I ever pirated computer games? Sure. But when Valve's Steam became more convenient to use than a badly cracked torrent, that became my number one resource for games.

I used to pirate movies because renting or buying them was such a pain in the ass. With iTunes rentals and Netflix, that problem has been solved too.

If you want to make a stand, maybe against DRM with which you disagree, do so by purchasing from people who are making a stand too; for example, I hope you bought Louis C.K.'s $5 DRM-free show a couple of months ago.

>Copyright is a monopoly granted by congress' interpretation of the constitution's directive to promote progress of science and the useful arts. I think it's time to reinterpret.

How do you suggest we reinterpret? Should everyone get everything they want for free? Should all the tech startups that we read about on Hacker News and root for have no business model, because charging for software or media is so wrong? We live in a capitalist society, and in order to "reinterpret" science and arts as free-for-all, we'd need to completely reorganize our economic system.

I'm not saying that we've got it down perfectly (in fact, I'd say the opposite), so I'm open to your suggestions and ideas.

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".