BitTorrent-Only Movie Denied IMDb Listing | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent-Only Movie Denied IMDb Listing

torrentfreak.com

58 pointsnreece12 comments

I don't see the problem here. If they allowed anyone to submit a title without any backing from a trusted name or company, or without it already being a working title, the quality of the site would soon drop off a cliff.

I agree. The sentence a few paragraphs in tells a very different story to the headline:

IMDb told the team that if a movie is not set up with a production company with a history of theatrically released movies, getting it listed at the early stages of development would not be possible

The reasoning didn't have much to do with it being released via bitTorrent only.

Zapruder's Other Films is a prolific and highly respected publishing house with a history of feature length theatrical releases[1] as per IMDB's original advice[2].

The problem is that they've stated this (a production history) as the only condition of getting a listing during pre-production and then ignored the fact that the condition was in fact met.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0891308/

[2] http://blog.thetunnelmovie.net/?p=209#more-209

IMDB requires a theatrical release, e.g. film festival or wider release. It might seem arcane, but the system is human-edited

They list straight-to-DVD releases (e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120131/). They even list TV shows.

Lots of speculation on torrentfreak's part. I expect the reason for rejection is because Imdb want to keep the quality of their database high and have an approvals process for movies to appear on there - otherwise you'll get every amateur film maker wanting to submit their productions and they don't necessarily need to be on there.

Although in this case it looks to be a serious production, I think this is just the approvals process stopping this and I'm sure it will be get sorted out soon.

I found the movie's funding model far more interesting than the spin about why IMDb.

It would be interesting to see how large chunk of imdb's traffic comes from The Pirate Bay. Whenever a film is posted on TPB, the popularity score imdb keeps goes way up.

IMHO, IMDB serves two major purposes - one as an archive for anything you may want to know about the movie, and second the rating ( which many people, including me, don't judge movies by)

Alternatives - One, Set up your own website/ Use Wikipedia . Second, use Rotten Tomatoes, or someone create a new and more open 'movie' database to help movies like 'The Tunnel'.

Um, IMDBPro is kind of a big deal too. Actually, most of the folks trying to get listed on IMDB is because of IMDBPro.

There already is a more open movie database:

http://www.omdb.org

A friend of mine made some short films on a budget of around $3000 on average, and they're on IMDB. Also, they are shot on genuine film.

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