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Comment by NoblePublius | Hacker News Reader

I literally did this at a startup. We had eight eight-at-time Netflix accounts (DVD accounts). This was in 2009. We made a search engine for movies. Yeah, like Mr Skin. We ripped them six at a time. Took us about six months to do 4000 films. The DMCA violations would have been in the trillions.

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“Hypothetically” you mean

Normally the Statute of limitations would apply, but it seems like US Law is becoming even more inscrutable in the last few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_limitations

There's no such thing as "the" statute of limitations. There may or may not be a statute of limitations governing each possible legal action. I count at least three: criminal copyright violation (U.S. v. NoblePublius), civil claim for copyright infringement (MPAA v. NoblePublius), and breach of contract (Netflix v. NoblePublius). Possibly others, e.g., if the DCMA has a separate criminal penalty for circumventing the copy protection.

No need to use that word. The DMCA is basically toothless at this point and can outright be ignored. You get a notice that can be safely thrown away. It's basically "don't do that again". Then you do it again.

Honestly it's always been pretty easy to ignore it since it's inception unless you are running a counterfeiting operation.

Some ISPs will cut you off after X repeat notices in under Y timeframe.

Why did a search engine for movies need the actual movie files, and not just the metadata? Or was it actually making the movies themselves available?

A guess would be more movie meta data than you can think of; - show me movies with Swiss Alps settings - show me movies with the quote "I'll be back" - tell me which part of Back to the Future shows me where they have hoverboards - actor/director/artist/crew: for my IMDB profile, tell me when my name is on screen (start credits, end credits)

I would guess it’s in order to build the hash/IDs/searchable dataset that can be used to match the movies. Think Shazam style fingerprints but for movies.

I was looking into this sort of thing recently for a project. Very interesting technology space with some genuine direct benefits coming out of the application of machine learning.

Correct

Why did a search engine for movies need the actual movie files, and not just the metadata?

Someone's got to build that metadata. Especially back in 2009, you couldn't just download it from some public database. Databases have to be built.

I'm guessing something along the lines of Morbotron [1]. Not the actual use case for the screens/subs/etc. but more the data required to do either of them: frame by frame images for analysis with timestamps and subtitles.

1: https://morbotron.com/

We needed high quality video files to create the metadata. Machine vision wasn’t good enough yet so we did it the old fashion way. Interns and lots of typing in real time

What was the bottleneck ? tray ejection time ? human operator sleep patterns ?

Not getting caught by Netflix or Hollywood.

In USA wouldn't you get a research exemption?

Was the postal stream the limitation on throughput?

With even a 2-day turn around, 8 accounts x 3 disks == 24 disks at a time... so, would think so.

Aside: Re-encoding to a tighter format at that time wasn't too bad, but still relatively slow IIRC.

Just cracking the encryption on the DVD for any purpose is a DMCA violation

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