1 down, 5 to go? isoHunt neutered by US judge
| Last updated about 12 hours ago
An American judge, concerned about the 'staggering volume of infringement' taking place at BitTorrent search site isoHunt, has issued a permanent injunction against the site and its owner, Canadian Gary Fung.
Movie studios now have the green light to submit long lists of movie titles to isoHunt, and those titles must not be hosted, indexed, or linked to by the site. In addition, isoHunt is barred from allowing search terms that 'are widely known to be associated with copyright infringement.' These include, but are not limited to, 'Warez,' Axxo,' 'Jaybob,' 'DVD rips,' 'Cam,' Telesync,' and 'Telecine.'
In addition to the limits on search functionality, isoHunt cannot operate a tracker server that 'assists users in locating, identifying, or obtaining files from other users offering any of the Copyrighted Works for transmission.'
Finally, the judge regulated isoHunt's webpage metadata (it cannot include 'infringement-related terms') and forbade the site from offering lists of 'top downloads' that include copyrighted works.
IsoHunt tried to head off this ruling after the judge found the site liable for inducing copyright infringement in late 2009. Fung hoped to create a 'lite' version of the site with restricted search features that would be available to the American market.
The site was rolled out in April with a welcome note:
US users, welcome to the lighter and lightning fast isoHunt! Although we bring this new search engine to you with a burden from the lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we hope you understand the reason why we are making this change. It is to address concerns Judge Wilson has over inducing copyright infringement in the US. Though inducement is never our intention and we have evidence to support it, with isoHunt Lite we want to affirm publicly that isoHunt's essential function is nothing more than a search engine and a public utility with all the net neutrality it affords and should be afforded.
The judge was not impressed. As he noted in his permanent injunction, isoHunt still contains 'all of the same indexing and searching functions as the original websites, only with a different interface for the users to operate.' The 'lite' site also included lists of the most popular downloads by category, almost all of which were commercial content.
In an April message on isoHunt, site operators wrote, 'There is much non-infringing uses [sic] of BitTorrent technology and we hope you will be able to continue to use isoHunt for these uses, free of constraints by large holes in the english dictionary because your search triggered a keyword in a title of one of the million movies that have been produced.'
But when your 'very business model, at its core, depends upon copyright infringement'—as the judge wrote about isoHunt—it's hard to scare up too much sympathy from federal judges. Because the servers are based in Canada, though, it's not yet clear how the ruling will affect isoHunt's worldwide operations.
IsoHunt last week was placed on a six-website blacklist by numerous members of Congress and the RIAA. Next up: Ukraine's mp3fiesta?
