RIAA Nemesis Launches Media Search Engine
Pablo Soto, the 30 year-old brain behind the file-sharing applications Blubster, Piolet and Manolito is being sued by the Spanish RIAA, but that hasn’t stopped him from launching another P2P venture. This week his company launched the media search engine FooFind, allowing users to search the web for torrents, Ed2k links and more.
In 2008, under the umbrella of the local RIAA, Warner Music, Universal Music, EMI and Sony filed a lawsuit against Pablo’s company, MP2P Technologies.
The labels argued that they lost a substantial amount of revenue because of the software he created, and are demanding a massive 13 million euros ($17.5m) from the Spaniard. The case is still ongoing, but Pablo is undeterred and has launched a new file-sharing related project this week.
His latest invention is a media search engine that enables users to find millions of media files online. The site, named Foofind, scours the web for torrent, Ed2k, Gnutella, FTP and HTTP links pointing to all kinds of media. At the time of publication the site is already indexing more than 10 million files and this number is growing rapidly.
The idea behind the site is simple according to Pablo. “The internet is not just the hypertext available in the world wide web,” he told TorrentFreak. “Content has many other media formats and is available on many other networks. So why not index it all?”
Pablo discussed the project with his legal advisers and he is confident that it operates within the boundaries of the law. All users get to see when they go to the site is a big search box and none of the files (or links to files) are actually hosted on Foofind’s servers.
“We are being extremely respectful of our laws – even the president of the Spanish RIAA just said that there isn’t an infraction on Foofind. Still, they will probably file a lawsuit, just because they can. But we don’t expect real troubles, as we know that it is absolutely legal.”
Pablo and his team are currently focused on expanding the site in terms of content, hoping to make it the largest specialized media search engine on the Internet. “We are working hard to make it crawl and index more and more files from more and more networks, so we’ll see Foofind growing to huge proportions in terms of results available,” Pablo said.
Foofind might be an example of what many other torrent and file-sharing related search engines will look like in the future. IsoHunt has already made a step in the same direction with the release of isoHunt ‘lite’ and others are considering taking similar steps to avoid legal trouble.
Foofind is available in English and Spanish and the source code of the website has been released under a GPLv3 license.
