“File-sharing gives people the freedom to share what they want,” Fung said. “File-sharing is logically the next step in the Internet’s evolution, in the sense that it decentralizes distribution. Anyone that wants to distribute can distribute whatever they want.”

“File-sharing will become more mainstream and all the lawsuits being launched against users or people like us, the technologists, well, we will have to find a way to reconcile our differences,” Fung said. “And find a new means of distributing content not just for independents but for the big companies that are suing us.”

“With any file-sharing site you try to shut down, a new file-sharing site is bound to pop up, and that has happened in the past—with Napster, then Kazaa,” Fung said. “There is no way you can shut file-sharing down.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

With this action, isoHunt hoped to prevent a judicial order which would require the site to implement a mandatory filter and remove torrents based on a list of ‘banned words’. However, despite these changes the US District Court of California still issued a permanent injunction against isoHunt in May.

Although the lite version didn’t change the decision of the District Court, it did impact isoHunt’s traffic volume of visitors from the United States.

As with most changes, many of the US users expressed unhappiness and complained from the get go. In the months that followed it turned out that the complaints were not those of a tiny minority simply resisting change. Since April, isoHunt has lost most of its US visitors due to the new look and this is one of the main reasons why the popular torrent search engine has now reverted to its original interface.

“We lost over half of our US traffic,” isoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak, adding that he’s now experimenting with a look that most users are happy with, while abiding with the court order. The key issue here is that the isoHunt website should not induce copyright infringement any more than other search engines such as Google. This was the main point of the lite interface: that the isoHunt search engine can be made to look and work exactly the same way as general web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

To most US visitors the isoHunt homepage now has a familiar look again, but there are some differences with the site the rest of the world sees. The ‘top searches’ that used to be listed on the site are gone for example, because one could potentially see this as inducement.

isoHunt appealed the permanent injunction of the District Court this summer and is now awaiting the appeal at the Ninth Circuit Appeal Court. Both the MPAA and isoHunt have filed their motions in their legal battle that will soon enter its fifth year. With this appeal, isoHunt hopes that the mandatory keyword filter will be dropped.

“I find it absurd that we are required to keyword filter which ironically all search engines in countries like China are required to do due to political censorship, but isoHunt would be the only search engine serving traffic to US users required to do similar filtering..,” Fung wrote to the Ninth Circuit Appeal Court.

Instead, a filter based on ‘infringing’ hashes is more appropriate according to the isoHunt founder. A similar system is already in use for a partnership the site has with the US Attorney General to ban child porn.

The Ninth Circuit Appeal Court has now to decide whether the permanent injunction will stay in place or not. This decision will be a crucial one to the future of isoHunt and possibly other BitTorrent sites.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

On December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt is indeed guilty of violating US copyright law by way of inducement, with the operators having engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

In noting the similarities between this case and earlier ones involving both the Napster and Grokster file-sharing services, Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that a full trial was not required and granted the plaintiffs request for summary judgment.

As noted by Michael Geist, the court also concluded that inducement liability and the safe harbor provisions under the DMCA are incompatible. In this case it means since isoHunt was found to have induced infringement, it did not qualify for safe harbor.

In common with the Mininova court defeat earlier this year, the court was critical of isoHunt (and associated sites) staff actions on the site and in their forums.

The court said the clearest instance of encouraging users to commit infringements was the ‘Box Office Movies’ section of the site. These pages listed the top 20 highest-grossing movies in the US, for which users were invited to upload associated torrents.

“By implementing this feature,” said the court, “Defendants engaged in direct solicitation of infringing activity.”

Furthermore, when isoHunt generated torrent categories, such as ‘Top 20 Movies’, the court said that the fact that these lists “almost exclusively contained copyrighted works and that Defendants never removed these lists” indicated that isoHunt knew about ongoing infringement yet failed to take action to stop it.

Several other instances of staff members giving users advice on how to download copyright movies (including providing .torrent links), rip copyright DVDs and use software such as PeerGuardian were also cited.

Even the forum user ranking system didn’t escape criticism. Since user ranks included titles such as “I pir4te, therefore I am” and “All Day I Dream About W4rez,” the court concluded that the Defendants “promoted their users’ infringing activities by consciously fostering a community that encouraged – indeed, celebrated – copyright infringement.”

The court’s judgment can be downloaded here, or viewed online here. At 46 pages long it’s a pretty heavy read, but contains essential information for anyone interested in what can’t be done when operating a torrent site or other similar service in the US.

At this stage it’s unclear if isoHunt will appeal the US decision, but of course, in the meantime the site is fully operational in Canada, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

isoHunt founder Gary Fung is not intimidated by the movie industry scare tactics that started back in 2006, and he is willing to fight until the end. “I’m doing this for the future,” Fung said recently, while explaining that isoHunt is not much different than search engines like Google.

“When we talk about copyright we should be more forward thinking. It is a huge issue for the culture. The current state of copyright might not be the future state. And there’s increasing adoption of BitTorrent, even by large media. That is a glimpse of the future,” Fung commented.

The MPAA has a totally different view on the matter, and sees torrent sites as commercial operations with the sole intention of cashing in on copyright infringement. Steven Fabrizio, the MPAA lawyer who also represented the RIAA in their case against Napster is very clear about MPAA’s battle plan.

It is not so much about taking the site offline, the ultimate goal is to scare those who operate BitTorrent sites by pursuing exorbitant damages. In their case against TorrentSpy they continued to push for damages in court even though the site had been taken down, and now they are coming for a piece of the next torrent site.

isoHunt has no plans to discontinue its operations voluntarily, but should they lose in court against the MPAA and ordered to pay a fine, Fabrizio promises that the movie industry lobby will do everything it can to come and collect.

Fabrizio is well aware that Fung wont be able to pay millions if isoHunt ends up losing, but the MPAA is patient. “The judgment doesn’t go away. If Gary Fung creates a legitimate website, we’ll be there. If he sells that company for $100 million, we’ll be there. For the rest of his life we’ll be able to pursue that judgment,” the MPAA lawyer told the Financial Post.

The comments made by the MPAA lawyer and their dealing with the cases against TorrentSpy and isoHunt almost suggests that this is a personal vendetta of the entertainment industry lobby.

In the case of TorrentSpy the MPAA is indeed keeping its word for now. TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnell was ordered to pay a $110 million fine last year after the court terminated the case against the movie industry. This decision is currently under appeal but the MPAA has already started pursuing the awarded damages.

In isoHunt’s case a ruling has yet to be made so all the talk about damages is purely hypothetical. We hope that isoHunt scores a victory, but it is not an easy battle in a country where lobbyists and Hollywood funded politicians are in power.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Since I’ve been sued by both the MPAA (Hollywood) and the CRIA (Canadian recording industry), I’ve talked about what’s been happening with our cases. Our CRIA case has also recently received mainstream press attention by the Canadian Press and Globe & Mail. But the question is why? Why do they insist on suing their own customers? Why do they sue search engines like us, who make the Internet more useful for everyone?

The problem lies in something fundamentally broken with the copyright system. A choice quote from Cory Doctorow’s article on the “copyfight”:

So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it. And since “sharing” on the Internet is the same as “copying,” this puts you square in copyright’s crosshairs. Everyone copies. Dan Glickman, the ex-Congressman who now heads up the Motion Picture Association of America (as pure a copyright maximalist as you could hope to meet) admitted to copying Kirby Dick’s documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated (a scorching critique of the MPAA’s rating system) but excused it because the copy was “in [his] vault.” To pretend that you do not copy is to adopt the twisted hypocrisy of the Victorians who swore that they never, ever masturbated. Everyone knows that they themselves are lying, and a large number of us know that everyone else is lying too.

When the head of the MPAA has to admit to copying the film that criticizes the very industry he represents, an industry group of lobbyists and litigators against such copying, it highlights an important fact beyond the obvious hypocrisy. The Internet has completely changed the economics of sharing. When sharing equals copying on the Internet and the direct cost of that sharing is effectively $0 (it doesn’t cost you anything to share videos on Youtube or BitTorrent), it makes copyright infringement so easy that even Dan Glickman can do it. So easy that a mom like Stephanie Lenz can do it when she posted a video of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince’s music. And I mean no disrespect to them.

This is an age of rampant sharing and remixing, and if you can make the connection between sharing and culture as Doctorow has, you will see this war between rightsholders and consumers will never end and the rightsholders will never win. The band Girl Talk, Lessig , James Boyle, Terry McBride of Nettwerk and isoHunt all echo a common point: Remixing and sharing is good for culture, suing consumers and technologists that enables sharing is destructive for everyone.

The Internet is a more efficient information machine than the printing press or VCR ever was, and also a whole different animal. It’s time for the content industries to learn to put it to better use as well, by discarding past notions of how business is done based on an economy of scarcity. In Star Trek, currency becomes irrelevant with virtually unlimited “copying” of physical objects with the Replicator. The Internet is the Replicator of information. When a 13-month-old dances to Prince’s music, copyright infringement is nowhere near his consciousness. It’s an endorsement that he likes it, pure and simple.

I’ve said a number of times that I’m not against copyright, but copyright needs significant reform in the Internet age. If all this rampant copying on BitTorrent and the Internet has not made a dent in Hollywood’s record earnings, why can’t we all just get along without rabid lawsuits? Why can’t they see that sharing and remixing is a human urge for culture, and when we share and remix art, it’s not a liability but an endorsement for the artist or author or producer?

When the majority of society has no ethical conviction of wrongdoing when they violate copyright law, it’s not society that’s wrong, it’s the law. Because no one can really own ideas. Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” It’s how the arts and sciences work. We share, we inspire and we remix. For more on Copyfight and where the word came from, go here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“BitTorrent really helps make content distribution cheaper and faster. The natural progression, as we’ve seen with YouTube and MySpace, is a lot more media distribution is going to be done online, and that’s going to converge with the client and P2P technologies.”

Gary further pinpoints that content owners should embrace P2P, instead of fighting it. One day he hopes to offer “premium” torrents to his users, uploaded and approved by the MPAA and friends. By making high quality files available for a decent price, and without restrictions such as DRM, a lot of people will go for the legal alternative instead of the pirated copies.

Personally, I agree with Gary that content owners should be more open to P2P solutions. A good balance between price on the one hand, and availability and quality (no-DRM) on the other, could really compete with pirated movies. However, there’s still a long way to go. BitTorrent Inc. is currently offering paid BitTorrent downloads, but so far they didn’t convince the content owners to do this without DRM, for a decent price (except their $0.99 promotional offers).

Revenue wise, Isohunt is not doing badly at the moment, even without paid downloads. Gary said that he earns a decent living, even though he pays $6000 each month for hosting, and an estimated $22,000 in legal fees. The legal fees are of course related to the lawsuits initiated by the MPAA. Gary is still awaiting the court’s decision in this case, but he is confident that it will be a victory for Isohunt. In his view Isohunt is just another search engine like Google and Yahoo.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.