“The main difference that sets Hexagon.cc apart from other social file sharing and BitTorrent sites, is everything is centered around groups. Be it file sharing networks or flash video sites, a key piece we found missing is social context,” isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung said.

With Hexagon Fung hopes to bridge this gap by allowing people to start groups where they can share content within a certain niche. These groups help to organize content and allow people to share with others who are interested in the same material, privately or in public.

In addition Hexagon is also aimed at content producers and independent artists who want to promote their content using BitTorrent. For this group Hexagon offers monetization opportunities such as direct “fan” contributions and sharing of advertising revenue.

“We have contacts with game publishers and independent musicians and film makers, who are very interested in creating their own groups where they can directly market their music, videos or games and interact with their fans, and generate sales directly or indirectly,” Fung said.

Hexagon is certainly not your average torrent site and we must admit that it took us a while to fully grasp the new sharing interface. That aside, it is great to see that some people are still innovating and trying to improve the BitTorrent sharing experience.

The Hexagon team is offering 500 invites for TorrentFreak readers who want to give Hexagon a spin, so you can decide for yourself. Update, here are 3000 more invites. And 10.000 extra just in case…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time.

In March 2009, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court. IsoHunt asked the court to decide whether BitTorrent search engines could be held liable for .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data, but the CRIA demanded a full trial against the BitTorrent site.

In the end the judge felt that the issues were too complex and consequences too far reaching not to move to a full trial.

IsoHunt appealed that decision but yesterday were turned down by the appeal court.

“The issues involved in this case are fundamental to the rights of creators to earn a living from their work,” said CRIA president Graham Henderson. “A matter of this importance should be considered by a court with access to all the facts and not, as isoHunt had argued, to only one party’s version of the facts. A lower court agreed with us and now so has the court of appeal,” he added.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, isoHunt’s Gary Fung said that the decision was not that sad and was expected.

“We didn’t lose (the case),” he told us, “only a motion on a form of litigation and we’ll have news soon enough on how we are to proceed suing CRIA in self defense”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

Gary Fung, the founder of the site, is in charge of daily operations from his hometown Vancouver in Canada. Below is a picture of Gary sitting behind his 2008 Mac Pro hooked up to a Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

isoHunt is currently using four dual quadcore Opteron 2352’s for the web servers. The site’s database runs on three additional servers, two Opteron and one Intel Nehalem based. Four old dual core AMD nodes are used for various background processing, one Intel, dualcore Xeon is used by the search backend and two more for load balancing.

Below you’ll find another picture isoHunt’s server rack, all wired up. We thank Gary for sharing this with us, and we will continue our behind the scenes series this weekend with a brand new workspace of another torrent site admin.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In order to get the word out, the label booked a monthly banner advertisement campaign on isoHunt, and linked that to a torrent file of the album that everyone can download for free. By doing so they hope to get people excited about their music and eventually build a strong fanbase.

“As far as we know, we are the first record label/band to advertise directly on a torrent search engine,” Colin Foord, the creative brain behind the campaign told TorrentFreak. “We are sponsoring isoHunt with a banner that links directly to our homepage where the album can be downloaded for free.”

In a music industry that is changing quickly, Honor Roll Music recognizes that torrent sites such as isoHunt should not be vilified, but turned into partners instead in order to reach millions of music fans eager to discover and download new music. BitTorrent sites have proven to be a stepping stone for developing artists, rather than a threat.

With a limited marketing budget the label can’t afford to buy ad space on all major torrent sites, but the isoHunt sponsorship is a sign of good faith and shows that they do recognize the value of reaching out to the millions of active BitTorrent users.

The latest Awesome New Republic album titled “Rational Geographic Vol 1″ is available on several torrent sites, and everyone is free to download a copy and share it with friends. Volume II will be released in July and Volume III, with a physical 3-volume bundle, in October.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time.

IsoHunt has asked the court to decide whether .torrent files, and BitTorrent search engines in particular, are infringing copyright or not. In other words, should BitTorrent search engines be held liable for the .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data? If so, what does this mean for other search engines, and sites such as YouTube?

Today, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court. While isoHunt asked the court to rule that they do not break any laws, the CRIA is demanding a full trial against the BitTorrent site.

This landmark case might be the one to define how files can be distributed online. Among other things, isoHunt argues that they are just a search engine, like Google, and that they have no control over the files they find elsewhere on the web. In court today, they showed that a filetype:torrent search for Coldplay on Google returns plenty of torrent files, similar to a search on isoHunt.

All isoHunt does is index other BitTorrent trackers and indexers, without human intervention. The files that can be found on isoHunt are scattered all over the Internet, and even these files are just metadata.

IsoHunt founder Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that the judge converted their petition into action at the end of today’s hearing. “He just thinks the issues are too complicated and consequences far reaching legally and technically, and a full trial is more appropriate for discovering all documents,” Gary said.

“The important issue is not about the complexity or ramifications of our case which we won’t dispute, but rather CRIA liking to use full action and discovery because it’s costly for all parties and the court and was exactly why we decided to bring our petition first for efficiency before they were going to sue with an action,” Gary told TorrentFreak in a response. IsoHunt is likely to appeal the order for conversion.

To be continued.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Google has a policy of not displaying ads on sites that are involved in or linked to copyright infringement, with many torrent sites previously excluded from the scheme. Of course, some still carry Google ads, purely because Google is unaware of the nature of those sites, but with IsoHunt the situation is different. On IsoHunt the Google ads aren’t directly served by Google, but by Ask.com, a Google AdWords ‘reseller’.

Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, works with several other BitTorrent sites. Only on IsoHunt have they displayed search based ads that came from Google AdWords campaigns. They have been doing so for several months, perhaps years, but up until now nobody complained, or knew.

Several companies whose ads appeared on IsoHunt, including online bookseller Bokkilden and search engines Sesam and Kvasir don’t have that much to complain about. However, there are others who are less happy.

Media giant Sony BMG and Norwegian online music store Platekompaniet have both reacted strongly to the news that their ads have appeared on IsoHunt. Artist sponsor StatoilHydro called the situation “regrettable”, adding “We would certainly prefer not contribute to the financing of sites like this.”

In a statement, Jan-Henrik Ohme, head of digital marketing at Sony BMG said “We have stopped the section of the campaign that goes to the third party until Google cleans up the issues. We have contacted Google, and they took immediate action.”

For its part, Google Norway has apologized for the situation, and said that the advertisers should not be held responsible for the placement of the ads, since due to the 3rd party involvement, they had no way of knowing where they would appear. The campaigns are not limited to Norway though, and Ask.com certainly has something to explain to Google.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

There was one problem though, since the iPhone doesn’t allow users to copy and paste text, adding new torrents proved to be quite a hassle. That’s where the uTorrent webAPP comes in, as it allows you to search for torrents on your iPhone, and directly add them to the download queue.

The iPhone web application uses isoHunt’s JSON interface to find the latest torrents, and is optimized to fit on a small screen. In order to browse through your torrents on the iPhone, you need to have the uTorrent WebUI installed on your local PC, with the iPhone GUI addon.

When you have everything setup, you can browse to louish.com/iphone, enter your IP and port, and you’re set. The IP and port will be saved on your iPhone, so you don’t have to enter it the next time you search for a torrent.

In the search results you will see a blue icon next to every torrent. A single click on this icon is all that’s needed to add the torrent file to the download queue. If you have secured your WebUI with a password, you will have to enter that before it’s added. For those people who are worried about security, the password, username and your IP-address are all stored on your iPhone and will not be sent to any external server.

We have tested the WebAPP, and it works like a charm. Adding torrents is achieved with a single click, and afterwards you can keep an eye on the download progress, or pause, stop or remove torrents via the iPhone WebUI. Worth a try.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In a direct message to our friends at p2pnet Layton stated: “Torrent sites [...] are actually very fundamental to making a democracy work, and to helping human intelligence to be shared and exchanged. It’s about as fundamentally democratic as you can get.”

In the video message Layton is very clear. Throttling people’s connections is not an option. The Internet should be open and equal to everyone.

“What we want to see is the Internet used as a public tool — a public tool for exchanging ideas and I particularly want to say that if we don’t fight to preserve it, we could lose it. We don’t want to see hidden fees and gouging and service slow-downs all in the interests of promoting the objectives of certain large corporations,” Layton says in his message to P2Pnet.

With his statement, he joins his fellow party member Charles Angus, who has spoken out against against ‘anti-piracy bills’ and in favor of Net-neutrality many times before. In an interview last June, for example, he said that the proposed three-strikes law is idiotic, and completely useless.

“It’s idiotic because as we see with the DMCA those that get accused of infringements lack the legal power that the corporations that are threatening them have,” Angus said. “So it’s always going to be a completely one-sided argument and if ISP’s are legally bound to cut you off after three claims of infringement, I think there are certainly problems.”

Based on their views on net-neutrality and copyright bills, the New Democrats seem to be the best party to vote for. Much better than the Conservatives at least, who are supporting ACTA and bill C-61. Unfortunately, many Canadians are planning to vote for the Conservative, as they are awfully close to a majority. This triggered isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung, who’s from Canada as well, to encourage his Canadian users not to vote for them.

On the frontpage of isoHunt Gary writes: “I know about 3.7 million Canadians visited isoHunt last month, which is more than 10% of Canada’s population. So I ask all who read this to tell your Canadian friends to not be a slacker and vote on Oct. 14. I don’t care which party you vote, just vote any party but the Conservatives.” In addition to this statement, all Canadian isoHunt visitors will now see the following message on top of the page, which leads them to Gary’s statement.

The New Democrats seem to be a good alternative to the Conservative party. However, towards the end of the video message Layton scared us a little by saying: “The Internet belongs to Canadians,” but we’re pretty sure he is trying to say that all Canadians should have equal access to the web.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In May 2008, isoHunt received a Cease and Desist letter from the CRIA, in which they demanded that isoHunt founder Gary Fung should take the site offline. If Fung didn’t comply, the CRIA said it would pursue legal action, and demand $20,000 for each sound recording the site has infringed.

A similar tactic worked against Demonoid, but the isoHunt founder didn’t back down so easily. “We have since tried to come to an understanding, but just as with the MPAA in the US, they ignored our offers of cooperation by the take down of .torrent links to their content files, so long as they provide sufficient identification,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.

Fung has pointed out that, like most other BitTorrent sites, isoHunt has a Copyright Policy, and takes down .torrent files when they receive an appropriate request. The CRIA simply ignored this, even though they have sent correct takedown notices to isoHunt before (and isoHunt complied), and continued to threaten with legal action.

As an act of self-defense, isoHunt has decided to sue the CRIA instead, and today Fung will file a petition (pdf) to ask the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt –and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis– do not infringe copyright. “This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak.

“Our petition summarizes BitTorrent technology, its open nature and a whole ecosystem of websites and operators that has developed around it, that CRIA does not own copyright to all files distributed over BitTorrent or on isoHunt websites, and we seek legal validation that we can continue to innovate within this emerging BitTorrent ecosystem on the Internet.”

“Think of this as a follow up to the QuebecTorrent case,” Fung says. “We intend to take this all the way up to the Canadian Supreme Court unless CRIA settles with us out of court in any reasonable way,” Fung added.

This is the first case worldwide where a court will be asked to decide whether .torrent files, and BitTorrent search engines in particular, are infringing copyright or not. Among other things, isoHunt argues that they are just a search engine, like Google, and that they have no control over the files they find elsewhere on the web. The site is indexing other BitTorrent trackers and indexers, without human intervention, and allows its users to find content that is scattered across the web.

So, should BitTorrent search engines be held liable for the .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data? If so, what does this mean for other search engines, and sites such as YouTube? This landmark case might be the one to define how files can be distributed online, let’s hope the Court of British Columbia will make the right decision.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Despite all three sites being involved in lawsuits, they continue to attract more visitors, and thus more searches. Mininova and The Pirate Bay currently process between 7 and 8 million searches per day, roughly 230 million a month. isoHunt isn’t far behind though, as its users perform 6 million searches every day, totaling some 180 million a month.

As Slyck points out today, the larger BitTorrent sites are getting as many searches as eBay and Amazon. When combined, the three BitTorrent sites are good for half a billion searches every month, which equals half of MSN’s total search traffic (and 5% of Google’s searches). The major difference though, is that the BitTorrent sites are still growing, while Microsoft’s search engine traffic is declining.

Even though most people use BitTorrent to download TV-shows, the latest Hollywood blockbusters such as Wall-E and The Dark Knight can also be found among the most popular searches. An interesting trend worth mentioning is that more people are searching for high definition content, as ‘720p‘ is a recurring term in most site search clouds.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of the reasons for isoHunt to implement SSL encryption, however, was a recent block by the Dubai government. isoHunt founder Gary Fung told TorrentFreak: “We decided to implement SSL to avoid eavesdropping on search, to bypass slow proxies, and to get around blocks like in Dubai.”

Earlier this year, Dubai started to block access to several BitTorrent sites, including isoHunt. With SSL, however, the site can be reached again, without any problems. There seems to be quite a demand for secure browsing as according to a poll on isoHunt, more than 80% of the users indicated that they will browse the site on an encrypted connection from now on.

Not only is isoHunt now accessible via SSL, its sister site TorrentBox, and the TorrentBox forums can also be reached over an encrypted connection. In the weeks to come, the isoHunt team will monitor how many users are browsing over SSL.

“We’ll be evaluating how much extra load this places on our servers over the next few weeks, and if there’s a large outpouring of people preferring to browse isoHunt or TorrentBox securely, we’ll be investing in some dedicated hardware to handle the SSL connections.”

For now, SSL is a great, and much needed, solution to censoring ISPs. Dubai is not the only country that blocks BitTorrent sites. Turkey does the same, so does a Danish ISP, and earlier this year the Kuwait government ordered ISPs to block access to 20 BitTorrent sites.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of these new developments has been the addition of increasing numbers of Creative Commons (CC) licensed material. Creative Commons media is licensed by the creator, to be shared – usually with some restrictions – and is the same license used by TorrentFreak. It’s not a niche license, instead it is becoming increasingly popular, with Nine Inch Nails having released their Ghosts album under a CC license earlier this year.

With this is mind, isoHunt has announced a partnership with Jamendo, a site that deals in Creative Commons licensed music. Reaching the 10,000 album milestone only days ago, content available on Jamendo is growing quickly and when you grow, it helps to be able to get the content out there. This is why isoHunt decided to partner with several BitTorrent sites. isoHunt’s owner, Gary Fung, has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons and public domain works, and has stated that there is a strong future in Creative Commons material at isoHunt.

Laurent Kratz, CEO of Jamendo told TorrentFreak “Jamendo uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme to keep the rules very straight forward : copy as much as you can eat, the artist, the right-holders are ok. The new thing about partnering with a torrent portal like isoHunt, is that Jamendo has started an editorial work on top.”

“We receive up to 500 new albums per week, from more than 60 countries in the world,” Kratz said. “In order to maximize the interest of millions using torrent search engines every day, it was critical to only highlight a subset of all the albums we receive every day. It’s not about discriminating one band from another, it’s about getting anonymous BitTorrent fans to Jamendo, and discovering unsigned bands from everywhere in the world.”

Jamendo is also partnering with SumoTorrent, and torrent.to, and has been experimenting with mininova. In addition, their torrents are also available through Vuze. What better way to “stick it to the **AA” as so many of our commenters put it, than to ignore their memberships product, and use sites like this instead.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Isohunt – the third largest BitTorrent site with 350.000.000 pageviews a month – is one of the older BitTorrent sites and predates both The Pirate Bay and Mininova. The site started in January 2003, and added support for torrents by the end of that year just a few months after the BitTorrent protocol went public.

At the time, no-one could have guessed that BitTorrent sites would ever become as dominant as they are now. Gary Fung, the founder of isoHunt didn’t foresee it either, as he told TorrentFreak: “I never expected the site to grow to this volume initially, until we started seeing explosive growth with the uptake of BitTorrent.”

About the future of his site Fung said: “By indexing any and all BitTorrent links, we expect to grow as much as usage of BitTorrent would.” Right now, there is no sign that BitTorrent’s usage will stop growing, so it is safe to say that like any other BitTorrent site, isoHunt will keep on growing.

Another interesting observation is that The Pirate Bay has outgrown Mininova traffic wise. For over a year Mininova has been the most visited BitTorrent site, but now – for the first time ever – The Pirate Bay is in the lead.

Update: apparently there was a glitch in the traffic rank numbers, they are back to normal right now and show that Mininova is still in the lead. We corrected the graph and the figures below. The title of the article is still correct, as it is based on direct reports.

Today’s rankings show that The Pirate Bay is 90th in the list of 100 120 most visited websites, Mininova 51st and isoHunt comes in 119th place. With the current growth rate of BitTorrent sites, Torrentz.com will probably join these three sites in a few weeks.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In April, the appointed judge asked both parties to clarify how BitTorrent works, and what isoHunt’s contribution is to the copying of (copyrighted) material. Little over a month ago the MPAA explained (in private) to judge Wilson why they think BitTorrent sites are infringing copyright, and today isoHunt has filed a response.

“The MPAA has taken a narrow point of view that copyright infringement is stealing, that isoHunt serves no other purpose than promoting and facilitating infringement of Hollywood films,” isoHunt owner Gary Fung writes. He and his lawyers refuse to be compared to “the bogeyman selling pirated DVDs on the street”, and explain why.

One of isoHunt’s arguments is that the site is in fact very similar to search engines like Google. They write: “The essential functions performed at a torrent site are also performed at a comprehensive search site like Google or Yahoo!. To visualize a visit to isoHunt, start off with a visit to Google , only a few things are changed, mostly superficial, and the workings are very similar.”

This is not a new argument, two years ago TorrentSpy used a similar analogy, and last year OiNK administrator Alan Ellis told The Telegraph: “If Google directed someone to a site where they can illegally download music, they are doing the same as what I have been accused of. I am not making any Oink users break the law.”

Indeed, torrent sites do not host or directly link to copyrighted content. In the filing isoHunt goes on to explain how BitTorrent works and what the role of the site is in the downloading process. They explain that all the site does is collect and index metafiles (torrents), and that they are not directly involved in the downloading process.

The MPAA does not agree, and has argued that sites such as isoHunt offer a “centralized index” of copyrighted material. isoHunt, however, does not agree with this view, and tell judge Wilson: “It is a semantic game to argue that Defendants provide a “centralized index.” The words “centralized” and “central” are contrary to the principles that shape and define BitTorrent technology.”

BitTorrent is indeed decentralized rather than centralized, and the claim that BitTorrent sites are an “index of copyrighted material” is not correct either, since .torrent files itself are not copyrighted. Some files may link to copyrighted material (hosted on computers all over the world), but there are thousands of .torrent files that link to material that is uploaded with the permission of the copyright holder.

isoHunt as a service does not infringe or facilitate copyright infringement, all they do is host .torrent files. These files may or may not point to copyrighted material, but this seems to be irrelevant. The site is not alone, hundreds of sites index .torrent files, and even Google has a .torrent search command. BitTorrent or .torrent links have nothing to do with copyright infringement, nor do sites like isoHunt.

“More innocent than Google, Defendants have no part in the design or operational control of the BitTorrent Network and have no more than a membership role,” isoHunt’s lawyers write. Perhaps the MPAA should sue Google next?

To be continued…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

IsoHunt founder Gary Fung writes in their forums: “It has been a long time coming, but with steady growth of active torrents from around the Web (which I’ll call the Torrentsphere from now on if you don’t mind), isoHunt’s index reached the 1 million torrents milestone 2 hours ago.”

Like most other BitTorrent sites, isoHunt’s traffic is not slowing down at all. The site is currently among the 150 most visited websites on the Internet, and listed in the top three most used BitTorrent sites together with The Pirate Bay and Mininova. The increasing popularity also has its downsides though, in this case downtime because the servers can’t keep up.

The record traffic, in combination with the new features, have caused server issues over the past few weeks, and they had to display a “iSohunt is Sick” error message more often than they wanted to. “It’ll be back to normal soon enough,” Gary says, adding “You should seldom see them now that we got most congestion issues solved.”

IsoHunt had a small backlash last year when the isoHunt team had to block access to all US visitors on their TorrentBox and Podtropolis tracker, because of their involvement in a lawsuit initiated by the MPAA. Other than that, things are going great for them.

The increase in BitTorrent’s popularity is far from over yet. The numbers speak for itself, isoHunt indexing a million torrents, The Pirate Bay tracking 10 million peers, and Mininova just had its 4 billionth download.

Good times for the “torrentsphere”.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Despite the differences these four guys sometimes have, they all believe that no other P2P protocol performs better than BitTorrent at the moment. However, there’s no doubt that there will be changes in the future.

“Technology is always evolving and I have little doubt that 5 or 10 years from now we will be using a different protocol” says Justin from TorrentSpy. Peter (aka Brokep) from The Pirate Bay also thinks new protocols will take over eventually. “There will be other alternatives,” he said “Not necessarily ours but others will come.” Niek from mininova has more faith in BitTorrent but expects that the protocol will evolve rapidly, an opinion shared by Gary from IsoHunt.

Most of the admins also predict that mainstream production companies will eventually embrace BitTorrent and P2P and some of them hope to play an active role in the transition from old to new media distribution. Below you can read the full responses to the question I asked them: What do you think the future holds for BitTorrent and your website?

Niek from Mininova

I’m sure that we’ll see quite a few changes in the P2P landscape during the next couple of years.

From a business perspective, I notice that content producers recognize more and more the advantages of P2P distribution models (see e.g. the Pariah Island case). We all know that DRM is close-to-death, and major studios are now rethinking their business models, which is a good thing. We’d like to see Mininova play a major role in this shift, so stay tuned for some related announcements the coming weeks :)

Looking at the technical side of things, I expect that the BitTorrent protocol will evolve rapidly. See for example (audio and video) streaming, which is already possible and supported by several clients. Other interesting developments are BT-capable chips and TOR-like functionality. New protocols (like the one proposed by The Pirate Bay) might arise, but only time will tell whether these will substitute BitTorrent. Personally, I think BitTorrent can go a long way with some extensions and modifications.

Having said that, Mininova’s only focus won’t be BitTorrent: when the “next big thing” arises, we’ll definitely consider backing it.

Justin from TorrentSpy

I don’t really concern myself with the future of BitTorrent the protocol but I do care about peer-to-peer as a technology platform. Technology is always evolving and I have little doubt that 5 or 10 years from now we will be using a different protocol. However I firmly believe that the use of peer-to-peer for everything from data transfer to shared CPU power will take the Internet to the next level.

If we look at TV you will already see this trend. Media use in our society is transitioning from someone else deciding what you want (push) to something that allows what you want, when you want it (pull). Right now you turn the TV on at 8pm to watch your favorite show or skip channels until you stumble across something interesting. The future is a demand system where you can buy and watch an episode the network has “released” any time you want. Tivo is a first step in this direction.

Surprising as it may seem, this can be done pretty easily today, but is tied up in complex licensing schemes, conflicts between producers and distributors, and a wide array of selfish interests. Unfortunately many companies use their power and influence to halt and punish innovations they cannot think of ways to make money with. The monopolies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thankfully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imagine for a second all the amazing products they did manage to squash…

Gary from IsoHunt

With so much momentum of content behind BitTorrent, I don’t see it going away anytime soon. Unless there’s a far superior and open protocol that is superior to BitTorrent in efficiency and convenience, for which BitTorrent is pretty hard to beat, I see we’ll like have new developments by extending the existing BitTorrent protocol. Although Bram Cohen talked about Merkle trees as a major revision in improving BitTorrent, and that didn’t go anywhere (at least not in open source). When BitTorrent Inc. do significant enough closed source changes to the protocol, BitTorrent will fork or new open protocols will rise.

For future of BitTorrent sites and IsoHunt, I’ve always been an advocate of open and public access. The more sites try to go underground, the more reasons the authority think there’s something dark at work and more they will take sites down by force – Oink and other private trackers for example. I’ve been blogging about P2P and its economic sense/legitimate use cases for a while (latest one on independent music), and I believe that’s what will give BitTorrent continued adoption and acceptance as a de-facto protocol and internet standard. It’s like the WWW: if people didn’t use the early web for other purposes than for porn (which was prolific in the web’s early days), the governments might have a different view and regulations on the internet now. It’s not what copyright infringement or “piracy” may be occurring, on P2P, BitTorrent or the internet. It’s what new use cases we nurture that benefits both end users and content producers, that will correct the stigma behind P2P and BitTorrent and accelerate their acceptance. Development on isoHunt and our other sites will for sure be done with this in mind.

Peter aka Brokep from The Pirate Bay

First of all, I don’t think it’s easy to predict the future. But I do think that it’s very important to be very promiscuous when it comes to the protocols we use. BitTorrent is currently the best but this might change. There will be other alternatives, not necessarily ours but others will come.

In five years things are probably very different from today, technology wise and politically. The latter thing is the biggest issue, not the technology. I would foresee that streaming is bigger and the companies still try to frame their users to use their locked down systems, maybe not DRM but rather streamed with their clients (like the BT DNA system) which will contain other copyright protection scams.

What do you think?

It’s great to hear the opinions and predictions of the leading BitTorrent admins, but what do you think the future of BitTorrent will be? Will we be all using a new protocol 5 years from now, will BitTorrent sites change, will TV and movie producers embrace BitTorrent?

Let us know!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

As of earlier today, we have disabled access from users in the US to our trackers. This goes for ALL trackers (torrentbox, podtropolis) we run. This is due to the US’s hostility towards P2P technologies, and we feel with our current lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we can no longer ensure your security and privacy in the US. So, if you’re outside the US, you may notice less peers. We encourage you to add other public, unhampered trackers to torrents you post, in addition to Torrentbox and Podtropolis’s trackers.

IsoHunt is not alone in their battle with the MPAA. Last month TorrentSpy, another site named in the MPAA lawsuit blocked access to US users on their site. However, the takedown of IsoHunt’s trackers will have an even bigger effect on the BitTorrent community worldwide, especially because TorrentBox runs one of the biggest public BitTorrent trackers. As mentioned by the Isohunt team, this means that users outside the US will see less peers connected to their torrents which may result in slower download speeds.

The MPAA announced the lawsuit (PDF) against Torrentspy, Torrentbox and Isohunt in February 2006. Isohunt owner Gary later told TorrentFreak that they will not bow down to the MPAA. Isohunt hired a top-notch lawyer, specialized in Internet copyrights. It now seems that this wasn’t enough to keep the trackers in the air. For now, the websites are still available to US visitors.

The MPAA argues that the sole purpose of these BitTorrent trackers and sites is to share copyrighted content. But they are wrong according to Gary, who said, “We process copyright takedown requests daily, and have done so for hundreds of requests in the past, if not thousands. We work with all copyright owners, and even the RIAA email us routinely. The MPAA is the only organization unwilling to cooperate with us.”

Luckily, quite a lot of torrents are tracked by more that one tracker these days. And if that doesn’t work there’s always DHT. You can read more about how to protect yourself from failing BitTorrent trackers in this article. Long live the hydra!

To be continued. (Thanks Tom)

Thanks to one of our American associates showing this block in action right now

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.