Having endured a several-years-long legal battle with the MPAA, owner Gary Fung sensibly negotiated a way out of his potentially ruinous copyright infringement predicament, eventually settling for a headline amount of $110 million, something (thankfully) he’ll never have to pay.

Nevertheless, the end result was that one of the Internet’s favorite torrent sites, with an owner that was both visible and well-liked, shut its doors for good leaving users without their regular home. Seeing an opportunity in waiting, a torrent-friendly group seized the day.

Within a couple of weeks, isoHunt.to was born. The site is a loose clone of isoHunt.com – graphically similar but with no connections to the original isoHunt team – with an aim to give former users a pace to share files. Just two months later at the end of 2013, isoHunt.to was making serious waves. From a standing start the site became the Internet’s 8th most popular torrent site, slotting in just behind 1337x.org in the overall top 10.

“When we launched isohunt.to we gained the level of about 200k uniques per day in about a week. Right before Christmas we hit 500k uniques per day. After that we’ve been going up and down but the overall trend remains upward,” an isoHunt.to admin informs TorrentFreak.

“Of course, many people are looking for ‘isohunt’ and that drives them to us. But there’s a lot of new traffic as well. We do lots of stuff to keep users happy and improve the site constantly. In a couple of days we’ll be rolling out another pack of features we’ve done since Christmas. Hopefully, users will be satisfied.”

While it’s certainly likely that millions of users are now happy at having a familiar looking site to frequent, the same can not be said about people who worked on the original isoHunt. When the clone site launched some quite understandably felt that it was unfairly trading on isoHunt.com’s image, not to mention their hard work.

“We tried to contact former isohunt.com members (admins and moderators) to get involved with the new site but we were rejected in a very rude way,” the isoHunt.to admin explains.

“Their position is clear – isohunt.to is a ripoff and our intention is only to make profit from the well-known brand. They have contributed so much into the original website it’s painful for them to see a wannabe isohunt in a current condition. But their rejection just means we have to continue ourselves. We may not reach the same heights as isohunt.com but we’ll definitely try to create a new wave of isohunt followers and make a new home for them.”

But in the world of file-sharing there is another bogeyman that often raises its head. When sites come out of nowhere and quickly start getting big, people question their motives. Is it money? Is it malware? Or, God forbid, do they have something even bigger up their sleeve?

“Since honeypots have been created over the last few years some people thought (and still think) our site is a honeypot made by MAFIAA,” the admin explains.

“It’s interesting to read comments where people assume we work for a government agency like the FBI, or an organization like the MPAA and others. We don’t blame them, we would probably think the same. And we don’t try to encourage these people into using isohunt.to. Everyone should decide it for himself or herself. But there are plenty of opportunities to be anonymous on the net. Just a hint,” he adds.

But despite the setbacks, the popularity of the site is booming and while some won’t use the site, others have put the past and other worries behind them.

“There are lots of people saying we made them happier with the new isohunt. When they found out the original site closed down many regular users felt like a huge part of their lives had just disappeared. They were sad and lost. That shows us again how great the original place was and how immense was the effort to keep it going. We can only see a fraction of that but are happy we can preserve something valuable for people.”

Finally, the isoHunt.to admin says he believes that the new site is in itself symbolic of torrenting.

“First there’s someone sharing something. Then others join and continue sharing when the original sharer can’t do it anymore. That feels great to be a part of something bigger. So we’ll be happy for new people to join the new-wave isohunt community and continue sharing,” he concludes.

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

The Canada-based Internet entrepreneur signed a $110 million settlement with the MPAA and shut down isoHunt.com, the site which he had worked on for more than a decade.

IsoHunt’s closing marked the end of an era, but despite the setback Fung is not giving up his ideals. Last month we reported that he had teamed up with an old friend, Clifford Joe, to start a new clothing line titled ‘Viva 10.23′, a reference to the date isoHunt was officially shut down.

Today the duo have launched their Kickstarter campaign, hoping to raise $10,230 through crowdsourcing to get the project started. People who back the project will get a T-shirt or hoodie of their choice, depending on the pledge amount.

Fung describes the concept as “political fashion” and the designs carry statements such as “Stop Watching Us” and “Freedom to Share.”

“For 11 years while I worked on isoHunt I’ve witnessed one thing: the Internet is about sharing, and file-sharing is a movement that is about more than mere files or copyright. It’s about the Freedom to share, the Freedom to create. And relatedly nowadays, the Freedom to not be spied on,” Fung told us.

“It is these freedoms, at the intersection of isoHunt closing and the erosion of privacy and other information freedoms, that gave me the idea for a clothing line. One that carries social statements with ironic twists, statements and designs in the form of t-shirts, sweaters and hoodies.”

Viva 10.23 promises to be more than the average clothing line. True to the “sharing” spirit the founders believe in, the brand will also accept input from the public. They will create a sub-Reddit where people can submit and vote on designs and slogans for the next “P2P clothing” designs.

The majority of profits Viva 10.23 makes will be donated to organizations that support Internet freedom issues, such as EFF, Wikimedia and Openmedia.ca. Hollywood shouldn’t expect a cut, but Fung does have a word of advice for his former adversaries. If they really want to stop piracy they should do it through innovation, and not by suing people left and right.

“Give customers what they want, at high quality, with the most convenience, at the right price, at the right time. If not, battles are won but the war maybe already lost,” Fung says.

For isoHunt’s founder the clothing line is not going to be a major revenue source. He receives a one time consulting fee of $110 and continues to look for new ways to challenge the status quo.

“The Internet is a big place. I’ll continue using it to come up with new and better ways of upsetting the status quo where it’s stupid. Viva 10.23, what I envision to be a massively localized and crowdsourced political fashion platform, is one such way,” Fung says.

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

Fung signed a $110 million settlement with the MPAA and shut down isoHunt.com as stipulated in the agreement with the movie studios. Initially the domain was completely dead, but visitors to what was once one of the largest torrent sites are now greeted by the following message.

“A United States federal court has permanently shut down isoHunt.com because it was in violation of copyright law. If you are looking for your favorite movies or TV shows online, there are more ways than ever today to get high quality access to them on legal platforms.”

TorrentFreak reached out to Fung, who said he couldn’t go into detail about why the notice was put up, or who drafted the language. However, he did point out that his ideas on “sharing” haven’t changed a bit.

On the contrary, his work on isoHunt taught him that the freedom to share information is one of the core values of the Internet, and despite the setbacks he suffered Fung is still motivated to defend these ideas.

“I shut isoHunt down on October 23 to end the seven year battle with Hollywood, but for 11 years while I worked on isoHunt I’ve witnessed one thing: the Internet is about sharing, and file-sharing is a movement that is about more than mere files or copyright. It’s about the Freedom to share, the Freedom to create. And relatedly nowadays, the Freedom to not be spied on.”

“It is these freedoms, at the intersection of isoHunt closing and the erosion of privacy and other information freedoms, that gave me the idea for a clothing line. One that carries social statements with ironic twists, statements and designs in the form of t-shirts, sweaters and hoodies.”

This idea quickly turned into a new venture in which Fung teamed up with an old friend, Clifford Joe, who had already been working on starting his own clothing company. Today, the duo announced their plan to the world through a pre-Kickstarter project that has just gone public.

The clothing will carry the brand “Viva 10.23,” a reference to the day isoHunt was officially shut down. People can not fund anything yet, but are able to leave their email address so they are notified when the Kickstarter project goes live in a month or so.

The project page currently lists a handful of designs, including a Obama-style poster of Gary with the text “Share,” and shirts with the slogans “Stop Watching Us” and “Freedom to Share.” Fung told us that this is just an initial sample, and that Viva 10.23 invites designers from all over the world to submit their ideas and expand the product line.

The project page describes the concept as “political fashion” and Fung hopes to cover a wide range of Internet activism with the clothing line.

“What I’ve learned in my time working on isoHunt, is that the social, legal and political underpinnings of my work are just as important if not more so than the tech, and I see an opportunity now to bring both designers and ‘users’ together to casually campaign for what we believe in: information freedom, the freedom to share,” Fung says.

As for the revenue model, Fung notes that he will get a dollar as a consulting fee. The majority of profits Viva 10.23 makes will be donated to organizations that support Internet freedom issues, such as EFF, Openmedia.ca, as well as various charities and funds for emerging musicians and filmmakers.

“This is clothing we wear to advertise causes we believe in, and clothing that funds those causes,” Fung concludes.

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

The amount that owner Gary Fung would have to pay to the MPAA was publicized at $110 million, a somewhat scary quantity of money by anyone’s standards. Of course, Fung doesn’t have that kind of money and wouldn’t pay it freely to the MPAA even if he did. The amount was put out there to act as a deterrent to those who might think of opening a similar site in future, the metaphorical head-on-a-pike if you will.

But despite the scary messages and veiled threats, just days after the settlement was announced a group calling themselves the ArchiveTeam told TorrentFreak that they intended to save isoHunt’s torrent files, to save them for future generations. They had a big job ahead and a deadline of October 23 looming, the date that Fung had agreed to close down isoHunt.

Things wouldn’t pan out as planned. After hearing of the backup plan Fung pulled the plug days early, thwarting the ArchiveTeam’s attempts at preserving history.

However, in the background another project was already underway to breathe new life into isoHunt even after it had been shot and buried by the MPAA. Today isoHunt.to was launched, a site that looks identical to its now-dead namesake.

Speaking with TorrentFreak the team behind the project, who have no connections to the ArchiveTeam, say that preserving a cultural icon is their main aim.

“IsoHunt has been a great part of the torrent world for more than a decade. It’s a big loss to everyone who used it over the years. Media corporations don’t like innovative or competition and isoHunt’s fate is one of the examples of how they deal with it,” our sources explain.

“IsoHunt can definitely be called a file-sharing icon. People got used to it and they don’t want to simply let it go. We want those people to feel like being at home while visiting isohunt.to. The main goal is to restore the website with torrents and provide users with the same familiar interface.”

While there is still work to be done and bugs to be ironed out, things are well underway. The interface is completely familiar, with categories to browse on the left hand side as usual. Torrent pages appear as they previously did although the ‘time added’ box appears to show when the torrent was added to the new isoHunt site, not when it was added to the original isoHunt.

At the moment some of the community-driven modules of the site such as the forum and user profiles are unavailable and due to their nature it seems unlikely that they will return. User torrent comments are also absent but it at least seems possible that these might be recovered in a future update. Additionally, brand new torrents are also being added to the site so its usefulness will not only be limited to preserving the past.

With the original isoHunt gone there is no simple way of comparing the new isoHunt’s database with the old one but the team behind the resurrection inform TorrentFreak that so far around 75% of isoHunt’s torrent database has been restored.

“Only time will tell whether users like the site or not. If they like the idea and keep coming back we’ll be happy to develop the project even further,” the team conclude.

Update: A former employee of isoHunt.com has asked us to make it extra clear that isoHunt.to has nothing to do with the original isoHunt.com.

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

Fung signed a $110 million settlement with the MPAA and planned to shut down the site Tuesday night as stipulated in the agreement with the movie studios.

The unexpected settlement took many of the site’s users by surprise, and yesterday we reported that a group of “rogue archivists” was working on a full backup to preserve a piece of Internet history. Unfortunately for them, isoHunt’s founder didn’t think that this was a very good idea.

A few hours after the news broke, isoHunt took down the server where the torrents were stored. By early Monday morning the entire site had been replaced with a farewell note to the site’s visitors.

“This is it. We are shutting down isoHunt services a little early,” Fung wrote.

IsoHunt’s owner explained that the early exit was a direct response to ArchiveTeam’s backup attempt, but it’s unclear if it was his own decision or whether the MPAA’s lawyers pushed for it.

“I’m told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I’m honored that people think our site is worthy of historical preservation, but the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place,” Fung notes.

Fung is right and of course all isoHunt torrents are also backed up by the torrent cache services Torrage and Zoink. However, all other metadata and comments appear to be gone for good. The ArchiveTeam managed to grab 242 gigabytes of data, but most is still missing.

ArchiveTeam’s ‘joepie91′ told TorrentFreak that the main goal of the backup was not to copy the torrents, but all the metadata surrounding it including user comments and file-info. He is nonetheless proud of what the team of volunteers got done in such a short time-span.

“I’m disappointed to see that we didn’t manage to archive all of isoHunt, of course, but I am quite happy to see how many people helped out, and what kind of a result it has had – 29 million IDs checked in some two days is still incredible,” joepie91 says.

This partial backup will be posted on the Internet archive in the near future and announced on the #archiveteam IRC channel.

“One last but quite important remark I want to make, is that I think Gary might have misunderstood the purpose of the archiving project; he basically states that “the .torrent files can be found elsewhere too” – but this completely misses the point, being the archiving of the metadata *around* those torrents, such as user comments. These cannot be replicated from other sources…

Fung, meanwhile, used the early shutdown to deliver a “proper send-off” to the people who’ve used his site for many years.

“It’s been an adventure in the last 10.5 years working on isoHunt, a privilege working with some of the smartest guys I’ve worked with, and my life won’t be the same without it. For what I’m working on next, please look up my blog on Google and follow me there.

“Because as the Terminator would say with a German accent, ‘I’ll be backkk’,” Fung said, before Rickrolling the already distressed users….

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

At the time of writing isoHunt consists of 13,773,786 torrents linking to 286 million files which are good for a total 17,390.44 terabytes of data. Unfortunately, all of the site’s metadata may soon disappear.

After a legal battle of nearly eight years isoHunt founder Gary Fung announced the site’s closure this week. Fung signed a $110 million settlement with the MPAA and agreed to shut down the torrent site by October 23.

While isoHunt.com will soon be gone, the site’s torrents and other metadata will be preserved if it’s up to the ArchiveTeam. In an attempt to save isoHunt’s extensive collection of torrent files, a group of “rogue archivists” has been working around the clock to save all data for future generations.

TorrentFreak talked to several ArchiveTeam members, each determined to prevent one of the largest metadata massacres in history.

“The settlement took everyone by surprise, and appeared to come out of nowhere. IsoHunt is shutting down in less than three days, and the speedy massacre of such a significant volume of metadata is a tragedy,” ArchiveTeam’s ‘lysobit’ informs TorrentFreak.

“This project isn’t about politics or copyright issues. This is about preserving culture and historical metadata. All data is essential,” he adds.

The ArchiveTeam gathered fame in 2010 when they released a full backup of all Geocities websites before Yahoo! pulled the plug for good. The archive was released as a 641 gigabyte torrent and made headlines all over the Internet.

The backup of isoHunt, which is still in progress, is expected to be nearly five times larger. The ArchiveTeam believes that all torrents, comments and other metadata will be around three terabytes when its complete.

At this point it is still uncertain whether they will be able to finish the project in time. IsoHunt is expected to disappear in a few days and the ArchiveTeam is still looking for volunteers to assist in the backup process.

“People who are interested in supporting our effort of preserving the data contained on isoHunt can do so by following the instructions on GitHub for their platform. The script works by downloading metadata in bulks of 50 and uploading a compressed archive of them to a central server via the ‘Warrior’,” ArchiveTeam’s ‘Fionn’ told us.

According to ‘joepie91′, founder of the isoHunt archiving project, the rescue operation is a prime example of what the ArchiveTeam is for. The people involved in the team’s projects want to make sure that important data doesn’t get lost whenever a site shuts down.

“Many sites shut down over time – either outside of their own control, or due to an acquisition – and most of these sites don’t really care about their users, or the content they host. ArchiveTeam is a loosely organized group of ‘rogue archivists’ that keeps track of impending shutdowns, and saves all data that can be saved before it’s gone forever,” joepie91 told TorrentFreak.

“While there is some coherence, and some services are controlled by a smaller group of people, the general idea is to ‘just go get it done’. ArchiveTeam has developed a reusable toolkit for developing archiving scripts compatible with the ‘Warrior’; a system that anyone who runs the script can join to receive automated archiving tasks, making the whole process distributed and quicker,” he adds.

If the ArchiveTeam is able to get the backup done in time, isoHunt will write history again when the torrent becomes available. As far as we know, a three terabyte isoHunt archive is going to set a record for the largest torrent ever distributed in public.

Update: isoHunt has taken down its servers to prevent the site from being backed up. We hope to have more information on the current status of the backup later.

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

Both parties have submitted a request to conclude the case and isoHunt founder Gary Fung has agreed to pay a $110 million settlement and shut down the site.

“It’s sad to see my baby go. But I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. 10.5 years of isoHunt has been a long journey by any business definition, and forever in Internet startup time,” Fung notes.

“I think one worry I want to address is at no time have I compromised privacy of any user on isoHunt, in terms of your IP addresses or emails,” he added.

At the time of writing isoHunt is still up and running but Fung told TorrentFreak that it will soon close its doors. It’s a landmark decision – the site has been one of the most visited torrent search engines for nearly a decade.

The MPAA is delighted with the outcome and hopes it will deter others from starting similar websites. The Hollywood group explained earlier that while two to five million dollars would be enough to bankrupt isoHunt, a higher penalty would scare off others.

“Today’s settlement is a major step forward in realizing the enormous potential of the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce and innovation,” MPAA boss Chris Dodd, said in a comment.

“It also sends a strong message that those who build businesses around encouraging, enabling, and helping others to commit copyright infringement are themselves infringers, and will be held accountable for their illegal actions.”

The MPAA believes that the closure of isoHunt will help save thousands of jobs and protect many more businesses.

“The successful outcome of this landmark lawsuit will also will help preserve jobs and protect the tens of thousands of businesses in the creative industries, whose hard work and investments are exploited by sites like isoHunt,” Dodd added.

The full terms of the settlement agreement have not been disclosed, but there appears to be more behind it. IsoHunt will be bankrupted by the $110 million settlement, so there is no reason to throw in the towel two weeks before the trial was supposed to start, unless they received something in return.

For the MPAA this is the second big official legal victory against a torrent site. In 2009 the movie industry group won its legal battle against TorrentSpy.

While the MPAA has booked a clear victory, the case is not completely over yet. IsoHunt recently filed an application to appeal the case at the Supreme Court, which could mean that both parties are back in court again in the not too distant future.

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

One of the issues the two parties are in disagreement over is whether isoHunt should be able to question the notion that piracy is actually hurting the movie industry.

To argue that piracy might not be as disastrous as it’s often portrayed, the torrent site has listed researcher and economics professor Koleman Strumpf as one of its witnesses. Strumpf’s research has previously shown that piracy is not hurting sales at all, and isoHunt is expected to use this in its favor during the trial.

The MPAA, however, prefers not to discuss the topic of actual damages during the trial. They argue that the issue is too complex and that it could mislead the jury. For example, isoHunt may be able to show that movie industry profits are increasing, but that doesn’t mean that piracy has had no effect.

The movie studios are therefore asking the court to exclude the issue, arguing that actual damages can’t be measured.

“To permit consideration of actual damages under these circumstances would be perverse – and particularly unfair – given that Plaintiffs elected statutory damages precisely because their actual damages are not capable of meaningful measurement,” the MPAA’s legal team writes.

The MPAA argues that since the court has decided to award statutory damages, it is irrelevant to what extent their revenues are negatively impacted by online piracy.

“Defendants should not be permitted to exploit the inherent difficulty of proving actual damages in a case such as this as a basis for lowering the statutory damages award, especially when the very purpose of statutory damages was to provide a remedy that is not dependent on proof of actual damages.”

While the MPAA admits that the effect of online piracy is nearly impossible to measure, the movie studios do have a very clear picture of what’s needed to bankrupt isoHunt. The transcript from a recent court meeting reveals that two to five million should exhaust the company.

Court: What do you estimate to be the resources of [Defendants]? . . . What do you suspect?
MPAA’s counsel: Based on our estimate, Your Honor, we believe a couple to a few million dollars would exhaust Mr. Fung’s or defendants’ ability to pay…
MPAA’s counsel: A couple to a few million dollars would exhaust defendants’–
Court: Does that mean, like $2 million
MPAA’s counsel: Two million dollars to $4 million, $5 million at the most.

When the court asked the MPAA’s counsel why it was going for nearly $600 million in damages when a few million would be enough to put the company out of business, the MPAA argued that the high amount is needed to deter others from starting their own torrent search engines.

Court: So why are you making such a fetish about 2,000 or 3,000 or 10,000 or 100 copyrights?
MPAA’s Mr. Fabrizio: Your Honor, the purpose of statutory damages is not only to seek compensation from the defendants, the extraordinarily important purpose is to create — send a message to other would-be infringers like defendants, and there are thousands of them…
Court: But if you strip him of all his assets — and you’re suggesting that a much lesser number of copyright infringements would accomplish that, where is the deterrence by telling the world that you took someone’s resources away because of illegal conduct entirely or 50 times over?

In a reply to the MPAA’s opposition, isoHunt argues that actual damages are important information for the jury to have, so a more balanced sum can be reached. If there is no proof of piracy hurting the movie industry, a $3 million fine might be more appropriate than $600 million.

“Evidence on Plaintiffs’ overall and specific revenues relating to the works at issue will allow the jury to infer that Plaintiffs have not suffered any actual damages, which can be contrasted with the financial condition of Defendants in the jury fashioning an appropriate award,” isoHunt’s counsel argues.

“For example, if Plaintiffs enjoyed uninterrupted profits, and their overall revenues did not decline during the time that isoHunt was launched and Defendants began complying with the Injunction, the jury could conclude that it would be unjust and a windfall to award Plaintiffs anything more than the near $3 million statutory minimum.”

The court will now have to decide whether the issue of actual damages can be brought up in court. If that’s the case, then the trial is going to be a numbers game with experts from all sides trying to prove whether or not piracy is hurting Hollywood, and if so to what extent.

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

After the District Court ruling against the torrent site was affirmed in March, the case is now moving towards a trial next month from which the movie industry hopes to win hundreds of millions in statutory damages.

To secure this amount the MPAA has to prove direct infringement and show that United States users either uploaded or downloaded copyrighted works. In addition, they have to show that they are the rightful owners of the files in question. The movie studios want to settle these issues before trial and recently submitted a motion for summary judgment as well as supporting evidence.

However, isoHunt’s legal team is now pointing out that the evidence is not only far from conclusive but in some accounts completely inaccurate.

The MPAA initially listed 3,947 files, all movies and TV-shows, which means that the total damages isoHunt faces is as high as $592,050,000. To prove that isoHunt was offering these copyrighted files the MPAA hired Bruce Ward, owner of the consulting firm IP Intelligence. Ward identified the “infringing” torrents by searching through a copy of the isoHunt database from 2007. He then loaded the torrents into a BitTorrent client and transferred the downloaded files onto a hard drive.

The hard drive was subsequently sent to the movie studios to confirm that the downloaded files were indeed the infringing files listed as evidence. While this sounds like a solid process, something went seriously wrong somewhere down the line.

After all the files were identified the MPAA sent the hard drive with the infringing content to isoHunt’s legal team. On the drive were the torrent files and related videos categorized in folders, each with a unique id number (BT_ID) associated with the movie IDs on the list of titles isoHunt is accused of infringing.

However, when isoHunt’s legal team inspected the contents of the drive it turned out to be quite a mess, as the torrent files were not all linked to the right files.

“Plaintiffs’ BT_ID List identifies dot-torrent file 2224 as corresponding to Plaintiffs’ work ‘Legends of the Fall.’ Plaintiffs produced a copy of a dot-torrent file named ’2224.torrent’ on September 19, 2013. But opening the dot-torrent file ’2224.torrent’ in a BitTorrent client causes it to begin attempting to download a copy of a work entitled ‘Buddha Bar – Vol 4′,” isoHunt’s legal team explains to the court.

The mismatch between the titles provided by the MPAA and what the torrent files link to is not an isolated incident. isoHunt’s legal team has found several other examples, even though they only looked at a small selection of the files that were provided. They were unable to download all of the files in question, so they couldn’t check the actual videos.

In one case isoHunt’s team was able to download a torrent, but instead of the movie “Lords of Dogtown” it was linked to an MP3 album.

“On September 28, 2013, I launched the dot-torrent file ’16170.torrent’ using the BitTorrent client uTorrent, which downloaded eighteen files from the Internet. I reviewed each of the files and determined that none of them is the movie ‘Lords of Dogtown’,” isoHunt’s attorney writes.

“Indeed, none of the files is a video file. Rather, the downloaded files comprise sixteen mp3 audio files, an m3u file, a .sfv file, and a .nfo file that contains textual information about the audio files. Launching the 16170.torrent file using a BitTorrent client results in a download of audio files identical to the content files Plaintiffs actually produced on their hard drive on September 19, 2013.”

The attorney doesn’t mention the name of the album in question, but it seems plausible that the MPAA confused the “Lords of Dogtown” film with the soundtrack. In any case, isoHunt’s team argues that it is far from clear that the provided evidence is sufficient to prove that all torrents link to the movies and TV-shows the MPAA lists as evidence.

isoHunt’s legal team further notes that MPAA’s method to determine the location of isoHunt downloaders contains a pretty significant flaw. In his report, the MPAA’s expert notes that he used a geolocation tool to lookup the redacted IP-addresses of downloaders from isoHunt’s 2007 log.

The report concludes that at least one U.S. IP-address is linked to each of the downloads, but apparently the investigator used a recent IP-location database to determine that. This would be a problem, since an IP-address that was previously in use by a U.S. Internet provider might be used by an ISP in a different country today.

“Plaintiffs’ analysis of direct infringements also relies on geo-location data that does not cover the time periods at issue, such that their conclusions about the locations of purported downloaders are unreliable,” isoHunt’s legal team points out.

Based on the above and several other arguments isoHunt is now asking the court to reject the MPAA’s motion for summary judgment and reserve these issues for the upcoming trial. It’s now up to the judge to decide whether the MPAA’s evidence is good enough, or whether it requires a review during the trial.

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

The Court ordered the filtering of the search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA. Failure to comply would have meant a shutdown of the site in the United States. Earlier this year, the verdict was upheld by the appeals court which means that the filter remains in place today.

As a result isoHunt is filtering its systems for thousands of movie titles and blocking U.S. visitors’ access to torrents that contain keywords such as “The Heat,” “This Is The End” and “The Kingdom.” While this prevents visitors from accessing torrents linking to blockbuster movies, there’s also a vast amount of collateral damage.

This week artist Elliot Wallace found out that the music he shares with a Creative Commons license is blocked for U.S. visitors. Those who try to download his two track album “The Spirit Truth” will see the following error message.

“Torrent has been censored, as required by US court.”

Needless to say, Wallace doesn’t want his music to be blocked. However, one of his tracks is titled “In the Kingdom of the Undead” which contains “The Kingdom,” a combination of words which the MPAA deems infringing.

As an artist Wallace is not against anti-piracy measures per se, but he does feel that the MPAA filter is in part hurting his ability to share his music.

“As an independent musician, I rely on word of mouth to spread my music. I understand that the title filter is an important step in preventing piracy, but such tools should be used with great care. Censoring an independent musician’s work and damaging
his publicity without recourse clearly shows the law being applied carelessly and over-broadly,” Wallace tells TorrentFreak.

While no filtering system is perfect, the MPAA filter isoHunt has been forced to implement is literally blocking thousands of unrelated torrents, many of which are in the public domain.

For example, legitimate torrents blocked by “The Kingdom” phrase include an album with Reggaeton music, a selection of sermons preached at the North Main Church of Christ and a live concert from Uncle Earl. All these files are also hosted on the Internet Archive and can be shared freely.

For “The Kingdom” alone we found hundreds of Creative Commons or public domain files that are being caught by MPAA’s filter, and the same is true for other banned phrases.

The phrase “The Heat” censors the G4 podcast, the Hip Hop Heads Podcast, Parametric Studies of an Automotive Air Conditioning System and a UConn student’s opinion on gun control. “This is The End” also blocks a wide variety of free to share content including the GeekFurious podcast, the Real BS podcast and the Cell Shock podcast.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg, but it certainly shows that isoHunt’s implementation of the MPAA’s court-ordered filter results in quite a bit of over-filtering.

Interestingly, the MPAA argues the opposite and has told the court that isoHunt is deliberately manipulating the filter to render it ineffective. The movie studios therefore want isoHunt to turn over the filter’s source code and have asked the court to punish the torrent site for contempt.

“The record to date supports the inference that Defendants have deliberately engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective in preventing access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,” MPAA wrote in July.

As with most filtering systems, it is hard for the public to evaluate its performance when the list itself is secret. Perhaps it’s an idea to open up both the filtering source code as well as the list of banned keywords so the public can help spot abuse?

This is not the first time that an artist has complained that the MPAA has mistakenly censored his work, and if the current system remains in place it won’t be the last either.

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