Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content
Flashback: Prepare to be boarded! Pirate Party wins entry to European Parliament | Stockholm Court: Pirate Bay Judge ‘Unbiased’ | Pirate Bay lawyer calls for retrial after judge confirms ties to copyright groups | Jail terms for Pirate Bay founders, appeal in works | ISOHunt points out Google, Yahoo torrent engines too | Sweden approves wiretapping law | Opposition to proposed Swedish surveillance law mounts | Sweden sets sights on new ‘catch and release’ wiretap law
David Kravets, Wired.com
March 30, 2010
A U.S. judge is ordering Isohunt, one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines, to remove all infringing content. Isohunt’s operator said Tuesday that the decision would likely shutter the site, which has 30 million unique monthly visitors.
The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance.
A federal court sided last year with the MPAA, ruling that Isohunt was an unlawful avenue to free movies, music, videogames and software – the first U.S. ruling on the legality of a BitTorrent site. Hollywood’s legal tactics shuttered TorrentSpy in the United States in 2008, but the merits of the case were never decided.
Gary Fung, the 27-year-old Canadian who runs Isohunt, said he and the MPAA are now haggling over how to comport with March 23 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles.
“It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of plaintiffs’ works through defendants’ websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market (.pdf) for consumers to purchase access to the same works,” Wilson wrote in support of his injunction. [Ed. Note: Perhaps the judge should look up the def'n of axiomatic: "...a proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be either self-evident, or subject to necessary decision. Therefore, its truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other (theory dependent) truths." (Wiki) In this context, therefore, axiomatic means because he and the recording industry says so.]
The judge added that “upwards of 95 percent of all dot-torrent files downloaded from defendants’ websites” return infringing material or works “at least highly likely to be infringing.”
Wilson ordered Fung to comply within his order within 14 days of the MPAA providing Fung a list of content to be removed.
And therein lies the dispute.
The judge, while giving the parties until April 12 to hammer out an agreement, is demanding that Isohunt cease “creating, maintaining or providing access to browsable website categories of dot-torrent or similar files using or based on infringement-related terms.”
That’s jargon for keyword searching. “Filtering against keywords. It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine,” Fung said in a telephone interview.
Fung’s position is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires Hollywood to provide links to files to be removed. Keyword searches, he said, could scoop up non-infringing works.
“We’re discussing the mechanics, the process that is reasonable for an injunction,” Fung said. “We’re still trying to hope that the judge will do the right thing.”
The MPAA was not immediately prepared to comment.
The sites included in the judge’s ruling include ISO Hunt, Torrentbox and Podtropolis.
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April 30th, 2010 at 5:55 am
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May 6th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
[...] from declassified U.S. documents | Hundreds of Toronto G20 delegates granted diplomatic immunity | Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content | The prison spending boom | UK: Children must go through airport naked body scanners | CETA worse [...]
May 10th, 2010 at 11:53 pm
[...] in China, call for state cybersecurity | Internet linking rights case to go before Supreme Court | Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content | CETA worse than ACTA  EU Trade Negotiators Demand Canada Completely Overhaul Its Intellectual [...]
May 29th, 2010 at 6:15 am
[...] in China, call for state cybersecurity | Internet linking rights case to go before Supreme Court | Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content | CETA worse than ACTA  EU Trade Negotiators Demand Canada Completely Overhaul Its Intellectual [...]
June 13th, 2010 at 12:29 am
[...] in Columbia | UK: Pupils forced to submit to fingerprint scans for lunch, parents not consulted | Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content | CETA worse than ACTA  EU Trade Negotiators Demand Canada Completely Overhaul Its Intellectual [...]
June 16th, 2010 at 8:35 am
[...] in Columbia | UK: Pupils forced to submit to fingerprint scans for lunch, parents not consulted | Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content | CETA worse than ACTA  EU Trade Negotiators Demand Canada Completely Overhaul Its Intellectual [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
[...] from declassified U.S. documents | Hundreds of Toronto G20 delegates granted diplomatic immunity | Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content | The prison spending boom | UK: Children must go through airport naked body scanners | CETA worse [...]