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IsoHunt Told To Pull Torrent Files Offline
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been ordered to remove the .torrent files for all infringing content — an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung's two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren't looking good for the torrent site."
Legality these days is determined by the depth of your pockets and the size of your lawyer-army.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
> 99% copyrighted material with no distribution rights from authors
Google is in the same spot, unfortunately, unless you believe that not blocking their spider in robots.txt is equivalent to giving distribution rights. Somehow I don't think that's going to fly in court ("fair use" might).
By the way, if your idea would fly, it would be practically impossible to run a site which distributes legal user-created content: the minute this site became a threat to Big Media's profit margins, they could easily pay for it to be "DoL"-ed (that's a "Denial-of-Legality" attack, when they pay third parties to upload enough illegal content to make it possible to sue and shut it down).
After all, Big Media has already been caught uploading its content to YouTube via third parties in a way to make it appear illegally pirated. I wouldn't put it past them to try this "DoL" shtik.
Check out your local library. I've been using the library for about a year now. My library's selection is probably comparable to Netflix (I've recently watched several older movies like the Godfather series, and some WW2 era movies, the X-files series, soon going to watch the Farside), and if they don't have something, I've actually had pretty good success about requesting that they buy items I want and having them acquire them. My library actually has an Annex just for the older videos that they don't have on the shelves right now, and I have access to all of this material that I neither want to pay to watch one time nor want to store, I'm protected against my kids scratching disks.
Now, I live a 25 minute round trip from our library, but once a week, they send a Bookmobile (bus with shelves) all over the county, and I can request that they send my requested materials out on the local Bookmobile, which is a 6 mile round trip, which is closer than my nearest video store. I have had a couple of items that were so scratched I couldn't watch the whole thing, but I just requested a new copy and put a note in the old one so they could remove it from circulation. You're probably paying property taxes (even if you rent, the landlord is paying some of your rent in taxes) to support a library and this is a far better option than paying for the video store (I also get all items for 1 or 3 weeks depending on the item, and cheaper fees if I keep it too long), risking getting sued, or buying it myself.