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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."
First it's the Pirate Bay, then Mininova, Newzbin, and now IsoHunt? Where or Where are we to get our stuff from? Itunes?
Pirate sites will go, and others will replace them, but there is a constant: like death and taxes, piracy will go on.
Would this get around the ruling?
So when is someone going to develop a peer-to-peer system for hosting and tracking torrents? What happened to this technology?
IsoHunt and Torrenting in general is just a service, to connect people. In the same way MSN connects me to my friends and websites connect me to news.
Making IsoHunt responsible for the copyrighted material would be like making Microsoft responsible for Copyrighted material I share with my friends over filesharing through Live messenger.
Now, if I go home and do that tonight, can I expect US District Judge Stephen Wilson to order MSN to cut off filesharing?
one which is not hell bent on creating a new form of intellectual feudalism through copyright and ip mechanisms.
Read radical news here
is a .torrent file containing any copyrighted material?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
... is about as likely to be won by the content holders as the 'War on Drugs' to be won by the Federal Govt.
The parallels are striking, starting with 'Just say no' / 'Don't copy that floppy', and then escalating internationally to ACTA.
As long as the demand for unauthorized content exists, supply will find its way.
Until consumers have a compelling reason to buy an authorized copy (iTunes is a great example of this), torrents or some other tech like .nzb will give the people what they want.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
It's called a parabola. It's just a morality tale.
And yes, if you could glean some sort of moral from a kid's book, it too would be a parabola.
You mean media, or expression, or product. The content, if any, cannot be copyrighted. Also you don't mean infringing, you mean unlicensed, or pirated.
I don't like isohunt (for reasons I can't remember) and I think copyright violations are wrong in some/most cases (I'm in the 10-20 year copyright crowd), but why would isohunt or anyone else who gets hit by judgements care much? It doesn't take too many hours to move the site to some other country. And as a former abuse-handler of a large webhost, I know that simply hosting whatever you're doing in a different country that the people who wants to shut you down will make it very hard for them (at least in countries not ruled by the RIAA or MPAA.)
(as abuse-handler, the best part of my job was to tell all morons sending me DMCA-notices to stuff it, since the DMCA is a US-thing and if they had a valid complaint to make they would say so instead of using silly DMCA-mails to abuse@xxx.com).
Since IsoHunt is mainly a search engine of torrents, they could just crawl the .torrent hosts and instead of saving a local copy like they do now, they'll just provide a link to the host. I don't see how this will change things much.
"Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors,"
Hah! That's a joke, right? More agreeable that having to remove infringing content? The only thing more agreeable than that is if he removes it all AND pays massive fines. Oh... wait... more agreeable to *him*?
That's equally funny. For that to be a remote possibility someone in authority would have to be okay with him facilitating the transfer of copywrighted material and there's just about zero chance of that happening. Let it go.
I am saddened by the judge striking down this use of the internet. A television network should do a news piece on this, in order to transfer knowledge about this subject to the masses. I'm sure they have a protocol to deal with internet stories.
Someone please keep me posted. Why?ENCASE THIS BECOMES A HUGE STORY instead of just letting it die! please! For the good of us all!
I realize Canada is a party to the Berne Convention, but what does a US Judge have to do with a site run entirely in Canada?
On a side note, the original judgement against them was the categorized system in which users access torrents, specifically that it had sections for movies, music and such that could be browsed without a search input. They have been working on a "lite" version of the site that removes all the functionality that the MPAA complained about and are hoping to present it as a way to stay in operation and still satisfy the courts.
http://isohunt.com/lite/
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
On the contrary, I found your post rather elliptical.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
When people start infringing copyrights, they are attacking centuries of legal thought.
No, less than a century of legal thought, as before the 20th century copyrights had reasonable lengths. I wonder how much "pirated" material is older than 20 years?
Copyright is not about ownership, it is about a limited time monopoly to get creators to create. Jimi Hendrix will perform no more; his work should be in the public domain, as should anything else longer than the length of an invention's patent. Nothing made before 1990 should be covered by copyright, and if it wasn't I believe there would be little piracy.
I'm sure creativity would evolve much faster. Like technology, art is built on what has come before. Nothing is created out of a vacuum.
Free Martian Whores!
It seems there's already software (Tribler) that bypasses the need for host sites.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
Whoosh. (It's a pun.)
It's not an endless river.
Yes, yes it is. As far back as I can recall -- and that is a long way -- there has always been piracy. To think or even suggest that you can "dent" or outright stop piracy is just wishful thinking. It always has been.
The method will differ, that's all. Goodbye torrents, hello ?????
The only reason this seems odd is because over the last 10 years, the general public has gotten into piracy in a big way. If that hadn't have happened and it was much more "low key" -- we wouldn't be having this discussion and you, most likely, would not even realize piracy was taking place. Now we have torrents. Before that we had http. Before that we had SFTP. Before that we had FTP. Before that we had Zmodem on BBS's. Before that, we had X/Ymodem. And before that we had sneakernet.
The evolution continues...
(sidenote: Remember rule #1. I purposely have a glaring oversight in the list above. Can you spot it? LOL)
And when copyright terms are extended, it is also an attack on centuries of legal thought. The sole purpose of copyright is to enrich the public domain by promoting the publishing of art and sciences by granting a limited monopoly on distribution. Extending the term of that copyright is a direct attack on that sole purpose, while "piracy" is merely an attack on the method of promotion.
Copyright law is a misnomer, it is really copyright restriction. We all have a right to copy anything we want, this is a natural right inherent in our humanity. It is as natural as our freedom to think, speak, walk or defend ourselves. Copyright law restricts that right temporarily, so that in time we will have a richer and deeper culture to share in the future. The extension of copyright for profit is theft of the highest order, it is stealing from every man, woman and child in existence and leaves humanity as a whole poorer.
Is not selling their content in countries, like Spain, where piracy is rampant.
Best Slashdot Co
That's not a pun. That's a wikipedia entry.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Ah, just so. Thank you for pointing that out. Confusion might have arisen!
When I was a lad long, long ago we had no internet and only two tv channels. Usually there wasn't anything on worth watching. I read a lot of books.
Most cities have these buildings full of books and even media, which they seem perfectly happy to loan out for free. I'm not entirely sure what their business model is, but they've been doing this for as long as I can remember, so it appears viable, strange though that may seem. It might be time to rediscover them.
Loose lips lose spit.
I understand the reason to fight in court, however if he ends up losing, what is to stop him from just moving all his physical servers to some country like Kerblackistan that doesn't give two whits about what some judge in USA land has to say? I mean the whole site is just hosting torrents which are just teeny tiny files that point uTorrent et al where to find the good stuff, correct? That doesn't exactly take a whole lot of horsepower.
I mean Pirate Bay got shut down because the US pressured the crap out of Sweden to do it, but I am sure there are plenty of places that could care less.
Anyway I gotta go blow my bandwidth cap for March/April and download what parts of the internet I don't already have...
"Once the admins and users will start getting jail time and huge fines more often,"
unless they do something crazy, like move to another country. Spain has already ruled P2P and P2P links are legal. Isohunt has 40 million unique searches a month and is worth $51 million dollars, generating $5 million a yr in ad revenue. If the US Govt told me "Hey! You can't make $5 million a year anymore!" I would be on the next plane to where ever it was legal to keep doing what I'm doing.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It's a game of whack-a-mole. My concern is the same is the real game of whack-a-mole. One game I played as a kid (sharks not moles), the better you did, the more the game speed up until it was impossible to win.
, (I was amazed when these things came out at 2gb!) it becomes possible to move 40+ VCD movies in something as big as your fingernail which a data smuggler could stitch into clothing for gods sake.
The internet is all about copying, it's fundamental, and it's never easier. It's what Turing machines do. Consider Streaming even, there is not such thing as streaming, it's still downloading, however renamed to keep rightsholders from realising what it really is.
Theoretically it's possible to create a file sharing service that is incredibly difficult perhaps almost impossible to monitor and trace. Onion routing works pretty well, there are robest methods of key exchange, and it seems encrypted links are good enough to protect online banking.
All the while bandwidth, computational capacity and digital storage is getting better, faster and cheaper. If one thought piracy was at an all time high now and the tide will start to turn against it, then one is like a luddite before the industrial revolution.
Maybe Big Content does end up shutting down P2P faster than it can pop back up, and even win some candy floss in the process. Piracy will just move back to untraceable anonymous physical media. You see, one underestimates the bandwidth of a portable hard drive or USB stick moving from A to B.
What about ACTA border searches of your iPod and laptop? Considering the size of a 32gb MicroSDHC Card now,
Still don't get what I mean? A high end 32gb SDHC card costs alot, but so did a $10 4gb card once upon a time. What happens when these things hit 500gb, 1000gb? Become so cheap that you give them away like we do with burned CD/DVD-Rs now?
Another example, my entire music collection (legit) took up most of my expensive 80gb harddrive in 2003/2004. Today that same price point, buys me a 1.5TB drive, with change. My music collection that has only grown a little suddenly has a trivial footprint.
A hypothetical pirated movie collection of hundreds of 700mb VCD-quality movies now fills up a good chunk of ones hypothetical 1TB drive.
In six years that will be nothing on my $100 50TB drive.
By the end of the decade you could afford to have a desktop computer with every major movie of the last 50 years stored on it with room to spare.
Repeat.
Yeah so you were thinking maybe we are seeing the end of piracy, but it's only just getting started. Suddenly Big Content seems like a bunch of luddites tearing down the machines of the revolution, failing to see the precipice of change coming.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Why not focus on a different aspect? How exactly is Isohunt supposed to know what is infringing? Google (or rather, YouTube), when put in same spot as Isohunt, has nicely provided an example that authorized copyright holders have been known to post their content as if it were pirated.
CEO G@Ry FuNg has introduces a new torrent site: www.is0hunt.com
I read the article, and I'm still confused. If he is ordered to take down all infringing material, then the solution is simple: purge all torrents, then let the users upload them again. I'm sure if he announced that there was a time planned to do this, someone would back up all the torrents, and then re upload them after the purge.
Xzibit, is that you?
"A pun?"
"No, no, not a pun, no, what's the other thing, which reads the same backwards as forwards?"
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
It is heart wrenching to see where this is going. We are selling our future cultural heritage to entities which have no desire to preserve it, only to control it till it no longer makes them money and then assault those who attempt to enjoy it after that.
The single reason our species has made it this far is through the free exchange of ideas, art, theory, process, and emotion. To see that we have denied our history and choose to err on the side of greed is terrible indeed.
To those naysayers out there that believe this series of events in the last ten years, regarding copyright and patent, is healthy for our society; Really? You truly and honestly believe this is for the betterment of our species? Really?
Slashdotters, like most people I guess, don't like it when someone gets off on a "technicality". People often wish the law employed more common sense when determine verdicts.
However, when it comes to torrent sites in which is it obvious to everyone that the site facilitates the downloading of pirated content, people WANT to use technicalities to show that the site is not at fault, either because the .torrent files aren't copyrighted themselves, or that Google also facilitates the download process. They want to use technicalities here as a legal defence, but hate it when the MPAA use them themselves for example.
Hypocrites.
> Where will you go? Somalia?
You lack imagination (and love to play the devil's advocate), eh?
I'm sure things will get interesting when the "next big thing" on Facebook (and the like) is having everyone post lists of all the media they own so that the "how many steps to the media I want to borrow" application can do its thing.
Of course, these same lists also have tons of less "infringement-inducing" applications --- for finding people who share similar tastes in media, for example.
No, the clock is ticking. Nothing will stop the winds of change. It will be interesting to see what will come of it all.
From what I could see at the site, there are few seeders left for any TV show that was broadcast more than 20 DAYS earlier. By the 20-month mark, you have none worth mentioning. Try downloading some torrent-megastar like BSG from two seasons ago, and good luck with that.
> The thing that accused infringement-aiding sites have to prove is that they have significant non-infringing uses. This is obviously true for Google. It is not so obviously true for IsoHunt and others. Sure, you can find legal content (like the latest Linux distros and so forth) - but IsoHunt and its brethren are a) not the sole distribution method for aforementioned legal content and b) the amount of illegal content is significantly larger than the amount of legal content.
Also, they'll rake you over the coals if you're ever seen committing infringement (which they might use as evidence of inducement) or if you say things like "download movies here!" (which they assume are the infringing kind). Even in Viacom v. YouTube, Google had to create a special filter program to do the (nearly) impossible task of policing copyright owner's "property" for them and they're STILL fighting for their lives with expensive lawyers.
So what you have to do is to convince the judge (and jury) that you were attempting to set up a mostly legitimate site and that the infringing activity was secondary to the purpose of your site, never approved of by anyone running the site, and that you did your best to stop or discourage it.
Which sucks, because it cuts into your DMCA Safe Harbor by making you an agent for the copyright cartels even if it's their own damn problem that information cannot be made uncopyable.
> Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors
And I'm still hoping that I get bit by a radioactive spider and gain superpowers.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Certain types of software are only produced if there are strong intellectual property laws. Volunteer GPL programmers will not self-organize into groups of 50 and create games like Crysis. You are free to produce whatever you want and give it away freely. However you take away options other from producers when you argue against copyright laws.
It's pretty sickening for so many to use such intellectual dishonesty when we all know what the site is for. The forums aren't filled with people discussing politics and religion. They're filled with people talking about how to rip a movie or crack an application.
Economists support intellectual property laws because they encourage the production of goods that couldn't exist naturally since all the cost is in the production, not the reproduction.
If you support piracy at least be honest as to why you think some of your fellow geeks shouldn't be compensated for their work. Explain why you disagree with the vast majority of economists instead of pretending this site exists for any reason other than to make pirating easier.
most of it sucks and doesn't "further the species" in any way.
You're free to listen to last.fm if you don't want to pay a measly buck per song.
But if you want a rationalization for piracy then at least come up with one that doesn't make me gag. Furtherance of our species? Really?
Currently isohunt.com resolves to 208.71.112.30 which is assigned to NET-208-71-112-0-2 as NET-ISOHUNT-1. And NET-208-71-112-0-2 is assigned to neutraldata.com which seems to be located in Toronto, Canada. One would assume that their datacenter(s) would be located around there as well.
Now, I'm sure it should be fairly trivial to simply move the site to a country where there's no DMCA or equivalent. Then he could do what The Pirate Bay has done countless times: Say FUCK YOU to the MAFIAA morons that do not understand that TORRENT FILES contain no infringing data, and trackers contain only hashes of that. Every relation to data which may or may not be infringing is provided by search engine functionality completely similar to Google, Bing and others - which has not been brought on trial, probably due to these corporations having larger armies of lawyers than the MAFIAA. It's so much easier to attack a (and win against) defenseless individual that barely can afford a single lawyer.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Canada is standing for us, you moron.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
...If I cant get the torrent of 'The City Slicker', I will have to buy a bootleg dvd and the bootlegger will give that £3 straight to The Terrorists, or I will have to buy it from a RIAA member for £12 and the RIAA member will spend the £12 on cocaine and whores and lawyers, and the lawyers will spend their cut on whores and cocaine and The Terrorists end up with the £12.
Torrenting is the only way to get films without funding The Terrorists.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Um, no...
Using the number of seeders/peers on a torrent listed on a site is stupid. It is not nearly accurate, just an indication.
It lists direct tracker users and not DHT / peer exchange. Most shows can be found for years.. You can still easily find torrents of most tv shows broadcast in the last 10 years. You just have to be patient.
its really bad ?
Read radical news here
From the site:
I should clarify with misleading reporting out there that there's no order, only a PROPOSED order.
I am hoping this is just another april fool's joke, and that I have nothing to worry about, as I really LOVE isohunt!
At some point they're bound to sue facebook for allowing the sharing of streaming links. What happens then ?