Federal Court Issues Permanent Injunction For Isohunt

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from NewTeeVee: "Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District, issued a permanent injunction (PDF) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies. The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all US visitors. ... The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours."

Comments

Last time I checked

[damicatz]

The last time I checked, Isohunt was based in Canada as was Garry Fung. And last time I checked, Canada was (not yet) part of the US. Just another arrogant American judge who thinks that the entire world should be subject to US rule and law.

Re:Last time I checked

[iCEBaLM]

As a Canadian citizen who has visited the US a few times in the past, I'm actually scared to travel to your country, knowing what I know about what you do to some of your guests.

I'll stay up here, thanks.

Re:Last time I checked

[blitzd]

Living in a border city, we cross several times a year from Windsor to Detroit (shopping, sporting events, etc) and each and every time we enter the US my ass puckers up. I HATE entering the states even though I have absolutely nothing to hide... it's brutal.

Vacationing is a pain in the ass too. We usually fly out from Detroit metro, so we always have a hard time in the airport coming back home. They just can't seem to grasp why Canadians from Windsor would fly out of, and into, Detroit.

Re:Last time I checked

[Pinhedd]

Isohunt was initally based in the US and were still based in the US when the lawsuit was filed by the MPAA. They moved to Canada afterward. Last I checked, isohunt had blocked all access to US visitors a long time ago

Re:Last time I checked

[Calinous]

I don't think North Korea is safer than US of A - just that they will treat you less like a criminal.

Re:Last time I checked

[_Sprocket_]

Living in a border city, we cross several times a year from Windsor to Detroit (shopping, sporting events, etc) and each and every time we enter the US my ass puckers up. I HATE entering the states even though I have absolutely nothing to hide... it's brutal.

Brutal? What are you subject to? I'm curious to see if your experiences are much different than mine when I fly domestic.

Re:Last time I checked

[hedwards]

Extradition, is one possibility for some matters. Which is why it's a good idea to be mindful of what countries you're doing business with. The prince of pot will be doing 5 years in the US because he opted to send his seeds here. Nobody forced him to send them to the US. Had he restricted himself to Canada, he wouldn't be going to prison.

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point: Mark Emery (the so-called "Prince of Pot") was extradited from Vancouver to the US yesterday to face 5 years in a US prison for selling pot seeds by mail order (which is punishable in Canada by a $200 fine).

Re:Last time I checked

[Tuoqui]

I hope you dont give that access to your US employees. They could be compelled to access this information for the US Government and be prevented from telling you about it because of those national security letters.

Re:This proves how clueless

[westlake]

Again, this proves just how utterly clueless judges (and politicans) are of how the Internet actually works.

It proves how clueless the geek is about how the law works.

Re:ISO Hunt disagrees with the summary

[westlake]

Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order.

The isoHunt announcement is dated April 5 Annonucements. The permanent injunction was filed May 20th. isoHunt Permanent Injunction

The court had this to say about its right to act:

The Court further clarifies that this injunction covers any acts
of direct infringement, as defined in 17 U.S.C. 106, that take place
in the United States. To the extent that an act of reproducing,
copying, distributing, performing, or displaying takes place in the
United States, it may violate 17 U.S.C. 106, subject to the generally
applicable requirements and defenses of the Copyright Act.

As
explained in the Court's December 23, 2009 Order, "United States
copyright law does not require that both parties be located in the
United States. Rather, the acts of uploading and downloading are each
independent grounds of copyright infringement liability." Summary
Judgment Order at 19. Each download or upload of Plaintiffs'
copyrighted material violates Plaintiffs' copyrights if even a single
United States-based user is involved in the "swarm" process of
distributing, transmitting, or receiving a portion of a computer file
containing Plaintiffs' copyrighted content.

Re:Freedom

[Rockoon]

I messed around with FreeNet once. What a slow piece of junk. Reminded me of the BBS days, but not the good BBS's.. the bad ones.

Re:I hear Wildcard Studios just licensed their wor

[Bungie]

I don't know about such things, but is it theoretically possible for torrents to work without trackers?

Trackers are needed so that the peers can locate each other efficiently. If you're downloading a file, the tracker will tell you who is hosting the various pieces so you can connect to them. Without the tracker your client would have no way to know the IP's which are hosting the file.

It's the same problem that's been present since the early days of P2P. You need to have some hosts which keep an index of the files and the IP addresses of clients which are hosting them. The RIAA can always target these sites.

Torrent trackers are static hosts with large centralized indexes, which means they are fast for clients to query but also can be easily targeted by the RIAA.

FastTrack and Gnutella get around this by offloading the tracker functionality to individual clients with high bandwith (which makes them harder to target). Each query must be forwarded from clients to their trackers, and from their trackers to other tracker nodes, and then the results must be returned the same way. This means it can take a long time for a query to complete as you wait for responses from each node.

There have been some P2P designs which eliminate tracking nodes altogether by having the clients maintain a list of close peers. The clients contact their peers which forward search requests to their list of peers and so on. Every search must be cascaded across many clients and returned from each one, so they are slow. You also must always maintain a good list of peers, or you will end up stranded from the network.