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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."
Uh, which part actually proves that? Actually:
The part where anyone that wants to can just connect to isohunt through a proxy, or that 2000 other sites both better and worse have/will pop up to replace it.
That still doesn't say anything about if the judge is clueless. If there is a proxy or someone is actively trying to circumvent the country restriction, it's not isohunt's problem anymore. And what mostly matters is that majority of users, especially casual ones, won't go for the trouble just to access isohunt, and it might make them think what they're doing might be illegal because you have to use proxies and all other tricks just to access the site.
Other sites might pop up but that doesn't mean it's useless to do something about one site. Just like if you're driving drunk you can't say that "but there are 2000 other drunk drivers in this country, why you punish me!". There's also a limit of people wanting to create such sites, especially if it carries harsh punishments.
Not that I agree with the injunction, but I don't think they're clueless. They're just concentrating on the things that matter most and not going to the single details like possibility of proxies and circumvent.