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IsoHunt Settles With MPAA, Will Shut Down And Pay Up to $110 Million
hypnosec writes "The MPAA and Gary Fung, owner of IsoHunt.com, have settled their case out of court, with the torrent indexing site closing as part of the deal. The judge presiding over the MPAA vs. IsoHunt.com case, Jacqueline Chooljian, canceled the hearing which was planned after she was informed that both the parties have settled outside court. 'The website isoHunt.com today agreed to halt all operations worldwide in connection with a settlement of the major movie studios' landmark copyright lawsuit against the site and its operator Gary Fung' reads the press release."
Only a few days after the MPAA was accosted by the judge for seeking damages several times the total worth of isoHunt: "But if you strip him of all his assets — and you’re suggesting that a much lesser number of copyright infringements would accomplish that, where is the deterrence by telling the world that you took someone’s resources away because of illegal conduct entirely or 50 times over?" Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million. So much for the optimism for isoHunt's successor.
The more will slip through your fingers.
MPAA demanding money for imaginary damage done to imaginery property? Pay them with monopoly money.
The takedowns mostly consist of links to forums that link to filelocker sites which have also been DMCAed, so they are of limited use in finding infringing files. Sure, a determined pirate can use them to follow a trail, but it's a lot of work.
Oh, pirates. Request for you. Those NFO files? Include hashes. File size, ed2k, aich, btih, sha1 and tth. That covers all the major hash-search-capable p2p networks. That way even if all the filelocker links are down, people can still try to use the hashes to aid in their quest.