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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.
TOR is a poor choice for media sharing as it's not P2P. Freenet was written as secure P2P from the ground up, and has had plenty of security review. While I don't trust anything to be safe from the NSA, the known attacks require far more resources than the *AA will ever use.
I doubt it's any faster than TOR, but being P2P if people actually started using it instead of open torrents, it would be.
The problem of course is "network effect". There's no content because no one uses it and vice versa. But it is the correct technical solution, with years in the field and years of security review.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
ISOhunt provided the index. From the index they made a profit.
The "Yellow Pages" is a profitable form for finding things. The makers of the yellow pages make money, yet they provide none of the services they index.
That's the reason for the $110 million settlement.
That number is orders of magnitude greater than what ISOHunt can pay.
The reason the settlement number is so large is that the MPAA is looking for how much they want to charge google for enabling people to search the internet.
That just takes me to the home page. Perhaps because Netflix detects I'm in .nl, realizes that it's not part of their offer in .nl, and so just dumps me to the main page.
The other two work fine, but I think you took 'most popular' a bit too literal, and perhaps a bit too narrow.
Since Netflix doesn't seem to actually allow you to see their full library unless you log in (I can see a small selection - this alone is a good reason to give Netflix a thumbs down over torrents), perhaps we could give the 'Top 10 this week' from torrentfreak a try through http://www.flicksery.com/ ?
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-week-131014/
1-10. no.
Or, if you want to stay on the legal avenue, the top 10 of 2012 according to imdb, rather than just the #1 slot?
http://www.imdb.com/year/2012/
1. Avengers - yes
2. Pitch Perfect - no
3. The Hunger Games - yes
4. The Dark Knight Rises - no
5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - no
6. Argo - no
7. Django Unchained - no
8. The Place Beyond the Pines - no
9. Spring Breakers - no
10. The Motel Life - no
2013, according to box office*, then?
( * because new releases are heavily skewed toward high scores on imdb, and via box office we get to the same #1 for 2013 so far, Iron Man 3 )
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=2013,2013
1. Iron Man 3 - no? Weird - though after some googling, perhaps it's only available from Netflix in DVD form, rather than streaming - canistream.it seems to suggests so as well? Perhaps you could clarify that one.
2-10. - no
Don't get me wrong, Netflix is a wonderful service and people who just want to watch whatever movies or TV shows will find more material there than they can watch in a year. But it's not all going to be material they want to watch, the material they want to watch may not be on there, and overall it's just a poor comparison - gets even worse when you're in .nl ;)