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isoHunt

isoHunt logo and screenshot of homepage.
URL	https://www.isohunt.com
Type of site	BitTorrent and P2P search engine
Registration	Free
Owner	Gary Fung
Created by	Gary Fung
Launched	January 2003
Current status	Online

isoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.4 million^[1] torrents in its database and 16 million peers from indexed torrents.^[2] With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to it each day as well as deleted for a multitude of reasons. On average, isoHunt users perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On Oct 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally.

History

Wikinews has related news:

Wikinews interviews Gary Fung from isoHunt

isoHunt was founded in January 2003 by Canadian Gary Fung. Its name is derived from the term ISO image, used to describe a 1:1 soft copy of a CD or DVD, a format often used in peer-to-peer file distribution.

On February 23 2006, the MPAA issued a press release stating they were prosecuting isoHunt for copyright infringement. A year later, January 16 2007, isoHunt was taken off-line, stating "Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice."

After a major hardware upgrade,^[3] the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007 although experiencing several brief periods of subsequent downtime due to server changes.

Legal

Correspondence with the MPAA

Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.^[4]

Lawsuit

In February 2006 it was announced that the MPAA had launched legal proceedings against isoHunt, TorrentBox, TorrentSpy, ed2k-it, and several other BitTorrent indexing or tracker sites, alleging that these sites facilitate copyright infringement. On February 28, 2006 a lawsuit was filed against Gary Fung in the District Court of Southern New York. Fung stands to oppose the MPAA on legal grounds.^[5] On August 18, 2006, Judge Stanton granted a motion for case transfer from New York to California on the grounds of inconvenienced parties and similar cases already filed in the District Court of Central California.

As of June 2008, the case was undergoing Motions of Summary Judgment and preparing for trial.^[5]

DMCA Takedown Notices

isoHunt has a history of complying with DMCA takedown notices, and has worked with various copyright owners in the past, such as the RIAA and Microsoft. The site uses a takedown process modelled on the DMCA, even though the servers were relocated to Canada in January 2007 where the DMCA does not apply.^[6][7]

Lawsuit against the CRIA

On September 8th, 2008 Gary Fung announced on the Isohunt front page that he had made a preemptive move against an impending lawsuit from the CRIA by filing a petition to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. isoHunt argues that it is merely a search engine to find torrents that are scattered around the web, much the same as Google or any other search engine can be used in the same way. ^[8]

Gary Fung's affidavit can be viewed here

The Petition to the Supreme Court of British Columbia can be viewed here

Technical Details

In the beginning of 2007, isoHunt restructured its server setup and bought mostly new hardware for the cluster that operates the site. The cluster has a total of 34 AMD Opteron cores, 70 GB in RAM, and 30 hard drives ranging from SATAs to 15,000rpm SCSIs.^[9]

Network started with a D-Link switch but due to multiple failures, isoHunt moved to Force10 switch. Currently isoHunt is uplinked through Neutral Data Centers Corp to a mix of bandwidth providers.

Files contained in torrents indexed globally on isoHunt have passed the 1 petabyte mark.

See also

• BitTorrent
• Copyright infringement
• Peer-to-peer
• Recording Industry Association of America
• Motion Picture Association of America

References

External links

• isoHunt.com
• Gary Fung Slyck News interview
• Gary Fung The National interview by CBC
• B.C. man takes on Hollywood in piracy case - CBC May 31 2006
• BitTorrent site statistics
• MPAA sues newsgroup, P2P search sites - CNET News.com, February 23, 2006

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