IsoHunt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**isoHunt**

URL	http://www.isohunt.com
Type of site	BitTorrent and P2P search engine
Registration	Free
Owner	Gary Fung
Created by	Gary Fung
Launched	January 2003

The correct title of this article is isoHunt. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

isoHunt is a popular BitTorrent index. It currently has over 410,000 torrents in its database and over 7 million peers from indexed torrents. With 7.4 million unique visitors in May, 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular search engines for BitTorrent links. Currently the website's founder Gary Fung is being sued for copyright infringement. Recently Fung has done an interview for a news broadcast on CBC called The National, supporting BitTorrent's capability as a viable method to distribute all forms of media converging on the internet.

1 History
2 BTHub (defunct, replaced with BitTorrent's DHT)
3 Letters from the MPAA
4 Legal
5 Paid Membership/Donations
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] History

isoHunt was created in January 2003 by Gary Fung; it received its name from the term ISO image, which is an informal term for a disk image of a CD/DVD. isoHunt's IRC search capability was shut down by site founder Gary Fung due to load issues originally, but the thought of bringing back the IRC/XDCC indexing has been floated recently in isoHunt internal circles, with the main technical limitation being lack of a proper indexing mechanism with Rbot being in the lead. Previously, Gary Fung used a home-brewed mIRC script to do indexing, however, the scalability of mIRC on a home broadband connection can always be questioned. isoHunt's IRC search has been offline for some time now, and no IRC packs are currently available for search. Daily thousands of torrents are deleted as well as added to the torrent search engine for various reasons. isoHunt also has local copies of most of the torrents it has indexed in the lifetime of the site. On average isoHunt sees over 40 million unique searches per month and close to 500 member registrations per day.

[edit] BTHub (defunct, replaced with BitTorrent's DHT)

All clients are compatible. BTHub works by appending additional tracker urls that goes to {info_hash}.bthub.com, which is a dynamic DNS that points the url to that of a backup online tracker. The additional tracker uses the pretty much standard multi-tracker spec, which all reasonably updated BitTorrent clients make use of. Even if an older client isn't aware of this spec, BTHub urls are appended without modifying the original tracker url, so it would still be used as fallback, only that the additional BTHub urls will be ignored.

The point of BTHub is to dynamically direct traffic to an available tracker in case the original fails. A tracker for trackers so to speak. Unfortunately this works by adding URLs in a systematic way, so it requires either the BitTorrent site to modify the .torrent as isoHunt used to, or adding BTHub-awareness in the BitTorrent clients themselves. The BTHub modified .torrent is completely backwards compatible.

In November, 2005, BTHub has been retired. It was superseded by Distributed hash table in most modern BitTorrent clients, and multi-tracker cross-referencing included in all .torrent's served from isoHunt.com.

[edit] Letters from the MPAA

This was a letter received by Gary Fung on January 19, 2005 explaining their grievance with IsoHunt:

Mr. Oppenheim,

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:12:13 -0500, Oppenheim, Matthew J wrote:

Mr. Oppenheim: Dear Mr. Fung:

We are writing to follow up on our prior correspondence. As you know by now, we have filed suits against a number of significant BitTorrent operators. We continue this correspondence in the hope that we might resolve matters with you such that litigation is unnecessary.

Gary: Yes we are aware of your lawsuits. Despite the fact that I don't live in the US and the laws MPAA follows do not apply here, it is our intention to cooperate in resolving issues you have, in a reasonable fashion.

Mr. Oppenheim: As we have said repeatedly, a significant amount of copyright infringement is occurring as a result of your website and tracker. Apart from the knowledge you have by virtue of your day to day operation of the site and server, we have put you on notice that the infringement is occurring. The list of representative works that was attached to our notice letter was merely a sample of the infringement occurring on your site. We have requested that you stop the infringing conduct immediately. That you have automated the process of adding torrents to your website is not a defense. You have the ability to review torrents before posting them. You also have the ability to search your website and review the torrents that are already being distributed. There should be little doubt, for example, that "Ocean's Twelve" which is a torrent offered on your site is copyrighted and should not be distributed. A copyright holder is not obliged to monitor all the websites and the servers around the world to police and protect each and every work from those who would choose to close their eyes to ongoing infringement. It is incumbent on you to distribute only those torrents that correspond to files that you know are authorized to be distributed.

Gary: You repeatedly mention the "representative" list of works, which serves only to intimidate us as a search service. If you look at the Betamax vs. Universal case, the VCR was not deemed illegal since it is capable of legal use. isohunt.com is a content agnostic search service on indexing torrent links over the net, which is very much capable of legal use. While as a service we can filter content, and that is exactly how we cooperate by filtering identified copyrighted titles, we do not have the man power to manually verify the tens of thousands of torrent links, nor is it even technically possible without a complete list of copyrighted works to filter against. Since you seem to have trouble producing a complete list, a technical difficulty I can understand, you should also understand the same difficulty we have in making your copyrighted works magically disappear... somehow. So instead of calling it a complete list, which seems unfeasible, it should be referred to as a sufficient list. Without it, we cannot help you in filtering your works in our search results.

Mr. Oppenheim: Although you have suggested that you would like us to provide an index of copyrighted works to which you can refer regarding the torrents on your website, we simply do not find it credible that you are unable to identify as copyrighted material the many popular motion picture titles currently referenced on your website. To the extent you need further guidance, the United States Copyright Office maintains records of every motion picture and television program in the United States that has a copyright registration. Additionally, on-line databases provide information regarding who distributes motion pictures and television programs. You are already aware of at least one such source, the website imdb.com, to which you provide your users deep-links for motion pictures.

Gary: Read above. According to normal procedures of DMCA takedown, it is your responsibility to identify what maybe infringing your copyright, and then we will comply. Your notion that we should know every title MPAA owns, while you have difficulty producing such yourself, is absurd. Links to websites such as imdb.com is user submitted, while torrent links may be user submitted or indexed from other sources on the internet. We do not moderate this process, we don't have the resource to do so and it is not our policy.

Mr. Oppenheim: Finally, it continues to appear to be true that you have addressed the infringement of which we have put you on notice. Indeed, you have not removed those torrents that we specifically gave you notice. Your response that you should not have to undertake any action to address the ongoing infringement until we have agreed to the "arrangement" you have offered is not acceptable. You have an obligation to address the ongoing infringement. You may not offer less protection than we have a right to expect, and then condition that lesser protection on our agreeing that you should have to do nothing more.

Gary: It is not an arrangement, it is information necessary for us to cooperate. Unless filtering against your "representative" list is sufficient, which we then can use to filter to your satisfaction, please provide us with a list that is sufficient.

-- Cheers, Gary isoHunt.com

[edit] Legal

In February 2006 it was announced that along with TorrentBox, TorrentSpy, ed2k-it, and others, isoHunt was being sued by the MPAA. Complete list of defendants detailed in MPAA's press release.

The MPAA alleged that isoHunt participates in copyright infringement. If you take into account that isoHunt offers similar, albeit perhaps more comprehensive, metadata on BitTorrent resources that can be found on other popular sites such as BitTorrent.com and Google (by attaching "ext:torrent" or "filetype:torrent" to query), the validity of MPAA's case is questionable under United States copyright law, specifically the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. isoHunt has a history of complying with copyright takedown notices, has worked with various copyright owners such as the RIAA and Microsoft in the past, and has a thorough copyright policy. As of February 28, 2006 a lawsuit was filed against Gary Fung in the District court of Southern New York. Mr. Fung has retained Ira Rothken as counsel in the State of California, who has filed a motion to dismiss, or transfer to the district court in California. Gary Fung has shown no sign of voluntarily shutting down his site and stands to oppose the MPAA on legal grounds in court.

On August 18, 2006, Judge Stanton granted motion for case transfer from New York to California on grounds of inconvenienced parties, and similar cases already filed in the district court of Central California.

[edit] Paid Membership/Donations

Currently, since no legal fund has yet been started, isoHunt offers a "membership" which entitles the person who donates to an advertisement-free browsing experience. Since membership (paid or free) allows an isoHunt user to post in the isoHunt Forums but is not required for searching of the torrent index, isoHunt still leads the way in not requiring compulsory registration. isoHunt also has a strict privacy policy.