isoHunt
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| isoHunt | |
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 isoHunt logo and screenshot of homepage. |
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| 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 |
| Current status | Active |
isoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1,000,000[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.
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[edit] History
isoHunt was founded in January 2003 by 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."
It is unknown why isoHunt’s ISP made this move almost a year after the lawsuit was announced. Whatever their reasons may have been, it seemed that the isoHunt.com team would not back down that easily. On their temporary frontpage they made the statement "Stay Tuned!" and a backup of the site was ready to go online as soon as isoHunt found a new ISP.
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.
isoHunt completed moving its servers to a colocation provider named Neutral Data Centers Corp., located in a carrier hotel at 151 Front Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in early February 2007, and have been continuing to improve their service to clients since.[citation needed]
[edit] Legal
[edit] Correspondence with the MPAA
Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.[4]
[edit] 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. This is despite the fact that similar results can be obtained by using generic search engines such as Google; the validity of the MPAA's case is thus arguable under United States copyright law, specifically, DMCA "Safe Harbor" provisions. On February 28, 2006 a lawsuit was filed against Gary Fung in the District Court of Southern New York. Fung has shown no sign of voluntarily closing isoHunt and stands to oppose the MPAA on legal grounds.[citation needed] 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 September 2007, the case was undergoing Motions of Summary Judgment and preparing for trial.
[edit] 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. Its policy toward the DMCA is detailed on the site.[5]
[edit] 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.[6]
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.
[edit] See also
- BitTorrent
- Copyright infringement
- Peer-to-peer
- Recording Industry Association of America
- Motion Picture Association of America
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- isoHunt.com
- Letters with the MPAA, a year before their lawsuit
- Announcement and discussion of MPAA's lawsuit
- 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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