isoHunt logo and screenshot of homepage. |
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| URL | isoHunt.com |
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| Type of site | BitTorrent and P2P search engine |
| Registration | Free |
| Owner | Gary Fung |
| Created by | Gary Fung |
| Launched | January 2003 |
| Alexa rank | 252 (January 2012[update])[1] |
| Current status | Active |
| Part of a series on |
| File sharing |
|---|
| Technologies |
| Development and societal aspects |
| Non-public file sharing |
| File sharing networks and services |
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| By country or region |
isoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million[2] torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents.[3] With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006[update], isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to and deleted from it every day. Users of isoHunt perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On October 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally. The site is the third most popular BitTorrent site as of 2008[update].[4] According to isoHunt, the total amount of shared content was more than 13.44 petabytes as of September 29, 2011[update].[5]
Contents |
IsoHunt was founded in January 2003 by Gary Fung, a Canadian national. Its name is derived from the term ISO image, used to describe a 1:1 soft copy of a disk (typically a CD or DVD).
On February 23, 2006, the Motion Picture Association of America (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,[6] the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007, although experiencing several brief periods of subsequent downtime due to server changes.
As of April 5, 2010, users in the US and along south eastern Canada are redirected to a stripped-down version called isoHunt Lite in order to remove some of the factors that were used in determining liability for infringement. US users can still access the full version of the site using a web proxy, such as the popular free service anonymouse. Also, the BitTorrent clients µTorrent and Vuze are still able to search Isohunt for active torrents and download them directly.
Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.[7]
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.[8] 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.
On December 21, 2009, the court granted the MPAA's motion for summary judgment, finding IsoHunt and Fung liable for copyright infringement on the theory of inducement. The MPAA had presented evidence showing that the majority of content linked to on IsoHunt was infringing content, that the search engine was tuned to assist users in finding infringing works, and that Fung himself had made remarks suggesting the purpose of the site was to allow users to download infringing content. The court found that IsoHunt had not presented any satisfactory evidence to counter these claims, and at its core it was merely an "evolutionary modification" of Napster and Grokster, two P2P systems that had previously been held liable for inducing copyright infringement.[9]
As a result, the court went on to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting IsoHunt to continue indexing and linking to infringing content.[10]
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.[11][12]
On September 8, 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. Fung argues that isoHunt 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.[13]
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.[14]
The network started with a D-Link switch but due to multiple failures, isoHunt moved to a Force10 switch. Currently isoHunt is uplinked through Neutral Data Centers Corp to a mix of bandwidth providers.
On September 2, 2009 isoHunt announced the launch of a spinoff site, hexagon.cc.[15] The goal of hexagon.cc was to have a place for social groups based on certain niches to share specific content relevant to their interests.
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