Isohunt Suing The CRIA

Earlier this year the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) sent a Cease And Desist letter to popular torrent seach site isohunt, demanding that the site be taken down for copyright violation.  If founder Gary Fung refused, the CRIA has threatened to sue them to the not so compressed tune of $20,000 per infringing recording.

If isohunt were The Pirate Bay, they’d probably try to buy an abandoned oil rig off the shore of Baffin Island, but isohunt is trying something different.  They’re suing the CRIA right back.  Quoting from a post from Gary Fung:

We petition the court preemptively for its guidance and clarification of our rights as an internet company, in hope that by laying out all the facts here early, we can make it easier for the court to cut to the heart of the legal issues. In some ways, this is a condensed summation of the core issues with our other MPAA lawsuit (which is still pending a decision on a Motion for Summary Judgment in the US).

There are a number of points in this debate, and from my non-lawyerish POV, they all favour isohunt’s case.  The first is whether isohunt is violating copyrights by pointing to files. Even though they don’t actually store the infringing files on their servers, isohunt has complied with CRIA (and MPAA) requests to remove torrent listings in the past.

In much the same way many ISPs have started throttling torrent traffic, slowing the distribution of everything from game patches to open source OSes, shutting down torrent sites is akin to banning spray paint because it’s the main tool of choice by graffiti artists (not that I have anything against graffiti artists – quite the opposite).

Isohunt is merely an automatic indexing service, and it doesn’t matter whether the .torrent file is a Hollywood blockbuster DVD, or an open source operating system distribution. In fact, legitimate torrent use has been consistently growing, as more people and companies see the benefits of sharing the uploading/downloading duties of large files.

Fung clarifies further:

I’ll summarize what our petition to the BC court is all about. isoHunt is a search engine of BitTorrent sites, and our sister sites are indices of direct user contributed .torrent links. None of the pieces of files exchanged over BitTorrent pass through our servers, they are exchanged over external P2P networks. We serve cached .torrent links to such files on P2P networks. Some of these files maybe copyright infringing, some aren’t. But given the ridiculously long copyright terms in most countries of the world (which does differ) and that all creative media are copyrighted by default (in many countries), large majority of files exchanged on the internet would be copyrighted. That includes Linux ISO images and your videos of friends and family doing whacky things.

The real question is are they infringing against the wishes of respective copyright owners. We make and run a great search engine here at isoHunt, but we unfortunately do not have the technology to mind read what are the wishes of all copyright owners, or who they are to begin with in association with the tens of millions of files on BitTorrent, to which we only indexes metadata links and not actual content files. Whatever copyright laws or safe harbor provisions provided in different countries, the only sensible and technically possible thing to do we’ve found is to take down links to allegedly infringing content only upon request and verification.

This part of the US’s DMCA is one which has much foresight and makes sense. (although not perfect obviously, it should add provisions for monetary punishment on erroneous notices as we receive plenty of ignorant or erroneous takedown requests and there isn’t much recourse about them, but that’s another topic)

By the same token, other search engines without ‘hunt’, ‘torrent’ or ‘pirate’ in their URLs also function as torrent searches.  Looking for a high res copy of the new series Fringe, for example? Typing “fringe HD .torrent” into Google will get you THIS.  Is the link I provided illegal?  If so, the CRIA may want to take a look at shutting down Google.

I’m just saying.