Judge Orders Permanent Injunction Against isoHunt, Search Terms Barred

[admin]

Movies studios have been granted a permanent injunction against the BitTorrent website isoHunt, and its owner, Gary Fung. The judge now permits movie studios to submit to isoHunt long lists of movie titles that isoHunt cannot host, index or link to, as well as several keywords that cannot be supported by the site's own search engine, including "DVD rips", "cam", "telesync" and other keywords associated with pirated content.

The judge wrote in the summary that isoHunt's "very business model, at its core, depends upon copyright infringement".

isoHunt recently rolled out a "lite" version of isoHunt, which makes it more clear the site's purpose as a Google like search engine, without all the trappings that makes it appear to be promoting pirated content. However, this did not impress the judge, who stated that isoHunt still contained "all of the same indexing and searching functions as the original websites, only with a different interface for the users to operate."

More:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/1-down-5-to-go-isohunt-neutered-by-us-judge.ars

[admin]

IsoHunt's Gary Fung says that the filter requirement is an attempt at censorship by Hollywood. "In my opinion, which I have expressed publicly, plaintiffs, MPAA and the Entertainment Industry are seeking not just to ‘stop copyright infringement’ but to obtain control over BitTorrent technology so that only their partners or those that conform to their demands for limiting access will have practical use of the technology," Gary Fung told the Court.

The MPAA has requested even terms such as ’10′, ’21′, ‘Birth’, ‘Cars’, ‘Dad’, ‘Dave’, ‘Firefox’ and ‘Soldier’ to be blocked by the filter, which when added to other keywords would mean that almost nothing can be found via the IsoHunt search engine, including many legitimate content.

More:

http://techfreqnews.com/2010/06/30/isohunt-tells-court-that-mpaa%E2%80%99s-filter-is-needless-censorship/