With constitutional freedoms at stake, isoHunt files plead [16]

Posted on 2 March 2012 | 8:44 pm
Freedom of expression on the Internet is under attack. From SOPA in the US, ACTA internationally, and C-11 in Canada, the same theme is apparent on the agenda of copyright industry groups: instead of dealing with actual copyright violators, they want to shut down technologies and internet services that they say will be used by violators. It’s the same alarmist approach that goes back to the VCR and the radio. As the Internet emerges as the de-facto medium of communication, sharing and expression, the control over distribution by copyright industries is threatened. In turn, the constitutional freedom of expression of Canadians and all participants on the Internet is threatened.

Since SOPA, a new term has been coined on this age: the War on Piracy. What it really is is a War on the Internet. In our latest response to CRIA filed in Court, we ask the Supreme Court of BC to adjudicate this crucial issue of balance between the constitutional rights of people on the Internet to communicate, share and search, versus the rights of copyright industries to limit such rights in the corporate interest of protecting and extending copyright. isoHunt urges the court to examine this issue carefully, for the sake of innovations on the Internet, free exchange of culture, and fundamental constitutional freedoms.

Here is an electronic copy of our pleading, filed at the Supreme Court of BC, Canada. The Attorney General has been put on notice of constitutional issues raised.

News:
- http://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-threaten-the-open-internet-isohunt-tells-court-120229/
- http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/t8aef/in_its_case_against_26_major_record_labels_at_bc/ (May 5, 2012)

Posted by: IH
Comments: 16

Celebrate! 8 Years of isoHunt Torrent Search [31]

Posted on 2 August 2011 | 6:00 am
It's been 8 years since isoHunt began searching the internet for torrents, almost as long as BitTorrent itself. 8 years since isoHunt began its life, hosted off a cable modem and on my home PC. Since then, isoHunt has grown from a hobby to one of the 200 largest websites on the internet, with users worldwide conducting over 12 million searches per day (or 142 queries every second). We now operate 2 server racks, collocated in 2 separate datacenters, in Canada and in Sweden. I believe we are the oldest, major BitTorrent search engine still in operation since 2003, and perhaps the only one with servers in simultaneous operation in 2 different corners of the world. While we cannot claim zero downtime, we pride ourselves in bringing you the best, fastest and most reliable search results available for BitTorrent files.

All of these give reasons to celebrate. Perhaps especially that during these years, 6.5 years ago we received our letters with the MPAA, and 5.5 years ago they sued. Counting the years, it amazes me really that we've lasted this long. Many other P2P networks and services have failed, legally or financially. We are still fighting our lawsuit in the US with a pending Appeal. A trial by jury is what we asked for, and we can only hope that for the sake of search engine neutrality and your freedom to search that we be granted a fair trial. We'll need your continued support in this. Same goes for our other lawsuit with *cough* Music Canada.

To commemorate 8 years of awesome torrent search, we've designed a new T-shirt. It sports a sleek design that is scientifically proven to make you look thin (as our model at Jinx demonstrates), and with text running vertically that is guaranteed to "turn heads". During beta testing, some of our users have commented that the front design looks like a tie and the "8" looks like an infinity bow tie. This is indeed true! You'll look smarter in it without sweating like a pig wearing actual shirt and tie in the summer. The back design features a working QR code and a barcode used as a design element, generated with the slogan "Freedom to search, Freedom to share". So what are you waiting for, go buy one and spread the isoHunt love! Not convinced? For limited time only (infomercial voice), with the code "IH8YEARS", you'll receive 25% off at checkout. And not only for our T-shirt of awesomeness, the discount applies to every item you buy at Jinx. And I wasn't kidding about the limited time offer, the discount code will expire by August 31. In buying our merchandize, you'll directly contribute to us financially for continued operation of isoHunt, (including our legal costs) and for that we thank you in advance!

Posted by: IH
Comments: 31

Job Posting: Anti-Piracy Programmer [54]

Posted on 1 April 2011 | 6:14 pm
isoHunt is the most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine on the interwebs. It comes as no surprise that losers online share links of copyleft and copyright materials which isoHunt indexes, both in indiscriminate amounts. Each possible infringement from such links are worth tens of thousands of dollars in statutory damage. With 166.2 million files indexed within torrent links on isoHunt, the amount of potential claim is worth TRILLIONS of dollars.

However, the conundrum isoHunt faces is determining who owns copyright over what files are described within torrent files that isoHunt indexes, and what are the wishes of these copyright holders. Is a file's copyright owned by hippies such as Richard Stallman and similar Free Software gang with these ridiculous beards? Or socialist commies such as these filmmakers posting free films and shows at Vodo, (absurd, I know) and similarly free music at Jamendo, and any other sites hosting such so-called copyleft non-sense? Or such copyright holders, whoever they are, hang on to their copyright as they rightfully should and intend on suing any who infringes on their copyright? Afterall, victories in court or settlements are worth more than customers. These copyright holders are our friends and isoHunt seek your expertise in bringing copyright thieves to justice. And profit.

Candidates for a position as Senior Architect and Programmer for Anti-Piracy has the following requirements:

* Semantically determine from names of file listings within close to 7 million .torrents isoHunt indexes, the following: copyright holder of such files, and metadata on the copyright status of such files
* isoHunt do not host or have access to such files (isoHunt can't be a hypocrite and download these files like all the pirates do), so your job it is to determine the above by solely file names
* No master database referencing copyright ownership and status with files shared on P2P networks currently exist, so your job it is to build such a database
* Desired, but not required: to determine names and addresses of pirates participating in the piracy of copyrighted works, for law enforcement purposes (not those owned by copyleft hippies, after having determined copyright status of files). Note that IP addresses does not suffice, even a child can copy out IP addresses of fellow pirates in his BitTorrent client.
* 30+ years experience in C++, Java, Python, Perl, TCP/IP, BitTorrent protocols, and strong magic are required for this job.

Should you qualify, please reply ASAP. Trillions of dollars of profit await, and your compensation will be almost as impressive.

Note: This was mostly a April's Fool joke. Or a parody for any other day.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 54

isoHunt Lite fixes, want feedback [142]

Posted on 8 April 2010 | 10:00 pm
IE6/7 bugs are fixed, and common complaint with dead links is addressed. The title in search results link to the original site which may be down or changed, but the Cached link is the same as the Download .torrent link on regular isoHunt before. Many of you don't seem to realize that, so we made changes to make that cached link more obvious. See http://isohunt.com/lite/#q=ubuntu for an example of the cached links I'm talking about.

True that we have disabled comments in Lite for legal reason, but ratings (with thumbs up, down) are still displayed, and it is factored in in the combined torrent search ranking, which includes seeds/leechers, ratings, search relevance and age. Many of you complain about missing sort and that is really uncalled for, the combined ranking is better in most cases especially with more spam trackers misreporting seeds/leechers stats. This ranking again is the same default ranking used on regular isoHunt which you come to love.

Sort by age for newest torrents is a valid feature missing and if you want this, we'll work on adding sort option for that.

So, if you don't like Lite, tell us why so we can improve it. Complaining that "it sucks" doesn't help. Nobody likes change but sometimes it's necessary, so help us change it for the better with constructive criticism.


New (04/14): Sorting options & table-like attributes formating now on Lite, as you requested
New (04/16): Search suggestions doubling as spell check, bug fixes
Update (11/03): Regular isoHunt interface available again for US with a twist: until we are able to appeal the US court injunction, categories and top searches are disabled. Lite is still available if you want it.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 142

isoHunt Lite test roll out and on rumored keyword filtering [183]

Posted on 5 April 2010 | 7:18 pm
US users, welcome to the lighter and lightning-fast isoHunt! Although we bring this new search engine to you with a burden from the lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we hope you understand the reason why we are making this change. We are addressing concerns Judge Wilson has expressed over inducing copyright infringement in the United States. Though inducement is never our intention (and we have evidence to support it), with isoHunt Lite we want to affirm publicly that isoHunt's essential function is merely to provide a search engine and a public utility with all the net neutrality it affords and should be afforded.

Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order. Freedom of speech, non-infringing use and technical implementability issues are still being debated in further court briefs. We have not done any keyword filtering and are fighting all we can not to, because we believe search terms are ambiguous by nature, and that any requirement to keyword filter is a violation of freedom of speech and tantamount to censorship. There are many non-infringing uses for BitTorrent technology and we hope you will be able to continue to use isoHunt for these, free of constraints by gaping holes in the dictionary because your search triggered a keyword in a title of one of the million movies that have been produced.

Why would you still use isoHunt, you ask now that it's just like Google and Yahoo, and you can search for torrents with those? While we won't dispute that claim, there's a fundamental difference: On isoHunt Lite you get ranking by constantly updated seeds/leechers and ratings, statistics specific for BitTorrent, in addition to search relevancy and age. A general search engine also do not group as one multiple, identical torrents spread on different websites on the Web. Your continued use of isoHunt will also support our upcoming appeal against the MPAA, and we thank you in advance.

We protest the possibility we may be required by US law in upcoming injunction to keyword filter for US users as it would be censorship. The DMCA mandates with good reason that copyright notice and takedowns requested by copyright holders be done under penalty of perjury with accurate identifcation, with standard practice of links or URLs, not broad mucking with the dictionary. If you want to join us in protest, share this by Tweet, Facebook, etc. and write to Congress. Donation to organizations like the EFF will also help.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 183

Copyright lawsuit update and introducing isoHunt Lite (Beta) [163]

Posted on 23 February 2010 | 4:39 am
US Copyright Laws

The US court ruled, in late December 2009, in Summary Judgment that we were liable for secondary copyright infringement, you may have read about it in the news. What you have not heard however is what happened since the status conference in January. The Judge, at the status conference, agreed to provide us after the injunction phase, but before the damages phase, with an interlocutory appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before we appeal however, we must undergo injunction motions and that's what we are doing now. Plaintiffs have filed their motion with their proposed measure for injunction a couple of weeks ago. The Plaintiffs proposed injunction and its keyword type filter, in our view, raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism. Such keyword filter is also impossible to implement if it's to have any sort of precision, nor can it avoid conflict with fair use cases, free commerce, or extra-territorial law. We have just filed our response in opposition:

http://isohunt.com/img/legal/Fung%20Inj%20Opp&Dec-FINALSTAMPED-noexhibits.pdf


isoHunt Lite

We are in the process of developing isoHunt Lite, a lighter, simpler, and faster version of isoHunt, and need user testing and bug reports for our beta version to iron out the bugs. Should the Court accept a version of isoHunt Lite during the injunction phase, it may become the required interface for our US users. Currently the isoHunt lite beta is a work in progress. You can preview the beta now, and whether you are from the US or not, we welcome your bug reports on the new isoHunt Lite:

http://isohunt.com/lite/

A reason for isoHunt Lite is that we propose it as a measure for injunction, as it no longer contains any red flags for inducement that were found at Summary Judgment. And without inducement, an important question with wide ramifications we can then ask is, when does a content agnostic search engine that specializes in a vertical like the BitTorrent ecosystem be ineligible for the DMCA Safe Harbors, an information location tool like isoHunt that has both non-infringing and infringing uses? When non-infringing uses in the ecosystem is growing, exemplified by the latest independent success stories like in Ink?

We will have an injunction hearing on March 22. Our appeal will follow after that, stay tuned.


UPDATE (after hearing): Despite rumors that we are ordered to keyword filter for US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order. Freedom of speech, non-infringing use and technical implementability issues are still being debated.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 163

isoHunt sues CRIA in self defense, Round 2 [130]

Posted on 27 November 2009 | 7:30 am
I already wrote a fair bit about our legal struggle with CRIA, so I'm not repeating them here again. Since CRIA's initial cease and desist letters (effectively asking us to shutdown entirely), we have tried to reason with CRIA, have petitioned the court on our legal right to exist as a search engine. Both to no avail, since Judge Curtis has denied our "petition" as improper form, and have ordered us to a normal, lengthy and costly legal "action". We have done that this week.

Here's our Statement of Claim (pdf) we just filed for our action at the BC Supreme Court.

As I've written to the Canadian government in the public consultation for upcoming copyright reform, I have high hopes for Canadian copyright laws and its courts to not make the mistakes that have been made elsewhere in the world. We must fight the increasing noise we are drowned in, that file sharing is stealing. I believe we Canadians are especially blessed with musical talent such as Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, Nelly Furtado, Lights and many others. So many that our "cultural output" per capita is arguably greater than that of many other countries. And we have done this without the excessive litigation against consumers that the legal climate in countries like our southern neighbor has encouraged. Thanks in part to our lack of DMCA-like copyright laws that does more harm than good.

With continued changes in both the digital marketplace and usage of P2P search engines like isoHunt, I believe now is a better time than ever to put our differences aside with copyright owners, and figure out how we can utilize P2P distribution and social media for the benefit of all. The internet has widened our choice in music more than ever before, and the music industry is live and well contrary to lies of certain lobbyists. The EU have also commissioned a study that found, P2P is not to blame for failures of certain parts of content industries. Why? How? Because P2P is the greatest radio ever.

If you are a musician and agree with us, we would love to hear from you! We have already heard many interesting feedback, like that of a book author, we want to hear more. And I cordially invite you to join our new spinoff, Hexagon.cc. Together, we can create a better future for content distribution and sharing. Same goes out to film makers, software and game developers.

As for CRIA and member record labels, if you come to your sense of reason, I would love to talk to you outside of court. The ball you've dropped on us is back to you.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 130

Hexagon.cc exclusive film release: In Guantanamo [12]

Posted on 5 November 2009 | 5:33 pm
From our friends at Vodo, here comes their second film release after US Now: In Guantanamo. This is a quote of what the short documentary film is about:

Quote:

David Miller’s quiet, powerful film is the result of three days the filmmaker spent touring the Guantanamo prison camps in May 2008, as part of a small group of media representatives allowed there. Although the event was presented as a chance to ‘see inside’ the working of Guantanamo, it was in fact a carefully staged PR exercise designed to yield predictable, stale, controlled media images.

This is an exclusive release on Hex, so you got this from us first By no means however should this remain exclusive, and Vodo's films are Creative Commons licensed. So share on!

We are excited to have Vodo creating their group at Hexagon. Hexagon.cc has now grown to more than 70,000 users with over 2000 groups, covering various interests and social circles. If you haven't seen Hexagon.cc yet, time to see what it's about!

And of course, support Vodo and join their group! For aspiring musicians and fans, check out our featured groups from Awesome New Republic and our Creative Commons group. Hex is all about connecting artists and producers with fans, so spread the word and find new interesting uses for torrent and video sharing at Hexagon.cc.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 12

Announcing Hexagon.cc, a Social File Sharing site [114]

Posted on 3 September 2009 | 3:11 am
With a short review at Torrentfreak and a mention in my interview with BBC, I'm excited to finally announcing a public preview of our spinoff project Hexagon.cc ! We have spent 2 years developing this, and I assure you this will change the way you think of a BitTorrent site and file sharing.

How is Hexagon different? The biggest conceptual change is everything is shared within groups you can join and create yourself. These groups can be public, based on interests or made by independent bands, film makers, game studios, etc. for promotional purposes. They can also be made private, so you can very easily and comfortably invite your friends to a private group for sharing your private videos and such. You can do this on Youtube and similar sites, but with BitTorrent, you can share any type of file and not only video, and there's no restriction on file format or size (as much as you can seed). In Hexagon groups, you can also share both torrents as well as flash videos so you get the best of both worlds. This blend of BT and flash video sharing is an unique first.

Another big feature of Hexagon is organization. We've seen through the rise of sharing on BitTorrent, volume of spam rises with its popularity. We've addressed this on isoHunt with comments and rating powered by you, but on Hexagon we've taken organization and spam control to a whole new level technically. Hexagon is (currently) invite only, so if a spammer gets in somehow and start inviting other spammers and creating other accounts, we can chain ban such with relative ease. Hexagon have also taken a very sophisticated approach to files organization. Besides tags now commonly found on many sites, Hexagon did away with the traditional "Videos", "Audio", etc. general categorization and instead, you can label or link your torrent posts with Semantic Web resources. For example, a firefox 3.5 torrent should associate to the Firefox resource, and under the Firefox resource you can easily browse all torrents in association for different versions of Firefox. This is a definite first for any social media site, and goes a long way in organizing the huge volume of torrents being shared.

Hexagon.cc is currently open for more users to stress test the system. We would very much appreciate your feedback as we continue to add new features and improve the site! But first, Digg this and Reddit this before

Sign up with this limited invitation: http://lobby.hexagon.cc/invitations/0UAUYvncEt http://lobby.hexagon.cc/invitations/kLVGYtaQmG <- (new invites available now at new link)


Read on if you want to see more details on the design, features and future direction of Hexagon.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 114

Globe & Mail's series, the Download Decade [12]

Posted on 11 May 2009 | 2:28 am
Globe and Mail, a high profile Canadian business newspaper, has launched the Download Decade series (digg this, they deserve it!). 6 months in the making and for one which they revamped their whole site programming in order to accommodate the new multimedia in the series, I especially applaud the fact that the Globe and Mail have now joined the CBC in releasing multimedia content over BitTorrent. Adoption of BitTorrent at big publications like G&M in a series celebrating the 10th year anniversary of Napster is a symbolic milestone in itself. What can we look forward to in the next decade to come? I think it's going to be exciting.

Currently only Part 1 of 5 in the series is out at launch of the Download Decade, featuring a long look back at Napster and the beginning of P2P. I have been interviewed, expect yours truly to come up in the coming parts. There's so much insights summed up in the series involving the enormously complicated legal and political issues surrounding copyright, culture and creativity, with well compiled audio/video interviews and interactive content. I highly recommend you to follow this series.

And of course, what's a news worth without torrents? Torrent of Part 1 as well as the upcoming parts in the series should be indexed here.

Posted by: IH
Comments: 12