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 isoHunt logo and screenshot of homepage. |
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| URL | https://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 | Online |
isoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million[1] torrents in its database and 20 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. IsoHunt users perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On Oct 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally. Isohunt is the 3rd most popular BitTorrent site as of 2008.[3]According to isoHunt, the total amount of shared content was more than 9.9 petabytes as of 2009-11-3.[4]
Contents |
History
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Wikinews has related news: Wikinews interviews Gary Fung from isoHunt |
IsoHunt was founded in January 2003 by Canadian, Gary Fung. 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 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,[5] the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007 although experiencing several brief periods of subsequent downtime due to server changes.
Legal
Correspondence with the MPAA
Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.[6]
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. 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.[7] 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 June 2008, the case was undergoing Motions of Summary Judgment and preparing for trial.[7]
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. 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.[8][9]
Lawsuit against the CRIA
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. isoHunt argues that it 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. [10]
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.[11]
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.
Files contained in torrents indexed globally on isoHunt have passed the 1.4 petabyte mark.[citation needed]
See also
- BitTorrent
- Comparison of BitTorrent sites
- Copyright infringement
- Peer-to-peer
- Recording Industry Association of America
- Motion Picture Association of America
References
- ^ "Toolbar and Stats". Isohunt.com. http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=115374. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ "BitTorrent Sites Statistics". Isohunt.com. http://isohunt.com/stats.php?mode=btSites. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ "Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2008 (stats from Alexa and Compete)". Torrentfreak.com. 2008-12-28. http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-torrent-sites-of-2008-081228/. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ "1Isohunt Home]". isohunt. 2009-11-3. http://isohunt.com/. Retrieved 2009-11-3.
- ^ "Hardware upgrade after servers move to Canada". Isohunt.com. http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=80731. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ IH (2003-01-21). "isoHunt Forum — Letters from MPAA". Isohunt.com. http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9273. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ a b "isoHunt Forums :: View topic — isoHunt tells court why Hollywood is wrong". Isohunt.com. http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=126788. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ "isoHunt DMCA Copyright Policy". Isohunt.com. 2007-01-22. http://isohunt.com/dmca-copyright.php. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ isoHunt gets shutdown by ISP and moves to Canada, CD Freaks
- ^ "isoHunt Forums :: View topic — isoHunt sues CRIA on legality of search engines". Isohunt.com. http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=141381. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
- ^ "Technical Details". Isohunt.com. http://www.isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=208021#208021. Retrieved 2009-10-19.
External links
- isoHunt.com
- Gary Fung Slyck News interview
- 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
- torrentfreak.com - Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2008
- about.com The Top 35 Torrent Sites of 2008
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