isoHunt

Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.[10]

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 United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Fung stands to oppose the MPAA on legal grounds.[11] 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.[12]

As a result, the court went on to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting IsoHunt to continue indexing and linking to infringing content.[13] The case on appeal, dubbed Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Fung, upheld the district court's findings on copyright infringement, but found that the injunction was overly burdensome to the extent it could prevent Fung from seeking legitimate employment, as certain provisions in the injunction would have prevented Fung from working in any technology company whose services could be used to infringe copyrighted content even if those companies were not engaged in copyright infringement.

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 an ex-gratia takedown process modelled on the DMCA, even though the servers were relocated to Canada in January 2007 where the DMCA does not apply.[14][15]

On September 8, 2008, Gary Fung announced on the isoHunt front page[16] 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.[17]

On 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,[18] the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007, although experiencing several brief periods of subsequent downtime due to server changes.

On July/August 2013, Federation of the Italian Music Industry obtained an order from the Court of Milan which demands ISPs to block isoHunt's domain and IP address.[19]

On October 17, 2013, Variety.com announced the website isoHunt would shut down by Oct. 23, 2013, as part of a settlement in a massive copyright infringement suit filed by Hollywood studios, agreeing to pay $110 million for claims that the site induced the violation of copyrighted movies and TV shows although isoHunt never hosted such content. The settlement terms included a $110 million judgment against isoHunt and its owner, Gary Fung, ending a seven-year legal battle over its operations.[20] According to court documents cited by the BBC, Fung's company will likely be able to pay only between two and four million dollars though.[21] The site shut down on 21 October 2013, 2 days earlier than the announced date, leaving a note from Gary Fung and a link to a YouTube "trailer for the movie Terminator Salvation" that is actually a Rickroll.[22]

Initiating Self Destruct

This is it. We are shutting down isoHunt services a little early. I'm told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I'm honoured that people thinks our site is worthy of historical preservation, but the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place. So I might as well do a proper send-off to you dear isoHunt users, before final shutdown sequence on Tuesday. It's been an adventure in the last 10.5 years working on isoHunt, a privilege working with some of the smartest guys I've worked with, and my life won't be the same without it. For what I'm working on next, please look up my blog on Google and follow me there. Because as the Terminator would say with a German accent,

I'll be backkk.

— Gary Fung[23]

On December 13, 2014, just 4 days after a raid by Swedish police took ThePirateBay.se offline, the isoHunt.to team launched a new website, OldPirateBay.org, mirroring the contents of a recent snapshot of The Pirate Bay. It is branded in isoHunt's style, featuring both a ghostly blue theme and the isoHunt logo.[28] The team stated that they would gladly take their copy of the site down if and when the original Pirate Bay came back online, which occurred on January 31, 2015.

On December 19, 2014, isoHunt.to released a tool called The Open Bay at Openbay.isohunt.to, providing original source code and additional tools in order to allow users to deploy their own version of The Pirate Bay website.[29]