isoHunt

» see isohunt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

isoHunt shut down on october 21 2013 and left a rickroll on the front page. that's a fitting end for a site that ran for ten years on the joke that copyright law couldn't catch up with the protocol.

gary fung was a canadian student in vancouver when he started it in january 2003. it was a torrent search engine, not a tracker, which mattered to him in court and didn't matter to the MPAA. by 2006 it was one of the largest torrent indexes in the world and the MPAA had filed suit. the case took seven years to resolve. fung lost on the inducement theory, which is the legal way of saying the court found you were obviously profiting from infringement and not just neutrally indexing the web.

the settlement was for $110 million plus a permanent injunction shutting the site down. fung's actual ability to pay was estimated by court documents at maybe two to four million. the symbolic ten-figure number was for the press release. on october 21 he flipped the switch two days early because the archive team showed up planning to mirror the site and he didn't want to be in violation of the settlement on day one. the rickroll was the only goodbye message.

by 2013 i was an engineer in ankara, the heavy public-tracker years were behind me, and most of what i used the BT protocol for was linux isos and old game patches. but i remember isoHunt by name. it was always in the rotation. when the news came that fung had taken the $110M deal it didn't feel like a death so much as the last public-tracker domino tipping over. demonoid had already been gone for years and mininova had been hollowed out. that was the run.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

isoHunt indexed BT trackers and let you search across them. you'd type the title of a movie or game and it would return torrent files from across the wider torrent ecosystem. the site itself didn't store the swarms. fung argued for years that this made it more like google than like the pirate bay. the MPAA argued otherwise and the court agreed.

~ the seven-year suit ~

the MPAA filed in february 2006. for the next seven years fung defended in canada and in los angeles. he lost the inducement ruling in december 2009 in los angeles federal court and then dragged the appeals out as long as he could. the canadian music industry separately settled with him in 2013 for $66 million on similar grounds. by october 2013 the appeals were exhausted and the choice was sign the settlement or lose the appeal at trial and lose harder. he signed.

~ the rickroll ~

on october 21 the site went down two days ahead of the announced date. the front page had a goodbye note from fung and a youtube link. the link said it was the trailer for terminator salvation, but anyone who clicked got rick astley instead. it was the last bit of jurisdictional comedy a public torrent index ever got to do. the archive team had been planning to mirror what they could before the deadline. fung pulled the plug early specifically to head them off, which is a strange way to lose dignity in your final hour.

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