Thread: Record Labels Sue isoHunt for Millions of Dollars

A group of 26 major record labels have sued the owner of Canadian BitTorrent site isoHunt for allegedly facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Through this lawsuit the labels hope to shut down the isoHunt website while receiving over 4 million dollars in punitive damages to compensate for their claimed losses.

These are rough times for isoHunt, one of the largest BitTorrent search engines on the Internet. After losing a long standing legal battle against the US movie industry a few months ago, isoHunt is now up against 26 major record labels in its home country Canada.

The record labels – including the ‘Big Four’ of Sony, EMI, Warner andUniversal – have sued Gary Fung and his company, who own and operate the torrent sites isoHunt, Podtropolis and TorrentBox. The labels claim that these torrent sites and thus their owners, facilitate copyright infringement on a massive scale.

“The isoHunt Websites have been designed and are operated by the defendants with the sole purpose of profiting from rampant copyright infringement which defendants actively encourage, promote, authorize, induce, aid, abet, materially contribute to and commercially profit from,” the court filing reads.

“The defendants and users of the isohunt websites act together, in and part of a file-sharing community, to reproduce and distribute plaintiffs’ sound recordings and other copyright content,” the record labels add.



Through this lawsuit the labels hope to permanently shut down isoHunt and Fung’s two other sites. In addition they are asking the British Columbia Court for statutory damages for each of the listed recordings (over 200 in total), which adds up to well over $4 million.

What is further unique about such a massive lawsuit is that while it was filed in May last year, no one picked the news up until today. At this stage it is unclear why the record labels haven’t chosen to make more noise about this through the press.

TorrentFreak asked isoHunt founder Gary Fung for a comment and he told us that the lawsuit is identical to the counterclaim the record companies filed in the suit isoHunt filed against them in 2008. Isohunt sued the record labels in an act of self-defense at the time, asking the court to legalize its operations.

The current lawsuit shows several similarities to the legal proceedings between isoHunt and the MPAA. In that case the U.S. District Court of California issued a permanent injunction against BitTorrent search engine isoHunt in May last year.

The court ordered the owner of isoHunt to start censoring the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S. The filter was soon implemented (for US visitors) and prevents a list of film related phrases from showing up in the search results.

IsoHunt is currently appealing the ruling in the MPAA case and will undoubtedly fight the lawsuit against the record labels as vigorously.

Source: Record Labels Sue isoHunt for Millions of Dollars | TorrentFreak

damn don't know what to say to that.... ouch!

They should sue Google... it facilitates piracy a lot more than isohunt..

These morons actually think going after one website is going to reduce piracy?

Besides forgetting the fact that isohunt isnt even a tracker. It's a search engine and index.
What a load of bullshit.
You can't sue a search engine for what people put up on public trackers.

This is similiar to what they are doing to Google though. It's a violation of someone's rights and it's insane to us but, the way they justify it is by saying they make stealing easier and provide a means to do it with very little effort. This is where I wish I was a millionaire and I could help them with their defense because the record companies have sooo much money to draw it out hire the best of the brightest lawyers. Good luck ISOHUNT. WE are with you.

man that sucks sounds like google is next then....

Originally Posted by COD

man that sucks sounds like google is next then....

Hopefully if that ever happens google wouldn't cowtow to them.
Hopefully they would stand up and say, hey..we got 30 billion dollars in pocket change. Do you really want to fight us in court? Cause we can go - forever.

That's precisely why they don't go against Google. They only go against people whom they believe will be unable to mount a sufficient defense. The MPAA and RIAA care nothing about actual artists or copyright infringement. They simply use these scare tactics to get people to pay them. The more people they can intimidate, the more money they can scam out of them.

Good luck isoHunt. Hopefully the Canadian courts won't be in the industry's pocket, unlike US courts and politicians. Land of the free? Whatever.

This is to bad, IsoHunt was where I first learned about torrents, They got a great commentary and staff over there.

lennie ;) land of the free. lol.