| isoHunt |
|
|
isoHunt logo and screenshot of homepage. |
| 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 1,100,000[1] torrents in its database and 16 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 for a multitude of reasons. On average, isoHunt users perform over 40 million unique searches per month.
History
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 CD or DVD, a format often used in peer-to-peer file distribution.
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,[3] the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007 although experiencing several brief periods of subsequent downtime due to server changes.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_interviews_Gary_Fung_from_isoHunt
Legal
Correspondence with the MPAA
Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.[4]
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.[5] 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.[5]
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.[6][7]
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.[8]
Network started with a D-Link switch but due to multiple failures, isoHunt moved to Force10 switch. Currently isoHunt is uplinked through Neutral Data Centers Corp to a mix of bandwidth providers.
See also
References
External links
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