isoHunt is a
BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million
peers from
indexed torrents. 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.
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 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Lawsuit against the CRIA
On September 8, 2008 Gary Fung announced on the 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.
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.
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.
See also
