Federal Court Issues Permanent Injunction For Isohunt 212
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from NewTeeVee: "Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District, issued a permanent injunction (PDF) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies. The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all US visitors. ... The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours."
Re:Last time I checked (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you don't even need to travel to US. Just travel to one of the countries (95% of the world) that has extradition treaty with US and they send you there right away, without even having a change to fight against extradition in Canadian court. You better not travel anywhere then.
Who Cares? (Score:1, Interesting)
Isohunt was way past its prime anyway and begging to be put out of its misery. Remember, its just an index site that scraped other sites and posted their links. It never had its own tracker. It never verified torrents (in any effective way at least). In the early days, it was a slightly better option than TBP because it indexed multiple sites, but it has really run its course. There are better torrent sites for those who wish to continue their swashbuckling ways. And what were these guys thinking hosting this in Canada anyway? The canuks have copyright laws too and are real friendly with the us.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:5, Interesting)
+1. I used to travel all the time to the US - Vegas 4 or 5 times a year, CA, NY. Now I avoid the country entirely. Plus all our servers have been removed from the US because the Patriot Act permits the government access to our customers' records while making it illegal for anyone to even inform us this has happened - we can't trust our customer data in that sort of environment (we are an entirely legitimate company with 60,000+ employees).
Land of the free? Home of the brave? Not so much...
Re:Appeal in Canada (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to confess, I'm an engineer/scientest not a lawyer*. Can he get an injunction to block enforcement of the previous injunction? Dueling injunctions? My pride is hurt by the America bashing (wouldn't yours be too, if it were your mother counry?), but I feel anger at the wrongness of the situation.
* scientests study nature to learn laws, not just make them up on the spot like lawyers (and mathematicians)
Re:Last time I checked (Score:3, Interesting)
and the world will do nothing, because you jumped in the shark tank with roast beef strapped to your balls.
I understand that the US govt sucks, but we know that because we're permitted to bitch about it A LOT, and there's nothing we like to do more than bitch about things and post it all over the internet.
Re:Last time I checked (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Last time I checked (Score:4, Interesting)
As a Canadian citizen who has visited the US a few times in the past, I'm actually scared to travel to your country, knowing what I know about what you do to some of your guests.
As a US citizen, I'm scared to travel to YOUR country because I eventually have to come back to mine. At that point, I'm treated like I obviously spent the last two weeks buying as much plastic explosives and heroin as I could possibly get my hands on. In 2000, I traveled to Israel for a month and was barely questioned when I returned. "Oh, you saw Jerusalem? That's so COOL!" These days I go to Banff for a week and come back and it's like I might have raped a dozen infants.
It's enough to make a person want to become a terrorist.
Re:I hear Wildcard Studios just licensed their wor (Score:4, Interesting)
ACTA won't end piracy. Piracy will adapt. These corporate tycoons and their congressional meat puppets are sloppy and naive. So what if IsoHunt blocks all US addresses ? This is the goddamned internet! Proxies. Use them.
Swedish courts can write injunctions until their fingers bleed, it only means people will get their fix elsewhere. TPB can't work on and other "torrent related site" ? Ok, Garry Fung can hire them up here in Canada, at least until they replace Obama with another oil baron to which our P.M. can suck up.
The biggest problem with these unconstitutional laws is they open up opportunities elsewhere. If the U.S., Sweden, or even Canada becomes unlivable for piracy sympathizers, we will find some other place to work our jobs, pay our taxes and live our lives, and there will always be at least one nation that will welcome our money with open arms. Even if that nation is China, if push comes to shove, I'll learn some Mandarin and Cantonese and go help them destroy the west.
Regardless of your stance on piracy itself, at some level you need to take a step back and look at what they're really doing here. If it's not piracy it's drugs, if it's not drugs it's sex, if it's not sex it'll be something else. Underneath it all, these are people who want our money, can't get it via normal means - in other words, they're not selling something we want to buy - so they enact arbitrary laws that force us to give up our money, whether we like it or not. Why is Oxycontin legal if you buy it from this rich guy, but it's a heinous offense if you buy it from this other guy down the street ? Why ? Because the rich guy bribes the congressmen, who bribe the regionals, who bribe the chiefs of police, who tell their lackeys which agenda to push that week. It's not about right vs wrong, it's about who paid for those Audis.
Freedom, they don't like us having it. Pick one thing, anything you hold dear. If there is a financial incentive, they will take it away from you, then sell it back at a premium.