IsoHunt Settles With MPAA, Will Shut Down And Pay Up to $110 Million 245
hypnosec writes "The MPAA and Gary Fung, owner of IsoHunt.com, have settled their case out of court, with the torrent indexing site closing as part of the deal. The judge presiding over the MPAA vs. IsoHunt.com case, Jacqueline Chooljian, canceled the hearing which was planned after she was informed that both the parties have settled outside court. 'The website isoHunt.com today agreed to halt all operations worldwide in connection with a settlement of the major movie studios' landmark copyright lawsuit against the site and its operator Gary Fung' reads the press release."
Only a few days after the MPAA was accosted by the judge for seeking damages several times the total worth of isoHunt: "But if you strip him of all his assets — and you’re suggesting that a much lesser number of copyright infringements would accomplish that, where is the deterrence by telling the world that you took someone’s resources away because of illegal conduct entirely or 50 times over?" Still, the settlement seems unfair: The MPAA has asked the court for $110 million, when the MPAA itself admitted that isoHunt only has $5 or $6 million. So much for the optimism for isoHunt's successor.
Re:Is anybody surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
TOR is a poor choice for media sharing as it's not P2P. Freenet [wikipedia.org] was written as secure P2P from the ground up, and has had plenty of security review. While I don't trust anything to be safe from the NSA, the known attacks require far more resources than the *AA will ever use.
I doubt it's any faster than TOR, but being P2P if people actually started using it instead of open torrents, it would be.
The problem of course is "network effect". There's no content because no one uses it and vice versa. But it is the correct technical solution, with years in the field and years of security review.
Re:ISOhunt had 5-6 million dollars?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
ISOhunt provided the index. From the index they made a profit.
The "Yellow Pages" is a profitable form for finding things. The makers of the yellow pages make money, yet they provide none of the services they index.
Re:Fortunately we still have Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the reason for the $110 million settlement.
That number is orders of magnitude greater than what ISOHunt can pay.
The reason the settlement number is so large is that the MPAA is looking for how much they want to charge google for enabling people to search the internet.
Re:another solution, proven to work (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Netflix and Amazon Prime don't really work that well, because they only have a limited selection. If the program you want to watch is on there, then great; Netflix is only $8/month for unlimited online viewing. But if the program you want isn't on there and requires you to get both a cable subcription and an HBO subscription, well, Torrenting is the only feasible and affordable alternative. And, MythTV doesn't work for shows like that, because of the cable+HBO deal, but also because last I heard, MythTV doesn't work for premium cable channels, so you have to spend even more money for some shitty cableco-provided DVR box that doesn't work right.
If the content companies just put all their stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all, and not many people would bother with torrenting.
Re:let's look and see (Score:5, Interesting)
That just takes me to the home page. Perhaps because Netflix detects I'm in .nl, realizes that it's not part of their offer in .nl, and so just dumps me to the main page.
The other two work fine, but I think you took 'most popular' a bit too literal, and perhaps a bit too narrow.
Since Netflix doesn't seem to actually allow you to see their full library unless you log in (I can see a small selection - this alone is a good reason to give Netflix a thumbs down over torrents), perhaps we could give the 'Top 10 this week' from torrentfreak a try through http://www.flicksery.com/ [flicksery.com] ?
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-week-131014/ [torrentfreak.com]
1-10. no.
Or, if you want to stay on the legal avenue, the top 10 of 2012 according to imdb, rather than just the #1 slot?
http://www.imdb.com/year/2012/ [imdb.com]
1. Avengers - yes
2. Pitch Perfect - no
3. The Hunger Games - yes
4. The Dark Knight Rises - no
5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - no
6. Argo - no
7. Django Unchained - no
8. The Place Beyond the Pines - no
9. Spring Breakers - no
10. The Motel Life - no
2013, according to box office*, then?
( * because new releases are heavily skewed toward high scores on imdb, and via box office we get to the same #1 for 2013 so far, Iron Man 3 )
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=2013,2013 [imdb.com]
1. Iron Man 3 - no? Weird - though after some googling, perhaps it's only available from Netflix in DVD form, rather than streaming - canistream.it seems to suggests so as well? Perhaps you could clarify that one.
2-10. - no
Don't get me wrong, Netflix is a wonderful service and people who just want to watch whatever movies or TV shows will find more material there than they can watch in a year. But it's not all going to be material they want to watch, the material they want to watch may not be on there, and overall it's just a poor comparison - gets even worse when you're in .nl ;)
Re:Distributed architecture, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
As opposed to the general BitTorrent world?
Yes. Did you ever stop to wonder why people left KaZaA, eDonkey, Gnutella and so on for Suprnova and The Pirate Bay? We tried it 10-15 years ago and it was vastly inferior to torrent sites, what's new? Except that torrent sites have now gone torrentless and trackerless to mostly carry magnet links.
How exactly would a decentralized searched engine have to cope with worse problems than the traditional ones struggle with?
Statistics. Google has tons and tons of statistics on what links are actually relevant to the search terms, your decentralized crawler will find some random shit and return it as a hit. Search any of the networks above and you get tons of crap. Perhaps you get better results with a decentralized search engine on the web, but only because you rely on sites like TPB and other popular torrent sites to weed out most of the crap. Searching a fairly centralized resource in a decentralized way isn't exactly being decentralized.