IsoHunt told to pull .torrent files offline, likely to close

By Jacqui Cheng

The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been ordered to remove the .torrent files for all infringing content—an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung's two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren't looking good for the torrent site.

Judge Wilson's order follows a summary judgement against Fung in December 2009. At that time, Wilson said that Fung had completely failed to rebut the claims brought against him by the MPAA. The movie studios had brought in expert witnesses stating that a statistical sampling of the content and server logs showed that nearly all of the content infringed copyrights, and about half of the downloads were made within the US. Fung dismissed this as "junk science" but did not present any sort of evidence showing that this wasn't a valid approach.

Fung previously tried to argue that his sites were just another search engine that just happened to pick up copyrighted content, but the studios countered with evidence that his search code was specifically tuned to find copyrighted material.

Now, Fung is stuck between a rock and a hard place as he tries to find a way to comply with his injunction without shutting down. Judge Wilson has barred Fung from creating, maintaining or providing access to categories with .torrent files, search results with .torrent files, or any "similar files using or based on Infringement-Related Terms."

This means that the basic search functionality of IsoHunt, Torrentbox, or Podtropolis would no longer be permissible under the injunction, not to mention that it would be nearly impossible for Fung to actively investigate every single file to see whether it's legal or not. Fung believes this goes outside of the DMCA and that the MPAA should provide a list of links to files that it wants taken down instead. "We’re discussing the mechanics, the process that is reasonable for an injunction. We’re still trying to hope that the judge will do the right thing," Fung told Wired.

The MPAA did not respond to our request for comment by publication time, so it's unclear how willing it will be when it comes to working with Fung. Given how well things have gone for Fung so far, though, it doesn't look very promising.

Update: A MPAA spokesperson got back to us and said that the court has rejected Fung's proposal. Looks like he'll either be picking out all the illegal content or shutting down after all.

Further reading

• Judge Stephen Wilson's March 23 order (archive.org)

Top 10 Torrent Sites Soon Without Mininova

Written by Ernesto
From: http://torrentfreak.com/

For the first time in five years Mininova is about to disappear from the top 10 of most visited torrent sites. This exit is due to a traffic drop that resulted from the removal of most of the site’s torrents following a lost court battle. Newcomer KickassTorrents is still gaining momentum and has already surpassed Mininova in terms of traffic.

Compared to a year ago the BitTorrent landscape has changed significantly. The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker last fall and a few weeks later Mininova partly shut down its website. However, with the fall of Mininova many new torrent sites emerged, with KickassTorrents being the most successful one.

It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.

As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.

Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,600,136 - Pageviews: 26,036,770 (5.66 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #101 - Compete Rank: #724 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,756,280 - Pageviews: 13,781,400 (5 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #167 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,285,811 - Pageviews: 15,497,799 (6.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #187 - Compete Rank: #1,187 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,363,883 - Pageviews: 6,423,889 (4.71 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #367 - Compete Rank: #2,055 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 919,552 - Pageviews: 1,783,931 (1.94 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #737 - Compete Rank: #3,035 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 DEMONOID.COM - Daily Visitors: 728,513 - Pageviews: 5,383,711 (7.39 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #626 - Compete Rank: #4,640 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 686,219 - Pageviews: 1,331,265 (1.94 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,050 - Compete Rank: #3,435 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 670,536 - Pageviews: 1,562,349 (2.33 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,004 - Compete Rank: #6,846 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 642,498 - Pageviews: 2,634,242 (4.1 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #859 - Compete Rank: #4,347 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 632,519 - Pageviews: 1,872,256 (2.96 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #987 - Compete Rank: #3,257 Visit Site | Full Report

New Google Tools Determine if Your ISP Is Blocking BitTorrent

Next time you're dealing with a dreadfully slow internet connection, you can ask Google what's causing the trouble.

The company announced a new open platform Wednesday called Measurement Lab, or M-Lab for short. As part of the initial launch, M-Lab includes three publicly accessible tools, including a tool called Glasnost that tests whether BitTorrent traffic is being blocked, throttled or otherwise impeded on your broadband connection.

Also part of M-Lab's launch are a tool to test your connection's overall speed and a diagnostic tool that will tell you if you're suffering from speed barriers common to last-mile broadband-network infrastructures.

In a post on Google's official blog, the company's chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf says M-Lab was launched to help the academic community. Researchers at institutions like Georgia Tech and Germany's Max Planck Institute have been working on these projects, but they've been hampered by infrastructure problems.

"Unfortunately, researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity," he writes. "This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another."

To provide a suitable testing environment, Google will roll out 36 servers over the course of 2009. Also, all data collected by the project will be made publicly available for anyone to cite or reuse.

In addition to the three tools launching Wednesday, there are two more currently listed as "coming soon" on M-Lab's site. The first is called DiffProbe, and it's described as network probe that will determine if your ISP is shuffling certain kinds of traffic onto a slower pipe. The other tool still in development is Nano, which will tell you if your ISP is purposely throttling traffic from a particular group of customers, traffic from specific applications or traffic bound for specific destinations.

It's interesting to see Google stepping up into the role of a proactive net-neutrality watchdog. As a company that's banking on the internet eventually being put to use by all of us for everything above the operating system level — applications, data storage and communications — the move makes sense. But rather than push for open, reliable connections in the courts or through legislation, Google is taking the fight to the streets.

For years, ISPs have been notoriously shady about what they're throttling or blocking. The industry needs a healthy dose of transparency. Right now, we're just a bunch of pissed-off users complaining about our Skype calls getting dropped and our YouTube videos sputtering to a halt. But when it comes to placing blame, most of us are in the dark.

Google and the academic institutions its partnered with are empowering users to find out for themselves who's to blame when their service turns lousy, and helping them figure out where to direct their anger. And not just the command line jockeys, but everyone — tools like Glasnost are aimed at novices, the only requirement being a current version of Java.

With access to the data that tools like this can provide, we'll be able to suss out the culprits and force them to own up to the true nature of their traffic-shaping policies.

Illustration: M3Liff@

By Michael Calore