isoHunt sues the CRIA: day in court
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Canadian BitTorrent and P2P search engine isoHunt has become the first such site to go from defense to attack in the online file-sharing wars, p2pnet reported in September last year, going on »»»
In a landmark case, it’s suing Canadian RIAA clone the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America), asking a court in British Columbia to make the first ruling on whether or not BitTorrent search engines should be held liable for .torrent files that might link to copyrighted data.
“Why do they [Big Music] insist on suing their own customers?” wondered isoHunt owner Gary Fung last year.
“Why do they sue search engines like us, who make the internet more useful for everyone?” He went on, “The problem lies in something fundamentally broken with the copyright system.”
Never a truer word was spoken and with that in mind, yesterday marked Gary’s day in court with the CRIA.
In his court document filed last September, “The isoHunt Search Engine is an Internet-based tool that allows a visitor/user to locate information presented in a particular protocol, namely BitTorrent, that is available through the Internet,” he explains.
Yesterday, Gary and the CRIA, “appeared in court,” says TorrentFreak, the Dutch site specialising on issues and events centering on the BitTorrent protocol.
“While isoHunt asked the court to rule that they do not break any laws, the CRIA is demanding a full trial against the BitTorrent site,” it says, going on »»»
This landmark case might be the one to define how files can be distributed online. Among other things, isoHunt argues that they are just a search engine, like Google, and that they have no control over the files they find elsewhere on the web. In court … they showed that a filetype:torrent search for Coldplay on Google returns plenty of torrent files, similar to a search on isoHunt.
All isoHunt does is index other BitTorrent trackers and indexers, without human intervention. The files that can be found on isoHunt are scattered all over the Internet, and even these files are just metadata.
Stay tuned.
p2pnet – isoHUNT sues record labels’ CRIA, September 6, 2009
fundamentally broken – Copyright is wrong. Abolish it, March 11, 2009
TorrentFreak – isoHunt Takes on the CRIA in Court, March 11, 2009
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March 12th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Maye he should hire the Pirate Bay crew to come over and testify.
Start a Canadian “SpecTrial”.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Well, I guess Jon needs to find out what the canadian rules are for recordings of trial proceedings then.
In sweden, public service radio simply did it for the first time in the trial of “ThePirateBay” and broadcasted live and direct also via internet worldwide. Unless its in the french speaking part of canada, audiotransmissions of “BitTorrent protocol vs. CRIAA” would even be easier to follow then the swedish one.
Internets would not need the help of Sofia, matti_kolu and others to get the meaning of what they talk about