Should a site be held accountable for merely linking to pirated material? IsoHunt thinks not, and is taking its case to the courtroom.
IsoHunt does not want to go the way of Demonoid.
Copyright Issues
The issue of copyright is a hot one at the moment, with sites as diverse as YouTube and The Pirate Bay both having to deal with the subject on a daily basis. The two sites may be very different, but are facing similar gray areas in the law.
The main difference between those two sites is that one will immediately comply with a takedown notice over an alleged copyright claim while the other doesn’t care.
Alternative Response
This compliance with media companies wishes hasn’t prevented YouTube from being sued however, with the $1 billion Viacom lawsuit still yet to be resolved. While this case drags on in the U.S, northwards in Canada a ‘potential infringer’ is taking a more aggressive stance.
IsoHunt Gets Aggressive
When IsoHunt, a popular torrent tracker, received a cease and desist letter from the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), instead of playing dead, the Internet company counter-sued the CRIAA, the Canadian version of the RIAA.
If IsoHunt is successful it will send a clear message to rights holders that copyright laws are there to benefit everyone.
Linking = Copyright Violation?
The CRIA cease and desist claims that IsoHunt is violating copyright by linking to torrents containing pirated material.
While IsoHunt has complied with CRIA and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) takedown notices in the past, exactly as YouTube does, it is now suing the CRIA to try and force a legal stance on the matter of BitTorrent technology, linking law and torrent trackers.
IsoHunt took this measure when the CRIA issued cease and desist letters to isoHunt.com and its sister sites (Torrentbox.com and Podtropolis.com) to have the entire sites taken offline.
IsoHunt’s Defense
Gary Fung, the President of IsoHunt, spells out the case for the defense in some detail in a forum post on IsoHunt.com. It’s an eloquent and decidedly intelligent discussion of the issues involved and deserves a read.
But does IsoHunt actually stand a chance of winning their lawsuit and countering the claims made by the CRIA?
The main argument is that IsoHunt, along with every other torrent tracker and search engine, serves the purpose of linking to content, be it pirated or not. Therefore it shouldn’t actually be liable for these kinds of copyright violation claims if it complies with individual take down requests to remove links to infringing content.
This seems fair enough from a layman’s point of view. Just as Google exists to link to web-pages, just as YouTube exists to host all sorts of videos, IsoHunt exists to link to torrent files and doesn’t exist purely to link to pirated material.
Repercussions of the Lawsuit
In the past we have seen pirate TV sites like PeekVid, MahTV, TVLinks and QuickSilverScreen be in a much weaker position against rights holders since they have existed almost solely to link to pirated videos.
Proving that IsoHunt exists to link to torrent files, and not just pirated torrents, will be key to its case as the CRIA appears to see IsoHunt as a den of thieves.
This will be the first case to test whether BitTorrent indexes such as IsoHunt are infringing copyright or not. If the court sides with the CRIA it could make see a rise of angry rights holders in Canada taking wrath on sites like Google and YouTube with an increased chance of success.
If on the other hand IsoHunt is successful it will send a clear message to the likes of Viacom, the MPAA, the RIAA, CRIA and others that copyright laws are there to benefit everyone, not just the rights holders.
This in turn could encourage rights holders to start waking up to the need to embrace new distribution models, rather than fighting them.
Further Reading
- Linking law expert Dr Stephan Ott talks about linking to pirated video
- Linking to infringing content is probably illegal in the US
- Peekvid to be Sued to Oblivion
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