California Court Orders IsoHunt Shut Down

It looks like the “IsoHunt Lite” gambit didn’t stave off legal repercussions as planned: The US District Court of California has levied a permanent injunction against IsoHunt, the BitTorrent search engine, and its sister sites TorrentBox, Podtropolis and Ed2k-it; causing them to block all American users.

As of this posting, however, IsoHunt is still up and running in the US.

From NewTeeVee:

Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District issued a permanent injunction against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry[sic] 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 U.S. visitors. Fung could be held in contempt of court if he doesn’t comply with the injunction, and he could possibly be thrown into jail.

Fung told Torrent Freak that a filtering system would be imperfect at best, and would inevitably also block public domain files, or files that were shared with the consent of their copyright holders.  He said that filtering “raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism.”

Though IsoHunt has been ordered shut down for US users, it would remain available in other parts of the world.

Here’s the injunction against Fung:
Isohunt Permanent Injunction