The Bit Torrent Saga

Copyright Infringement is literally undergoing a new chapter. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have new reason to be very upset. This is such a new issue for copyright infringement that it has yet to even surface in our textbooks. Legal Environment of Business did teach about the monumental Napster case in regards to online music file sharing, but the new issue is Bit Torrents.

If you haven’t heard of Bit Torrent yet, I truly feel bad for you. It’s the fastest way to download peer-to-peer files on the Internet. The limits of my iTunes and movie collection are endless. So naturally I stumbled upon one of the largest bit torrent search engines and have been coming back ever since. Their name is Isohunt, and along with The Pirate Bay and Mininova, they make up the three largest search engines for .torrent files. Mininova at one time was even number 51 of all websites for most trafficked.

As of late only Mininova and The Pirate Bay have been decimated by court rulings. For starters Mininova’s founders have been sentenced to jail for hosting copyrighted material. The Pirate Bay has been going through legal battles in Italy, bouncing between the Court of Bergamo, the Supreme Court, and back to the Court of Bergamo to battle a complete censorship of their site in Italy. The decision was made in the Supreme Court where they ruled, according to the verdict, “Bit Torrent sites that host torrent files are playing a significant role in the downloading and uploading process of their users. By doing so they are more than an agnostic search engine such as Google.” The Pirate Bay will be going back to the Court of Bergamo to combat the decision.

Now this brings me to Isohunt, who is a website based out of Vancouver Canada. Canada has notoriously been a safe haven for file sharing. It’s important to note that Canada has never sued someone for distribution let alone downloading. So naturally they are a friendlier place than Sweden when it comes to P2P sharing, as Sweden is the country to lock up The Pirate Bay founders.

The IIPA are the combination of MPAA, RIAA, BSA, and they have notoriously been on the case of China, Canada, and Russia for their lack of modernization in regard to copyright protection. Essentially the IIPA is in place to secure the entertainment industries interest. It seems that China, Canada, and Russia have subscribed to the “wait and see” method, where as the United States has taken file sharing head on.

Now onto the case, Isohunt is currently being sued by Columbia Pictures Industries for a permanent injunction. The ruling in favor of Columbia Pictures has been widely reported on. What has not been talked about is the countersuit by Isohunt to oppose the permanent injunction. Lead by Gary Fung, the arguments against Columbia to me seem to be very strong.

The facts of the case are as follows. The basics of the website are the same as that of the likes of Yahoo and Google. At their core is a SIS system, which is the ever-changing, basic technical design for search engines. Google, Yahoo and Isohunt all have the same goal: to organize and help users locate information worldwide. To prove their similarities, Mr. Fung conducted a test of 5000 torrent searches on both Isohunt, and then a search on Yahoo as well as Google. He found that 95% (4721 of 5000 searches) of the torrents that were indexed were equally available on the main sites as they were available on Isohunt.

Isohunt does not discriminate what is indexed and what is not, “nor does it make available links to possibly copyright infringing content any more than what is already available on the Internet in aggregate as a whole.” Essentially Isohunt reflects the state of the Internet as a whole, just like Google and Yahoo do.

Isohunt also is not guilty of providing a service to download the copyrighted material either. There is nothing about the sites or services that provided a software mechanism for copying. Once the material is downloaded the connection with Isohunt is lost. So it is apparent that the service Isohunt provides is a search for material, both within and outside the legality of copyright. So the question now is who is responsible? Is the user who uploads the copyrighted material to the site that Isohunt links to responsible? Is the website responsible for monitoring copyrighted material?

If the courts assert that Isohunt is guilty of being a more than agnostic search engine, as they did in Italy with The Pirate Bay, isn’t Google and Yahoo guilty as well. If their sites provide 95% of what Columbia deems as lawsuit worthy, why isn’t Google in court? This is an ever-changing legal picture that is still shaping today. So naturally I don’t have the answer as a senior in college, however I’m free to guess. And my guess is because nobody, and I mean nobody, as the audacity or gumption to sue the most popular website on the planet. Google provides users the ability to find information, just as Isohunt does. But should Isohunt become a victim for merely focusing their search on just .torrent files? The MPAA and RIAA are in for some headaches, and until they can successfully shut down the dissemination of sharing digital material.. share away my friends.