14 DAY TRIAL // In a surprising move, considering its past actions, or rather inactions, Google has gotten involved with a lawsuit concerning BitTorrent search engines. isoHunt has been entangled in a lawsuit brought against it by the movie industry for half a decade now. But Google has only now offered its official opinion on the matter.
Unfortunately for isoHunt, Google is not coming to the rescue, quite from it, but it does try to get some rulings changed to help its own case against Viacom.
IsoHunt, at one time one of the biggest BitTorrent search engines out there, was taken to court by a number of Hollywood movie studios for copyright infringement and 'inducing' copyright infringement.
The court eventually found isoHunt guilty and ordered it to implement a wide filter in the US, preventing users from searching for certain terms chosen by the studios.
IsoHunt filed an appeal, arguing that the order amounts to nothing less than censorship. Key to isoHunt's and other search engines' defense was the fact that they operated similarly to Google, indexing and aggregating content and enabling users to sift through it by retrieving relevant results. No actual copyright infringement happens on the BitTorrent search sites.
But Google has stayed away from these lawsuits, it has enough problems of its own. While, in principle, these search engines operate much like Google, the company didn't want to be associated with the stigma.
Considering that it recently started censoring its own search suggestions for words like "bittorrent" and similar terms 'associated' with piracy, it's no big surprise that Google wants to get as far away from this as possible.
But it has intervened in this case filing an amicus brief. The company is not involved directly in the case, but the ruling could affect it's own legal struggles.
Google pretty much throws isoHunt under the bus, agreeing that what the site is doing is illegal. However it has an issue with the way the court reached this conclusion.
One of the things that it argues against is that isoHunt is liable for the links to torrent files on its site even if it didn't receive a specific DMCA takedown notice for a particular piece of content. The court decided that the site is guilty because it 'knew' copyright infringement was taking place, in general.
What Google is trying to establish is have the court say that, as long as a service complies with the DMCA, it's in the clear. This could be a solid defense for any of Google's products, but it comes especially handy in the Viacom versus YouTube case.
While YouTube has won the initial ruling, it did so because it complied with takedown notices. Viacom has appealed though and a precedent saying that a site could be held responsible if it 'knew' it handled infringing content, which YouTube did know, could spell trouble for Google.