14 DAY TRIAL // Most of the time when you hear about a lawsuit between a bittorrent site and a copyright holder the latter is suing the site on various claims of infringement and illegal activities. IsoHunt, based in Canada, though, decided to take the first step and sue the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) to determine them to declare the site, and affiliated operations Torrentbox and Podtropolis, legal. The latest developments have the case going to a full trial after an isoHunt appeal was denied.
At the time isoHunt was fearing a lawsuit from the CRIA so the site's founder, Gary Fung, filed his own lawsuit in September 2008 to get a court ruling on the legality of bittorrent sites and whether they could be taken to court if the .torrent files they hosted, which contained data about the torrent but not the actual content being shared, linked to material that could potentially be infringing. In March 2009 the two parties appeared before the court, with IsoHunt wanting a simple court order without the need to go to a full trial while CRIA was asking for the latter.
The judge eventually ruled that the issue at hand was much too big and subtle and decided that there would be a full trial. The decision was appealed by the torrents site but the appeal was also denied on Friday so the case will now move for a full court hearing. The CRIA, obviously, boasts this as a victory while Fung downplayed the decision.
“The issues involved in this case are fundamental to the rights of creators to earn a living from their work,” Graham Henderson, CRIA president, said. “A matter of this importance should be considered by a court with access to all the facts and not, as isoHunt had argued, to only one party’s version of the facts. A lower court agreed with us and now so has the court of appeal.”
“We didn’t lose [the case], only a motion on a form of litigation and we’ll have news soon enough on how we are to proceed suing CRIA in self defense,” Gary Fung, isoHunt's creator, told Torrentfreak.