IsoHunt Tries to Go Lite and Avoid Takedown

A California court has issued an order for IsoHunt's administrators to remove all of the infringing torrent files from their website. To get around the judge's decision, Gary Fung, IsoHunt's founder, is trying to have the court approve a lighter version of the torrent search engine as an alternative to implementing a word filter for search queries.

The man who issues the ruling, Judge Stephen Wilson, is about to hammer the last nail in IsoHunt's coffin if he decides that the lighter version of the website isn't up to his initial decision. Besides IsoHunt, the ruling includes fellow sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis, also owned by Gary Fung. No mention was made of Hexagon CC, another torrent portal owned by Gary Fung.

As in the case of Mininova, IsoHunt has the possibility of implementing a keyword search filter for their torrent search engine, so IsoHunt won't be guilty of “creating, maintaining or providing access to browsable website categories of dot-torrent or similar files using or based on infringement-related terms” (quote from the original ruling). But as Mininova admins quickly discovered, such a filter is almost technically impossible to build and still provide access to non-infringing content for legal torrents listed in the public domain.

Because the trial was filed quite a while back, the IsoHunt support team has had some time to think about and develop a backup plan. Their solution: a very Google-like, category stripped version of IsoHunt, providing a simple search field and results.

The resemblance isn't only symbolic. It has been well known that by adding “filetype:torrent” to a Google search, the site will return results containing only torrent files. IsoHunt is playing the “We are a search engine too!” card and arguing for freedom of speech and content accessibility.

But unlike Google, IsoHunt can't deem itself as a real search engine, mainly because during the latest trial, the MPAA brought evidence showing that its search code was specifically built for finding copyrighted material.

Gary Fung has now until April 12, 2010 to filter the search queries (nearly impossible), to get his IsoHunt Lite website version approved (highly unlikely), to block all US users (estimated 50% of all IsoHunt traffic), or to simply shut it down.

Screenshots of IsoHunt Lite can be seen below.