14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent site isoHunt has come back from the dead, weeks after the MPAA managed to bury it following a lawsuit that’s been going on for years.
The team behind the zombie site isn’t the same as the one behind the original site, but the name remains. Starting today, isoHunt.to is officially online and looks identical to its namesake.
Earlier this month, isoHunt decided to close down after Gary Fung reached a settlement with the MPAA which has him paying $110 million (€80 million), much less than the MPAA wanted in the start ($600 million / €437 million) but still a pretty large sum by anyone’s standards.
A group called ArchiveTeam intented to save isoHunt’s torrent files since the site was such an icon among torrent sites. However, Fung pulled the plug on the site days early particularly to prevent such attempts.
Another project was going on silently, however, and now isoHunt.to was launched by yet another team that has nothing to do with Fung or ArchiveTeam.
“isoHunt has been a great part of the torrent world for more than a decade. It’s a big loss to everyone who used it over the years. Media corporations don’t like innovative or competition and isoHunt’s fate is one of the examples of how they deal with it,” sources told TorrentFreak.
They consider isoHunt to be a “file-sharing” icon and people got used to it and they don’t want to let it go. “We want those people to feel like being at home while visiting isoHunt.to. The main goal is to restore the website with torrents and provide users with the same familiar interface,” they said.
That explains the pretty-much-identical interface, complete with categories to browse on the left hand side. Torrents appear with the date they were added to the new site rather than the old one, but other than that differences are slim.