The longtime search-engine staple of the BitTorrent community gets shut down after it’s ISP’s lawyers call it quits.
Around since the earliest days of BitTorrent tracker sites, isoHunt has been elude the legal might of the RIAA and the MPAA up until yesterday it seems.
The subject of a lawsuit by the MPAA since last February, which included Torrentspy and eDonkey among others, it has finally been done in by the lawyers of it’s own ISP.
“Website operators who abuse technology to facilitate infringements of copyrighted works by millions of people are not anonymous – they can and will be stopped,” said John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA. “Disabling these powerful networks of illegal file-distribution is a significant step in stemming the tide of piracy on the Internet.”
On it’s site it notes:
Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice, as of 14:45 PST. No doubt related to our lawsuit brought by the MPAA, but we don’t have more information at this time until people responsible comes to work tomorrow. We will be back in operation once we sort out this mess with our current ISP, or we get new hardware ready at our new ISP.
Sit back and enjoy the rest of the internet in the mean time, while it last. For your torrent searching needs, try Google for now by searching for “SEARCH TERMS ext:torrent”.
You can also come hang around our IRC channel (SSL on port +7000). We’ll update on this page and on IRC when we have more information.
If you wish to help us out financially, you can donate via Paypal from the button below. Due to prior dis-taste from certain individuals misusing legal funds for their own purposes however, this is not a legal defense fund. Your donations will be used for the operational costs of our servers and development of our websites. You have our sincere thanks.
Why the ISP decided to pull the plug now after all this time has passed is unclear but, it most likely is due to the fact their ISP resides in the US, not exactly a country where the government and corporate interests look favorably on P2P and file-sharing websites.
They write:
Our current ISP is in the US. Our new ISP is in Canada, where this temporary page is being served. Depending on whether we get our servers back in the US, we will be back in full operation sooner or later.
As for moving the servers to a country that does tolerate BitTorrent search engines and aggregators, it seems as though the operators of isoHunt have already dismissed such a move.
In particular, the recent quest by The Pirate Bay to move its servers to Sealand has been acknowledged and disavowed as a possibility.
FYI, since this is a common topic, no, moving servers to Sweden or Sealand isn’t going to help. I have no intention of hiding our servers. BitTorrent was created for legitimate distribution of large media files, and we stand by that philosophy as a search engine and aggregator.
Perhaps the simple move to Canada will be fine in and of itself, and allow it to get back online. The operator has already noted that “…hopefully we’ll have our data back today, because if we do, we should be at least halfway back up by friday.”
Sounds like good news to me. Maybe moving out of the country wasn’t such a bad thing after all, for at least one isn’t such an available target for the ire of the MPAA and the RIAA.
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