Follows TorrentSpy’s lead and chooses user privacy over court-ordered MPAA data collection.
BitTorrent users in the US have just lost another popular public BitTorrent tracker site with ISOHunt’s recent announcement that it has decided to begin blocking access by US visitors effective immediately.
Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal judge for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, ruled back in May that TorrentSpy had to begin tracking users’ activity on the site despite that fact that there was no existing mechanism to do so and that the action in itself would violate its clearly defined privacy policy.
Rather than violate user privacy, TorrentSpy decided to simply cut loose the US and leave it to its own devices. ISOHunt, faced with similar legal wranglings as TorrentSpy, decided to follow a similar path and cut loose the US as well.
A message on the site now reads as follows:
As of earlier today, we have disabled access from users in the US to our trackers. This goes for ALL trackers (torrentbox, podtropolis) we run. This is due to the US’s hostility towards P2P technologies, and we feel with our current lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we can no longer ensure your security and privacy in the US. So, if you’re outside the US, you may notice less peers. We encourage you to add other public, unhampered trackers to torrents you post, in addition to Torrentbox and Podtropolis’s trackers.
Of course there’s tons of ways to still use the site, be it proxy servers, Torpark, etc., so it’s not really that big of a deal, but it does renew the troubling unresolved debate about net neutrality and our govt’s penchant for trying to regulate the internet.
Even though companies and their servers may be located beyond our shores our govt seems to think it’s okay to enforce our rule of law upon them. Think about that for a minute. If any other country in the world tried to do that to a site operator here we’d have endless flag-draped speeches in which american pride and sovereignty seem to be on the line. When it’s in the reverse it seems to be painted as a sort of "civilizing" campaign that is merely working to protect american jobs.
It’s not likely to change anytime soon, but it should serve as a troubling reminder that our country is in desperate need of clearly defined net neutrality laws that respects the laws of the country in which a site is located. We wouldn’t allow anybody else to dictate internet related laws and regulations to us, so why do we think its okay for us to do unto others?
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Gay
Doesn’t surprise me. Quite frankly I would love it for filesharing to be abolished for a short while. Then we could finally see the affect it had on record sales. Could you imagine if you saw side by side record sales down after filesharing shutdown.
old news.
you can get around the block with a proxy.
Good point – a proxy would be all you need.
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Max … Out!
http://www.cmyos.com – free online operating system
First Demonoid is down now ISOHunt is blocking me?
Somebody PLEASE CORRECT THIS ARTICLE. ISOHUNT HAS NOT BLOCKED ACCESS TO THEIR SITE. The TRACKERS ONLY are refusing US connections. THE SITE AND SEARCH STILL WORK FOR ANYONE INCLUDING THOSE IN THE US.
I don’t use ISOhunt but it shows that us Americans need to put more and more pressure on the government to do something about the MPAA.