Isohunt, the third most popular search engine for Bittorrent files, will close and pay the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) $110m, ending a long-runng legal battle.
The move comes just ahead of a formal court battle which Isohunt, set up by Gary Fung of Canada, was certain to lose. The MPAA has been trying to shut Isohunt down since February 2006, when it issued a press release saying it would sue the site for copyright infringement. The site will close by 23 October under the settlement.
The closure is the latest win for copyright industries which have fought a cat-and-mouse battle with torrent sites including The Pirate Bay which make copyrighted content available at no price.
Supporters of Bittorrent sites making films available claim that they help revenues for filmmakers overall even if they don't directly generate revenue as online stores such as Google Play, Amazon or Apple's iTunes do. One academic paper claimed in September 2012 that the closure of sites alleged to have been used for piracy, such as Kim Dotcom's MegaUpload, actually hurts the makers of independent films, while helping blockbusters. However the quality of that study has been called into question, with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University saying that immediately following the MegaUpload shutdown "that for each additional 1% (lost) penetration of Megaupload the post-shutdown sales increase was between 2.5% and 3.8% higher."
Fung's decision to close the site and pay the MPAA the huge settlement comes amid claims that the site "induced the pirating of movies and TV shows". A US federal court issued an injunction against the site in 2009, but it kept operating via servers in Canada.
"t's sad to see my baby go. But I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful," Fung wrote on his blog. "10.5 years of isoHunt has been a long journey by any business definition, and forever in Internet startup time."
He told Torrentfreak: "I think one worry I want to address is at no time have I compromised privacy of any user on isoHunt, in terms of your IP addresses or emails."
A US court had ruled against a defence offered by Fung in March, using the same finding that had led to the closure of the peer-to-peer music- and film-sharing system Grokster. In that case, the US Supreme Court determined in 2005 that Grokster couldn't show that the non-infringing uses of its site were "commercially significant" compared to those which did infringe copyright, and so it had no protection under the copyright laws.
In a statement, the MPAA's chairman Chris Dodd said that the settlement "sends a strong message that those who build businesses around encouraging, enabling and helping others to commit copyright infringement are themselves infringers, and will be held accountable for their actions."
In a formal document filed by the two sides on 16 October, Isohunt agrees not to seek to appeal its decision. However it had already filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, which is now in process.
