IsoHunt to Shut Down as Part of Settlement With Studios
variety.comIsoHunt has been largely irrelevant in the US for the last several years since they started filtering US IPs[1] and even before then was a pretty poor selection of torrents with many displaying completely incorrect swarm data.
While I'm not personally bothered by this (from the point of view of someone who used IsoHunt) I do find this settlement quite annoying and Dodd to be completely abysmal as a person.
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[1] http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-redirects-us-visitors-to-lit...
What are better sites for torrent search? I've actually had good luck with ISOhunt.
Kickasstorrents is the best atm in my opinion. TPB is good but their legal issues make them unreliable technically and I prefer non-magnet links for use with rtorrent.
rtorrent supports magnet links just fine if you're using a recent version (As in one from the past year or two).
TPB works fine enough for me.
So I went to try that site out. Where the hell is the download link?! They're all ads!
For legit torrents, using Google doing a "<search term> torrent" might be the best option.
For others, use torrentz.eu and Adblock.
Thanks for the advice. However, all I can find on torrentz.eu are links to other torrent sites. Is it merely an aggregator? I thought they hosted their own torrents, it's less useful if they just send me to thepiratebay anyway.
Ah right -- Torrentz is a meta search engine and doesnt host any torrents.
The way I use it is to search for the torrent, and then use the results to pick a torrent site [that appears in the results] to stick with. Then that gets shut down, I head over to Torrentz, run another search, pick another site and so on..
Ah, I see, that makes sense now. I thought they would host the torrents themselves, but every link that looked like it would be a torrent download was an ad. Your clarification helped, thanks.
If you're trying to find anime, I recommend nyaa.se. It's where most fansubbing groups upload torrent files to.
For torrent searching alone, torrentz.eu or bitsnoop. For a community, kickasstorrents.
http://thepiratebay.sx/ ? I admit their search function is terrible, but it has nearly everything. They've had great uptime for a while now too.
There is btdigg.org, which builds its database by crawling the bittorrent distributed hash table.
What's stunning to me is the $110 million dollar judgment. Did the site really make that much money, or is this a decision designed to condemn the founder to a lifetime of poverty?
The MPAA estimates [1] that the company has $2-4 million in assets, but seems to be asking for the higher number just to send some kind of a message.
If I'm reading correctly, it would be isoHunt, not the founder, responsible for the judgment, so they would just declare bankruptcy, and the MPAA would get whatever assets are left in liquidation. The founder wouldn't be responsible for paying the remainder.
[1] http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-says-piracy-damages-cant-be-mea...
It appears they were suing the founder, Daniel Fung, personally and in addition to suing the company. The lower-court case is Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung, 06-cv-05578, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). The appeals court case is Columbia Picture Industries v. Fung, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 10-55946 (San Francisco).
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-...
>The founder wouldn't be responsible for paying the remainder.
I wasn't sure because the article indicates the judgment was against both isoHunt and the founder (Gary Fung).
Note that the amount is 100% the same as TorrentSpy had to pay back in 2008: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/05/torrentspy-ordere...
I think this is not a coincidence.
MPAA admitted that it's a completely out of the blue number, made up to "scare" others.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-says-piracy-damages-cant-be-mea...
It said $150,000 per infringement (!) and I highly doubt the site made anywhere near that amount in revenue, let alone profit
> let alone profit
I don't understand why people think torrent websites are not profitable. Reddit and TF comments always claim it's not-for-profit. IsoHunt might not have as much profit as TPB due to it's constant lawsuits. However, hosting a website like IsoHunt is fairly lightweight in comparison to hosting YouTube. Torrents are tiny files, $30k server bills per month at most, probably they spend $10k/mo. They have ads and paid membership. I doubt they earn $110 million, but I do believe it's likely that they atleast earn $4 mill per year. Keep in mind there website has a lot of traffic.
He isn't saying it wasn't profitable.
> Torrents are tiny files
ThePirateBay, for one, no longer even stores torrents--only magnet links. I wonder what kind of profit margin their ads pull in...
Who would want to advertise on TPB, though? I have to wonder how much those ads could possibly go for considering it's a website focused on giving you something for free which you would ordinarily have to pay for. I am aware that there are legitimate files on TPB, but most people visit for pirated content.
I've never been a user of TPB so I can't tell you who has advertised there, but there are lots of people out there who will drop $600 on a phone and then jailbreak it so they can pirate 99 cent apps. For a lot of folks there is a clear line between digital content easily gotten and other stuff and they'll pay a lot for the other stuff but will pirate digital content when it is convenient to do so.
I'm not saying this is right, but in my experience it is pretty common. I've witnessed multiple instances of people teaching other people how to torrent including once in a jury lounge in a county courthouse and many times at workplaces that produce digital goods (software) and the general idea seemed to be that if they can get whatever digital thing (eg. the latest episode of Game of Thrones) for free, why not? And yet these are people who drive nice cars, wear nice clothes, and buy lots of expensive gadgets, squarely in the demographic of people that advertisers of non-digital goods like to target.
OTOH, I would suspect TPB (like 4chan) has a problem where advertisers of "upscale" goods just don't want to be associated with the "brand" of the site, regardless of the demographic match. But I don't think the fact that the users are people who want things "for free" is a disqualifier.
Well, look at the ads and you'll know. They're mostly advertising stuff that's not downloadable - memberships to dating sites, for example.
"Download accelerators" like installerex.com or "anonymous vpn" (they advertise getprivate.net at the moment) which installs adware. Also, Samsung advertises on TPB ( https://torrentfreak.com/samsung-exposed-as-top-advertiser-o... ). Adware can generate high revenue even on websites like TPB since the adware wont appear on TPB but replace a legitimate sites ad banner. The industry has gotten a little harder mind you, since adsense recently stopped adware software from using adsense's "custom search" ad.
They have no shortage of scummy advertisements and lucrative affiliate shitware.
> because that's the image their PR machine has very carefully cultivated
That's perfectly written. TPB once stood for freedom of the internet, even I don't deny that. However, when the original founders gave the website to an offshore company it became a website purely for profit but continued using the "freedom" excuse to create some kind of moral high ground.
Oh no! What is 2004 me going to do to find torrents now?
You won't get much at 300bps.
2004 is not stoked with this decision, that's for sure.
MPAA doesn't get it. Costly lobbying and crushing lawsuits is not how you defeat piracy.
This is how you do it:
Then perhaps they're not really trying to defeat piracy? If they're trying to justify the position of middle-men (say, recording studios in music), then the lawsuits show them adding value. Even when distribution is no longer difficult, thanks to the internet.
Recording studios are not middlemen. That's where records get made. You can only go so far in your bedroom before you need a room with a million dollars of equipment in it.
That's the problem with these modern ideas about people producing content off their own back, it's not actually possible. You can't make star trek on a macbook pro with final cut, and you can't make a highly produced album with 10 musicians in your bedroom.
You can make truly amazing music without the million dollars of equipment though! It's an optional extra, and I would argue that we would not be culturally less rich if those studios went out of existence. Worst case is that we would just have equally good music with a few slightly rough edges. As an example, I still choose Seth Lakeman's early recordings over his more recent even though they were made on a budget of a quarter of a macbook pro.
Unfortunatelly, so few people, even on this board, understand this. And the whole "artists should be poor and art should be free" idea expressed here many times is all that taken to extreme.
I don't think "middle man" is an accurate way to describe record labels. Record labels are mostly about financing recording (just like a bank finances your mortgage), driving the A&R process (this is crucial for pop music) and managing distribution. Publishers are, however, the real middle men with very real profits…
I'd say lawsuits show them "doing something". And pirates are there to hang all their failures on to when they need.
That's brilliant.
Gary Fung's not a US citizen AFAIK. What leverage do they have to force him to pay?
Why do they even try? It takes an hour to change the logo and host it somewhere else.
So that they can later justify draconian piracy laws.
"It took us seven years to get this one site down, a site that caused us over 110 million dollars in piracy, and we couldn't even collect any of it. Within hours of a court order, the site was back up with a new name.
<Thus, you should require ISP's to filter their traffic, or whatever> "
Wow, it's like the anti-acquisition.
More info can be found in the MPAA press release: http://mpaa.org/resources/52c16680-37ab-4f0a-9756-b850fe37ca...
The shut down date os Oct 23, 2013 (in a week from now).
What is everybody using for piracy these days?
I was hoping to go with a parrot and a speedboat off of the Horn of Africa, but with the economy as it is I've had to settle with a parakeet and a dinghy in the local catchwater.
Sounds like a lot of effort just to watch some crappy movies.
I hear they made a movie of that. Captain Phillips, I believe it's called?
I'm not sure. The TV had to be scrapped in favor of an AM radio with one dial missing.
Irc Abjects server. Eztv for series. SubtitleSeeker for subtitles. Tokyotosho for anime. TPB for other stuff and duck duck go for the remaining.
I hear Usenet (Astraweb, for example) with SABnzbd/Sick Beard/nzbsearch.net works really well.