isoHunt Found Liable for Inducing Infringement in California

The US District Court for the Central District of California (Court) has found that Gary Fung, the operator of the isoHunt web site, is liable for inducing copyright infringement, and has granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs, a group of copyright owners including Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. isoHunt is a BitTorrent search engine that is also the subject of litigation in British Columbia (see “The isoHunt Case Heads to Trial,” E-TIPS® Vol 7, No 19, March 25, 2009). The site maintains indexes of torrent files that users may search and use in conjunction with peer-to-peer software to download files from other users’ computers, such as movies whose copyright is owned by one of the plaintiffs. isoHunt argued that it is only a search engine and should not be liable, because it does not host any infringing material. The Court, however, rejected these arguments, finding that isoHunt’s liability was “overwhelmingly clear.” The situation here was essentially the same, said the Court, as in prior cases involving Napster and Grokster (see “US Supreme Court Reverses Grokster P2P Ruling,” E-TIPS® Vol 4, No 1, July 6, 2005), and referred to the defendant’s technology as “nothing more than old wine in a new bottle.” In the UK, somewhat similar arguments were made by the operator of a file sharing site called “Oink”, and were apparently successful in a recent case in which a jury acquitted the defendant of conspiracy to defraud. For the isoHunt decision, Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc et al v Gary Fung et al, CV 06-5578 SVW, visit: http://www.scribd.com/doc/24472378/Case-2-06-Cv-05578-Svw-Jc Summary by: Tom Feather