isoHunt.com Is Shutting Down

isoHunt is finally shutting down after seven years of lawsuits. The website is not being shutdown because of Government forcing, but rather a settlement offer that Gary Fung has agreed to on top of a $110,000,000, yes, One Hundred and Ten Million Dollar! Hollywood’s major movie studios sued isoHunt in 2006 and won its battle earlier this year. Hollywood’s major movie studios claimed that the site was promoting copyright infringement, and the 9th Circuit Cord of Appeals sided with them.

isoHunt is, or I should say was one of the most popular torrent sites available on the internet. With every site that goes down, multiple new sites come to light. Though I do not feel that torrenting kills different industries such as music, and videos, video games, or software. Long, long ago I would use Hotline to download music, but I wasn’t just downloading thousands of songs, movies and software titles. If I found something I liked, I would purchase the product. I have an extensive DVD collection, my CD collection includes well over 1,000 titles, I have a very large game collection, and I do not have one piece of pirated music, movie or software. In fact,many of the movies, artists and software titles that I have, I likely never would have purchased if I did not have access to the internet to preview them.

Today Gary Fung opened a new website which is simple WordPress site with only one posting:

“It’s sad to see my baby go. But I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. 10.5 years of isoHunt has been a long journey by any business definition, and forever in Internet startup time. It started as a programming hobby in my university days that has become so, so much more. It’s been a learning experience beyond what I imagined. I’ve done the best I could push the social benefits of BitTorrent and file sharing, the searching and sharing of culture itself, but it’s time for me to move on to new software ideas and projects.

There’s so much I want to write about. Some I want to take time writing about, some I can’t talk about. Since someone from Hollywood got the news out of our pending shutdown already, I just want to get a bit of my side of the story out with this post.

FYI, this is the last part of our lawsuit I haven’t talked about yet. Our SCOTUS petition.

I’m working on new projects, so this is not a good bye, but announcing a new beginning for yours truly. You’ll be hearing from me soon. Stay in touch with me on garyfung.ca.”

Earlier this year, it seemed that Fung had some other ideas for isoHunt, unfortunately he will no longer be able to use the site address… I am sure he will be bringing us some interesting things in the future though!

“For the next 10 years, I’m imagining a reboot of isoHunt. From a mostly passive search engine, to a new system where you the consumer can be active participants in bringing creators on board, and you can frictionlessly contribute to the creators.”

What are your thoughts on torrenting? Did you use isoHunt, if so, which service will you use now?

Thank you Gigaom for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of UserLogos.org