Court Rules: IsoHunt Guilty of Copyright Infringement
At the end of November we reported that IsoHunt’s founder, Gary Fung was still trying to persuade the court that the site he runs is just another search engine which should be declared legit. The fight is now over and, as most of us probably have anticipated, Fung lost.
The search engine arguments failed to impress Judge Stephen Wilson especially due to the evidence presented to the court which showed that the search code was developed to find primarily copyrighted content:
"Defendant Fung additionally directs the program to specific web pages containing terms like 'seinfeld-videos,' which one would infer contains infringing content from the television show Seinfeld." One of his sites also displayed a list of the top-20 grossing movies in the US, with links to copies of each, while another had categories that included "High Quality DVD Rips" and "TV Show Releases."
As ruled by the Wilson, Fung's lawyers had failed to rebut the arguments the labels primarily put on the table; moreover, Fung kind of sabotaged himself with a series of statements questioning the copyright law and admitting to downloading illegal material himself.
"The material facts supporting Plaintiffs' claims are almost wholly unrebutted," said judge Wilson in his decision. "Generally, Defendants' rest their case on legal arguments and meritless evidentiary objections, and offer little of their own evidence that directly addressed Plaintiffs’ factual assertions."
A possible appeal is yet to uncertain especially since there seems to be considerable unrebutted evidence that would have to be addressed accordingly.Currently isoHunt has 1114520 registered members.
(via ArsTechnica)
