isohunt Archives

Are Canada’s copyright laws friendly or unfriendly towards wealth destroyers according to Prof. Geist?

In the last few weeks Prof. Geist has been writing, blogging, tweeting, speaking and even testifying to a Parliamentary Committee about the IsoHunt case and whether there is a need for an amendment to the Copyright Act to create a new cause of action to make online pirate sites and services liable for enabling copyright infringement. His ostensible claim is that representatives of the recording industry secretly filed a copyright infringement claim against IsoHunt three weeks before Bill C-32 was tabled in the House of Commons; kept the suit secret to improve their chances of getting copyright reforms needed to shut the site down – all the while not needing the amendments because they already have the legal tools necessary to put IsoHunt out of business.…

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C-32 enablement remedy targets secondary copyright infringement

Mark Twain once famously commented, “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” Canadian copyright law bears the burden of his axiom more than most. The pith of our copyright law dates from a 1911 bill passed in the United Kingdom, which we adopted wholesale in the early 1920s, and have not kept current with the changes in time.

Our law, which was designed to deal with player pianos and renegade printing presses, and later traditional broadcast techologies like radio and TV, is occasionally called upon to deal with illegal filesharing on the Internet.…

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The Pirate Bay operators lose criminal appeal and sent to prison

The Swedish Court of Appeal affirmed the legal liability of the operators of the Pirate Bay. A video from the court is shown below. Meanwhile IsoHunt and its founder Gary Fung await a ruling from a California court on whether they are liable for contempt of the injunction order of Judge Wilson by continuing to operate the IsoHunt BitTorrent website in violation of the injunction.

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Isohunt permanently enjoined by US court

Yesterday, District Court Judge Stephen Wilson issued an order permanently enjoining Ishount and Gary Fung from continuing to engage in copyright infringement. The Court found an injunction necessary because the plaintiffs “have demonstrated that they have suffered irreparable harm, and would suffer further irreparable harm from Defendants’ continued infringement”.

According to the Court, “Plaintiffs’ power to control their rights has been so compromised by the means through which [Defendants] encouraged end users to infringe (digital files plus the internet) that the inducement amounts to irreparable harm.”…

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Injunction to issue against IsoHunt in a busy month for the courts

There has been some confusion over whether an injunction has issued yet in the US IsoHunt case. In short, an injunction has not yet issued against IsoHunt. However, US District court Judge Stephen Wilson issued a tentative order on March 23, 2010 ruling that a permanent injunction is going to be made against IsoHunt. A copy of the tentative judgment is available here.

The tentative order contains the judge’s ruling as to why the Court intends to grant a permanent injunction. …

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Toying with funny math to downplay Canada’s role as a piracy haven

Several weeks ago TorrentFreak published its Top 25 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009. In a blog commenting on the rankings, I pointed out that out of the top 25, 7 of them are located or have connections to Canada and that of the top 10, 4 are located or have connections to Canada. I also pointed out that this meant that Canada, alone, is home to more than 25% of the world’s public English language unauthorized bitTorrent sites and 40% of the leading ones are in Canada.…

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Fung and Isohunt found liable for inducing worldwide copyright infringement

Earlier this week, a US district court granted summary judgement to MPAA members holding that Gary Fung and four websites operated by him, including Isohunt one of Canada’s largest bittorrent sites, contribute to massive worldwide copyright infringement.

Operators of bittorrent sites like isoHunt often claim they are nothing but content neutral search engines like Google. The Isohunt court disagreed holding, based on uncontested expert evidence, that approximately 95 percent of all files made accessible through Isohunt were infringing or highly likely to be infringing.…

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