IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: BitTorrent website isoHunt.com agrees to shut down in settlement, (Oct 18, 2013)

The website isoHunt.com agreed, in a settlement announced yesterday, to halt all operations worldwide in order to resolve the major movie studios’ copyright lawsuit against the site and its operator, Gary Fung. As part of the settlement, the parties have jointly asked the court to enter a judgment of $110 million against the defendants. The settlement also includes a global prohibition against Fung further profiting from the infringement of MPAA member studio content. IsoHunt.com is one of the most popular BitTorrent sites on the Internet; it claims to offer 44.2 million peers, 13.7 million active torrents, and is currently ranked as the 426th most-visited website on the Internet, according to Alexa.com.

“Today’s settlement is a major step forward in realizing the enormous potential of the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce and innovation,” said Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). “It also sends a strong message that those who build businesses around encouraging, enabling, and helping others to commit copyright infringement are themselves infringers, and will be held accountable for their illegal actions.”

The settlement in Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Fung comes after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a unanimous decision on March 21, 2013, affirming the district court’s 2009 ruling against isoHunt for “inducing” users to illegally download and distribute the MPAA members’ movies and TV shows over the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Further, the appellate court affirmed that isoHunt and Fung were not protected by the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In 2009, Judge Stephen Wilson of the Central District of California granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that “Defendants’ intent to induce infringement is overwhelming and beyond reasonable dispute.” Subsequently, Judge Wilson issued an injunction permanently prohibiting Fung from hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to MPAA member-company copyrighted works then in existence or created in the future.

In its opinion released last March, the Ninth Circuit held that Fung and his company were contributorily liable for acts of infringement by users who downloaded and distributed unauthorized copies of works owned by seven complaining film studios. The studios established: (1) distribution of a device or product; (2) acts of infringement; (3) an object of promoting the product’s use to infringe copyright; and (4) causation in the defendants’ use of the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol known as BitTorrent. In addition, the defendants were not entitled to protection from liability under any of the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the court determined.

Under the settlement agreement, the site will shut down by October 23, 2013.

News: Copyright