MPAA, in sending anti-piracy message, could go after isoHunt assets

Gary Fung and his company isoHunt Web Technologies Inc. are not likely to hand over $110 million US to a group of American movie studios. That’s the sum of the damages awarded to members of the Motion Picture Association of America in a court settlement announced on Oct. 17, under which Vancouver-based isoHunt agreed to halt its operations around the world, though it’s not very likely the Canadian founder of one of the world’s largest BitTorrent trackers will be able to pay. “There’s no way, in my opinion, that isoHunt has $110 million of assets,” Allen Mendelsohn, an independent Internet lawyer in Montreal, said in a phone interview. Still, if the studios are serious about sending a message to Fung and BitTorrent movie filesharers, they could start a proceeding with a court in British Columbia to go after Fung’s assets, even seizing them, he said. “I’m sure the MPAA knows what kind of assets Gary Fung and isoHunt has, and they probably knew long before they ever signed the settlement,” Mendelsohn said. Fung, an entrepreneur in Vancouver, B.C. who founded isoHunt in 2003, said in a Facebook message on Tuesday that he had no comment. He referred to his blog, where he posted a message this week, titled “Initiating Self Destruct,” that also appeared on the now-shut isoHunt website. “It’s been an adventure in the last 10.5 years working on isoHunt, a privilege working with some of the smartest guys I’ve worked with, and my life won’t be the same without this journey,” the message said. “For what I’m working on next, please look up my blog on Google and follow me there. Because as the Terminator would say with a German accent, I’ll be backkk.” isoHunt had become one of the world's leading BitTorrent search engines before shutting early this week. The MPAA, in a release on Oct. 17, said the site “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.” Mendelsohn said he believes the MPAA’s objective is to use the settlement to send a message to large-scale enablers of online movie and music piracy. The settlement is not likely to directly affect current legal efforts to shut down torrent site Pirate Bay, he said, largely due to its decentralized structure. “It used to be centralized in Sweden, but those days are long gone,” he said. “The way it’s set up now, you’d have a lot of difficulty getting a judgment. Maybe you could get a judgment in absentia against them.” Fung, in his final message on the isoHunt website, said about 95 per cent of existing isoHunt torrents are now stored in other locations and can be found through Google searches. “Today’s settlement is a major step forward in realizing the enormous potential of the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce and innovation,” Chris Dodd, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, said in a statement last week. “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,” he said. The $110-million settlement, which emerged from Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung, followed a drawn-out legal process led by the MPAA, whose members include Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios, and Warner Bros. A decision in March this year from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had upheld an earlier, lower court ruling that said isoHunt was “inducing” users to violate copyright and download and distribute movies and TV shows. The appeals court also found that isoHunt and Fung could not receive protection under the “safe harbour” provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects online service providers from copyright liability, recognizing that they play an intermediary role. Music Canada, a group representing recording companies that had launched a lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court against isoHunt and Fung for millions of dollars in damages, said in a statement on its website last week that the settlement with the MPAA was “a landmark victory for the creative community in Canada and around the globe.” Music Canada said the site had enabled “millions of infringing acts” and made "a vast variety of unlicensed music, film and other creative content available for instant download. We welcome its closure.” The MPAA’s case against Fung originated with a lawsuit in 2006. A 2009 decision by Judge Stephen Wilson of the Central District of California granted a summary judgment in favour of the studios, writing that the defendants’ “intent to induce infringement is overwhelming and beyond reasonable dispute.” Major movie studios and music companies have said they abandoned a previous and more controversial strategy of issuing lawsuits against individual filesharers, to instead focus their efforts on targeting large-scale “enablers.” The Conservative government’s copyright reform bill, passed last year, contained a new “enabler” provision, allowing rights holders to sue web services for copyright infringement if their primary purpose is enabling copyright infringement. —With reporting by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.caand editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

MPAA, in sending anti-piracy message, could go after isoHunt assets

News | October 22, 2013

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