| isoHunt tells court why Hollywood is wrong | Posted by IH on May. 4
I haven't written about our
court case with the MPAA
in a while. The numerous court filings we've submitted are often hard to read and comment on, but I believe this latest round of briefs filed in response to
Judge Wilson's questions on clarification of the legal and technical issues of BitTorrent and isoHunt
concerns you and how information is exchanged on the internet at large.
| Central District Court of California wrote: |
The Court currently has under consideration Plaintiffs' Motion for Summary Judgment on Liability. Before the Court issues its order, it would benefit from supplemental briefing regarding certain issues presented in the moving papers and at oral arguments. Specifically, the Court would benefit from a further description of the separate components involved in the bit-torrent downloading process used by Defendants' website. From the moving papers and the oral arguments, it is unclear which of the components involved are distributed or provided by Defendants. Supplemental briefing should also include a brief explanation of the interaction between these components and Defendant Fung's website, as well any connection with the copying of actual files and the services Defendants provide.
... |
As followup to Wired's post about
MPAA (Secretly) Tells Court Why BitTorrent Tracking Sites Violate Copyrights
(MPAA's first supplemental brief in response to court), here's our briefs filed in response to MPAA's filings:
I know these are long reads, but there are important issues raised in these briefs. The MPAA has taken a narrow point of view that copyright infringement is stealing, that isoHunt serves no other purpose than promoting and facilitating infringement of Hollywood films, that we the search engine together with www.Torrentbox.com and www.Podtropolis.com the trackers are akin to the bogeyman selling pirated DVDs on the street, that caching, linking, and indexing by and of automated and open systems is same as targeted and willful distribution. Our answer is a resounding no. isoHunt is a tool in the collective "BitTorrent ecosystem" akin to the Web, we do not want it to be used for copyright infringement against the wishes of copyright holders, we have a long-working
Copyright Policy
and relations with them (large and small, except the MPAA), and we have sought to promote at every opportunity uses of isoHunt and BitTorrent by
various
independent
content producers of all sorts (video, music, software). You can find tons more examples of uses by independents in
my declaration.
To find us guilty is to find the Web at its infancy guilty because it was full of porn, and Yahoo guilty for making a directory of it. The freedom of search engines and linking are the fundamental principles of freedom of speech, to take it away is to end the internet and democracy as we know it.
For the legally inclined, our briefs linked above draws connection with the
Grokster
and
Sony Betamax
cases, both landmark cases in US copyright laws in relation with the latest technology of the time. Our case should it go to trial will set another precedent, for better or worse.
And on a sidenote of the MPAA's rhetoric that piracy is killing them, which is what this whole case is about: First they
made peace with BitTorrent.com
and sued other BitTorrent sites like us, leaving their message none too clear. (filter copyright infringing content on request and verification? Check) And considering
isoHunt indexes BitTorrent.com,
we have just created an infinite loop in their argument. Other good pieces include
they proving themselves wrong
with their own stats (stats to show the stock market), while having other stats like
this
and
this
to show Congress (both proven grossly "off" from reality). On the other hand though, I do think good film making should be rewarded, and the
box office agreed.
For one, I'm quite excited about Iron Man (
good reviews
and
great trailer
) and I want to see it soon. In theater that is, and you should too! Maybe I'll write a review after I've watched.
And I realize I just gave Hollywood a free ad. Maybe they should pay me.
Update May 8: Some interesting takes on this from
Ars
and
TorrentFreak
|
| isoHunt.com network changes | Posted by IH on May. 1
Some changes are underway for accessing isoHunt.com. We are testing alternate DNS servers which we changed over 2 days ago, and we are planning on changing bandwidth providers tomorrow.
So, in relation to
certain countries/ISP
not able to access isoHunt.com properly, please report whether this changes things for better or for worse. I would like to hear both sides, whether you couldn't access isoHunt before but now you can, and vice versa.
During networking changes, we don't expect any downtime longer than say 10 minutes so no worries 
EDIT 5/1/08 07:38 UTC (SecretSquirrel):
The network routes seem to have been changed already, with much better routes to much of the world (and lower latency). Please let us know if you have connectivity issues
|
| BeleniX 0.7 released | Posted by SecretSquirrel on Apr. 17
| Quote: |
We're happy to announce that v0.7 is ready and a _BIG_ leap ahead of 0.6. Changes include more devices supported, quicker boottime, very simple installer and ZFS root when installed to hard disk.
We expect a pretty big surge of downloads in the next week or so. BeleniX 0.7 will be released tomorrow on belenix.org.
The torrent is at
http://isohunt.com/torrents/belenix+0.7
|
One of BeleniX's developers wrote us this email yesterday, so we thought we'd help out by seeding it on one of our machines and posting this post right here on the front page. If you
tried BeleniX 0.6
and found it lacking, give 0.7 a try 
|
| Rick Roll'in | Posted by SecretSquirrel on Apr. 1
Happy April Fool's day, we'll take it down at 1 after midnight PST (GMT- on the 2nd ish :-p
Aftermath:
This was the video
we rickrolled you with, and we are pretty much responsible for the 1M views on it. Hope you enjoyed the 80's! Along with Youtube's own rickrolling on their frontpage and elsewhere this year, I think we've officially killed off the
rickrolling meme.
I hope? 
|
| Announcing partnership with Myka.tv | Posted by IH on Mar. 31
You may have noticed banner advertisements we are running for the
Myka
for the last few days. On their website you would see a special offer with isoHunt, which includes $10-15 discount off the Myka, $25 coupon for movie downloads, and a
free isoHunt T-Shirt
with your purchase.
I've looked at their specs and talked with
Dan,
the creator of the Myka. They seem to have done everything right for a set-top device like this with hassle-free hook up to the TV - with it you'll be able to download straight to the Myka via BitTorrent or from files on your PC, all with standard protocols (802.11b/g or ethernet), codecs (MPEG-2 and all the variants of MPEG-4), resolutions (HD or standard), and is BitTorrent certified. In my opinion, this is Apple TV as it should have been, unhampered by various restrictions with iTunes (and it comes with 500G version to boot, bigger than any Apple TV version). I'm very excited with this device, it'll truly bring internet media to the living room. The Myka being an embedded device will also save a lot of power compared to regular PCs, and likely play videos smoother than most PCs, with the Myka's hardware decoding of advanced codecs such as H.264.
Dan from Myka
is on this forum, so any question you have he'll be happy to answer under this topic.
If you've been following our news, there isn't much of any commecial products I've really vouched for, and I do think this is a real deal. Unfortunately I don't have a prototype to test with yet, but when I do I'll write more about it. TorrentFreak has also written
a good overview
of the Myka. So what are you waiting for,
pre-order now for the low low price of $289!
(and up)
</infomercial_sarcasm>
UPDATE:
No, this is
not
a April Fool's joke, it's real.
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