isoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents. With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to it each day as well as deleted. IsoHunt users perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On Oct 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally.

History

IsoHunt was founded in January 2003 by Canadian, Gary Fung. Its name is derived from the term ISO image, used to describe a 1:1 soft copy of a CD or DVD.

On February 23 2006, the MPAA issued a press release stating they were prosecuting isoHunt for copyright infringement. A year later, January 16 2007, isoHunt was taken off-line, stating "Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice."

After a major hardware upgrade, the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007 although experiencing several brief periods of subsequent downtime due to server changes.

Correspondence with the MPAA

Selected items of email correspondence between Gary Fung and the MPAA have been posted on isoHunt.com.

Lawsuit

In February 2006 it was announced that the MPAA had launched legal proceedings against isoHunt, TorrentBox, TorrentSpy, ed2k-it, and several other BitTorrent indexing or tracker sites, alleging that these sites facilitate copyright infringement. On February 28, 2006 a lawsuit was filed against Gary Fung in the District Court of Southern New York. Fung stands to oppose the MPAA on legal grounds.[http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=126788 isoHunt Forums :: View topic - isoHunt tells court why Hollywood is wrong ] On August 18, 2006, Judge Stanton granted a motion for case transfer from New York to California on the grounds of inconvenienced parties and similar cases already filed in the District Court of Central California.

As of June 2008, the case was undergoing Motions of Summary Judgment and preparing for trial.

DMCA Takedown Notices

isoHunt has a history of complying with DMCA takedown notices, and has worked with various copyright owners in the past, such as the RIAA and Microsoft. The site uses a takedown process modelled on the DMCA, even though the servers were relocated to Canada in January 2007 where the DMCA does not apply.isoHunt DMCA Copyright Policy

Lawsuit against the CRIA

On September 8th, 2008 Gary Fung announced on the Isohunt front page that he had made a preemptive move against an impending lawsuit from the CRIA by filing a petition to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. isoHunt argues that it is merely a search engine to find torrents that are scattered around the web, much the same as Google or any other search engine can be used in the same way.