Isohunt judge says MPAA has yet to prove direct infringment
File-sharing sites haven't had a great year, especially in court, but on Thursday they received a smidgen of good news. — The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court to rule that Isohunt was liable …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court to rule Isohunt liable for copyright infringement, but the presiding judge says the studios have yet to prove direct infringement by the BitTorrent search site — a rare courtroom break for file-sharing after a run of losses, including a BitTorrent search site losing its case in court back in December 2007.
The MPAA comes into this fight with a credibility gap of its own making: it has twice admitted flaws in its piracy-loss statistics, correcting mathematical errors in its 2005 study that had claimed college students accounted for 44 percent of domestic losses, and it spent late 2008 celebrating an anti-piracy bill pushed by its lawyer-turned-lobbyist corps. A stalled liability ruling keeps the litigation, rather than legislation, as the decisive front.
First-order effects
- Isohunt gains legal breathing room mid-case: without demonstrated direct infringement, the MPAA cannot yet secure the summary ruling it sought, and the site stays online through the dispute.
Second-order effects
- Studios pressing cases against search and index sites will be pushed toward indirect-liability theories — inducement and contributory claims — since the direct-infringement framing has just shown it can fail at the summary-judgment stage.
Third-order effects
- If judges keep distinguishing 'hosts the files' from 'points to them,' the industry's enforcement playbook shifts structurally toward proving secondary liability standards case by case, raising the evidentiary bar for every future suit against a linking or indexing service.
The trend: Court rulings on file-sharing sites are turning on whether search-and-index services can be held liable without proven direct infringement, pushing studio litigation toward secondary-liability arguments.