U.S. Court: Isohunt has to Shut Down
Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District issued a permanent injunction against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies.
Context & Ripple Effects
This injunction is the endgame of a case that turned decisively last December, when Judge Wilson's court ruled on summary judgment under a 'you induce, you lose' theory — after earlier signaling in August 2009, per CNET's report, that the MPAA had yet to prove direct infringement. The studios ultimately won not on hosting infringing files but on Isohunt's role as an index pointing to them.
The ruling also extends a line of California federal decisions the MPAA has been building since 2007, when TorrentSpy was ordered to hand over user data and later lost its own suit. With a UK court having ruled against a Usenet indexing site in March 2010, rights holders are now winning at the index layer on both sides of the Atlantic.
First-order effects
- Garry Fung must immediately block access to virtually all Hollywood movies on Isohunt, effectively gutting the site's core catalog overnight.
- The MPAA gains an enforceable judgment against a top torrent index without ever prevailing on a direct-infringement claim — the inducement theory did the work.
Second-order effects
- Traffic and upload activity shift toward remaining torrent sites and trackers, which now inherit both the audience and the legal target on their backs.
- Other index operators face a clear template: Judge Wilson's injunction shows courts will order site-wide filtering or shutdown at the directory level, raising shutdown risk for every similar service.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, liability for file-sharing settles permanently on the search-and-index layer rather than on individual sharers, making filtering infrastructure a condition of operating any large-scale content directory.
- Cross-jurisdiction wins — California's inducement ruling alongside the March 2010 UK decision against a Usenet indexer — point rights holders toward coordinated multi-country enforcement as standard practice.
The trend: Courts are shifting copyright enforcement upstream to the indexing and discovery layer, holding directories liable for inducing infringement even where they host no infringing files themselves.