Google's the Largest Torrent Search Engine, isoHunt Tells Court
Last month search giant Google got involved in a BitTorrent case for the first time in its history. The company took interest in the ongoing court case between isoHunt and the MPAA, fearing that the standing injunction …
Context & Ripple Effects
The isoHunt–MPAA case has escalated quickly this year. In January, Google began filtering BitTorrent-related terms out of autocomplete and suggestions, and in February it took the unprecedented step of entering the litigation directly, arguing that the proposed injunction would reach its own search results. That intervention handed isoHunt an opening.
isoHunt's new filing turns Google's own behavior into evidence: if the world's dominant search engine indexes and ranks torrent links, then an injunction against isoHunt alone cannot stop infringement — the indexing layer itself is implicated. It matters because it forces the MPAA to argue against the neutrality of general-purpose search, not just against one torrent site.
First-order effects
- isoHunt gains a potent 'the biggest player does the same thing' defense, shifting the case from whether isoHunt induces infringement to whether any search engine that surfaces torrents does.
- Google's first-ever entry into the case puts its own search results on trial — the standing injunction it fears would apply to how it indexes, not just what isoHunt hosts.
Second-order effects
- The MPAA faces a fork: narrow its liability theory to avoid a ruling that implicates general search engines, or widen the fight to Google itself — with far larger stakes and a far better-resourced defendant.
- Other torrent indexers can adopt the same argument, making every future secondary-liability case against a BitTorrent site harder to win without addressing search giants like Google.
Third-order effects
- If courts accept that indexing torrent links creates exposure for anyone doing it, liability doctrine moves upstream from host sites to search and discovery layers — reshaping how intermediary platforms are judged for the content they make findable.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is migrating from targeting individual torrent sites toward the search and indexing infrastructure that makes infringing content discoverable.