IsoHunt – a peer-to-peer file sharing platform created 10 years ago by a teenager in Richmond – followed Napster into history Monday.
Following a seven and a half year court battle with eight Hollywood heavyweights – including Disney Enterprises Inc., Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. – isoHunt creator Gary Fung shut the site down Monday.
Its shuttering came on the heels of a court ruling in the U.S. in which Fung and his company, Web Technologies Inc., were fined $110 million for copyright infringement. Other sites owned by Fung – torrentbox.com, podtropolis.com and ed2k-it.com – were also shut down.
In an email, Fung told Business in Vancouver that isoHunt's closure meant job losses for 10 employees.
"We had 10 employees, about half local in Vancouver and the rest from different parts of the world," he wrote. "With the shutdown, I naturally have to let them go. We didn't have an office, we were all telecommuting."
Asked if he had either the means or intention of paying the $110 million fine levied by the Central District Court of California, Fung said "no comment." It's not clear what legal mechanism American courts could use to enforce fines on a Canadian citizen.
Fung was 19 when he founded isoHunt while still a student at the University of BC in 2003. It was one of the oldest BitTorrent sites – something Fung believes may have made him more of a target than several other BitTorrent search sites.
"There's isn't any major BitTorrent site still running that started almost 11 years ago," he said. "The entertainment industries are always looking for scapegoats for their business and political problems, and they started suing me and my company 7.5 years ago."
The site used advertising to generate revenue. At its peak last year, Fung said the site had 40 million users per month.
BitTorrent is a protocol for transferring large files using multiple users rather than a central server. Although it has legitimate applications, BitTorrent file sharing platforms are largely used to download movies, music and other copyrighted material from other users.
Fung has maintained all along that isoHunt is no different from a search engine that simply allows users to search for files – movies for example – and download them from other users.
But U.S. courts have ruled otherwise, saying isoHunt helped facilitate the pirating of copyrighted material.
Asked what he plans to do next, now that isoHunt is dead, Fung said he is working on another venture, but would not disclose what it may be.
