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One of the largest BitTorrent search engines in the world, Isohunt, has been ordered by a US judge to remove all infringing content from the site. The ruling follows similar ruling against torrent tracker Mininova which has lost a great amount of traffic after complying with the order to remove copyright-infringing links from the site.The problem with this ruling, as it often happens, is the question: what exactly is Isohunt doing that’s illegal, here? According to the judge, Isohunt must cease “creating, maintaining or providing access to browsable website categories of dot-torrent or similar files using or based on infringement-related terms.”
The site’s creator, Gary Fung, claims that complying would be the end of Isohunt. “Filtering against keywords. It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine,” he said. But Fung has an idea how to keep running the site in “lite” mode. It would strip Isohunt of categories, and pretty much everything else besides a big search box.
It’s understandable that the entertainment industry is going after large torrent sites, as they point to thousands of links to copyright-infringing content. But so does Google. Is Isohunt’s search box different than Google’s () search box?