Recording Industry Targets Torrents

• By David Hamilton, November 07, 2008

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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After receiving letters from the Canadian Recording Industry Association in May insisting he eliminate links to all copyrighted material, the owner of torrent search engine Isohunt.com (www.isohunt.com), Gary Fung, has asked the British Columbia Supreme Court to decide whether his website violates the Copyright Act of Canada, according to a report from Canada's Globe and Mail.

The Thursday news report states that the 25-year-old British Columbian said he is "merely an indexer" like Yahoo! or Google, claiming that his site does not host any illegal content.

"What he's asking for is a declaration that by operating the website he is not infringing Canada's Copyright Act and that he's not infringing the copyrights of any of the members of CRIA," Fung's lawyer Arthur Grant told the Globe and Mail. "CRIA has written to him advising him that in their opinion, by operating the website, he is violating the act, and they have threatened legal action."

In an online statement, Fung explains in detail his contact with CRIA since October 2006, when the organization's anti-piracy department first sent Fung a notice to take down certain torrent song links, which he did. However, the notices in May 2008 were more blunt cease and desist letters. "They harassed our ISP with accusations of hosting a den of thieves," Fung writes.

The CRIA has shown its influence before, forcing torrent tracker Demonoid (www.demonoid.com) offline in November 2007 after the CRIA threatened to take legal action against its operators. It has since gone back online in April after leaving Canada.

However, Canada is not the only country cracking down on torrent sites. Last year, an Icelandic court shut down the country's largest torrent site Torrent.is, and there was suspicion that it would have to pay a fine to copyright owners; however, the order was reversed in May when the Icelandic Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs had no legal ground to pursue the injunction that brought the tracker down.

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