Isohunt gets a permanent injunction; may have to close down

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newteevee.com reports that Isohunt, a popular torrent site, was issued a permanent injunction by US Judge Stephen Wilson of the District Court of California, Southern District. The injunction forces owner Garry Fung to immediately block access to most copyrighted content. Judge Wilson is the same Judge that ruled in favor of studios in a 2006 lawsuit against Isohunt that forced Fung to build 'Isohunt lite", a smaller, less robust version of the site that US users were redirected to. Wilson's response to the 'lite' version was easy to predict: "Defendants’ proposed ‘primal’ or ‘lite’ website contains all of the same indexing and searching functions as the original websites, only with a different interface for the users to operate.”

The injunction compels Fung to not only take down whatever infringing material he's currently hosting, but to also actively filter out content and discourage illegal distribution in the future, be it in the form of manually taking down questionable content or by setting up very strict filters to make sure nothing illegal is uploaded.

While a solution that satisfies all the conditions of the the injunction is theoretically doable, it's highly unlikely that Fung will go through with such an active and restrictive filtering and moderation system without simply abandoning the site altogether. Fung has not yet released a statement regarding his intentions.
 
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