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isoHunt restored after shutdown

By | Published on Thursday 31 October 2013

isoHunt

Apt for Halloween I suppose, popular file-sharing website isoHunt is back from the dead, wandering around the internet zombie style, sucking more blood out of the bleeding necks of the copyright giants that killed it with one final swoop earlier this month. Do zombies suck blood? You see, I’m regretting this analogy already and I’m not even at the end of the first paragraph.

As previously reported, isoHunt, one of the longest running file-sharing sites, went offline earlier this month after its founder, Gary Fung, finally gave up after years of fighting litigation from the American movie industry and the Canadian music business. The US courts said that isoHunt and Fung were liable for the copyright infringement the service enabled, despite the file-sharing company wheeling out the usual “we don’t host the files” and “our service has legitimate uses” excuses.

But any celebrating at the movie studios or record labels may have been premature, because it emerged earlier this week that the site had been relaunched at a new domain – isohunt.to – with about three quarters of the data from the original site in place. Fung is not involved in the relaunched isoHunt, which has been set up using data pulled from the original site’s servers in the days before it closed.

As also previously reported, Fung actually shut down his site earlier than planned after discovering his servers were being scraped by third parties, although the Archive Team project which was known to be making a copy is seemingly not behind the restoration of the site.

In a statement to Torrentfreak, one of the people who is said: “isoHunt has been a great part of the torrent world for more than a decade. It’s a big loss to everyone who used it over the years. Media corporations don’t like innovation or competition and isoHunt’s fate is one of the examples of how they deal with it. isoHunt can definitely be called a file-sharing icon. People got used to it and they don’t want to simply let it go. We want those people to feel like being at home while visiting isohunt.to. The main goal is to restore the website with torrents and provide users with the same familiar interface”.

Not all the data from the original was secured before Fung flipped the switch, so some parts of the new site are currently empty, though it is thought that most of the content link data – arguably the most important bit – is still there. The Motion Picture Association Of America, which led the legal battle against Fung, will no doubt have its lawyers on this pronto, though if the new site sits beyond the jurisdiction of the US courts forcing isoHunt v2 offline won’t be so easy.



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