isoHunt Goes “Lite” for US Users

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/88578/isohunt-goes-lite-for-us-users/

BitTorrent tracker site begins redirecting US visitors to isohunt.hk, a stripped down version that searches the Internet for content instead, after court ordered injunction covering acts of infringement that take place in the US.

Last week US District Judge Stephen V. Wilson, who previously ruled that isoHunt infringed copyright and intentionally encouraged piracy, issued a permanent injunction against the BitTorrent tracker site. He demanded that Fung not only remove torrent trackers that link to copyrighted material, but also to filter “infringement-related terms” from the site.

However, the ruling clearly states that the “injunction only covers acts of infringement that take place in the United States,” and it would seem only a matter of time before US visitors were treated to an alternative version that complies with Judge Wilson’s order. That time is now with the introduction of isoHunt “lite” – isoHunt.hk. Although, Fung insists that “despite rumors that we are ordered to keyword filter for US, there’s only a proposed order, no actual order,” US visitors are redirected nonetheless while the “issues are still being debated in further court briefs.”

“We have not done any keyword filtering and is fighting all we can not to, because we believe search terms are ambiguous by nature, and any requirement to keyword filter is a violation of freedom of speech and amounts to no less than censorship,” adds Fung. “There is much non-infringing uses of BitTorrent technology and we hope you will be able to continue to use isoHunt for these uses, free of constraints by large holes in the english dictionary because your search triggered a keyword in a title of one of the million movies that have been produced.”

He insists that isoHunt.hk is intended to “protest the possibility” US law could force it to keyword filter for US visitors, and that its real purpose is to show the similar experience Google had in China where authorities demanded it censor keywords as well.

“The DMCA mandates with reason that copyright notice and takedown requested by copyright holders be done under penalty of perjury with accurate identification, with standard practice of URLs, not broad mucking with the dictionary,” he points out.

In any event, here’s what US visitors are treated to (myself included):



And the rest of the world:



The the funny thing is that circumventing the redirect is pretty simple. All you need to do is spend a few seconds finding a decent proxy or a free VPN connection.
That’s what really makes the entertainment industry look so foolish in all of this. For all its efforts against isoHunt all it gets in the end is an easily bypassed Google-esque redirect.

There are always ways and means.