RIP Isohunt: You Are Missed

You will be missed by those people who, I suppose, enjoy acquiring/finding/sharing .torrents.

This was a bit of news that might have gone under your radar, but moderately popular torrent site Isohunt shut down about a week ago. Why? Because business cartels managed to utilize the courts to not only force the site offline but also sue its owner for more than one hundred million dollars in (USD most likely), because the music industry is hurting for money, and piracy is a pretty clear infringement on property, and most of all because it's a show of power that might remind torrent fans of the Napster Trials of the 2000s.

Isohunt was moderately useful to find things that Pirate Bay might not have had, as well as very useful whenever Pirate Bay was down. It was in my world and existed there as a respectable site, not particularly shady or anything. What else is there to say? There are some questions, I suppose.

Will the fight against media piracy be won or lost? Did the owner of Isohunt have Bitcoin among his assets? Will he be ruthlessly pursued as he tries to avoid reparations he will need to go into serious debt to afford? Wikipedia reports that the owner of Isohunt may only have 3 or 4 million to make repayments and live on. The owner also very righteously admitted that most of the torrents available on Isohunt were widely available... but it was that 5% that contributed to a healthy torrent ecology.

With each industry victory, the remaining .torrent players become bigger and the number of worthwhile torrent sites decreases. For, you see, Isohunt was forthright and not malicious, whereas a lot of .torrent sites are quite clearly crooked, shady, hard to use, and dishonest. Therefore I would like to thank Isohunt and its legally embattled owner for their service to the freedom of information and enduring human activity of piracy.

Bittersweet stuff. It was a good run, it was a good service, and people who want free data are still winning the war – until the RIAA and NSA co-operate to destroy freedom sometime in the corporate information/surveillance state future.