IsoHunt has been largely irrelevant in the US for the last several years since they started filtering US IPs[1] and even before then was a pretty poor selection of torrents with many displaying completely incorrect swarm data.
While I'm not personally bothered by this (from the point of view of someone who used IsoHunt) I do find this settlement quite annoying and Dodd to be completely abysmal as a person.
Kickasstorrents is the best atm in my opinion. TPB is good but their legal issues make them unreliable technically and I prefer non-magnet links for use with rtorrent.
Thanks for the advice. However, all I can find on torrentz.eu are links to other torrent sites. Is it merely an aggregator? I thought they hosted their own torrents, it's less useful if they just send me to thepiratebay anyway.
Ah right -- Torrentz is a meta search engine and doesnt host any torrents.
The way I use it is to search for the torrent, and then use the results to pick a torrent site [that appears in the results] to stick with. Then that gets shut down, I head over to Torrentz, run another search, pick another site and so on..
Ah, I see, that makes sense now. I thought they would host the torrents themselves, but every link that looked like it would be a torrent download was an ad. Your clarification helped, thanks.
What's stunning to me is the $110 million dollar judgment. Did the site really make that much money, or is this a decision designed to condemn the founder to a lifetime of poverty?
The MPAA estimates [1] that the company has $2-4 million in assets, but seems to be asking for the higher number just to send some kind of a message.
If I'm reading correctly, it would be isoHunt, not the founder, responsible for the judgment, so they would just declare bankruptcy, and the MPAA would get whatever assets are left in liquidation. The founder wouldn't be responsible for paying the remainder.
It appears they were suing the founder, Daniel Fung, personally and in addition to suing the company. The lower-court case is Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung, 06-cv-05578, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). The appeals court case is Columbia Picture Industries v. Fung, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 10-55946 (San Francisco).
I don't understand why people think torrent websites are not profitable. Reddit and TF comments always claim it's not-for-profit. IsoHunt might not have as much profit as TPB due to it's constant lawsuits. However, hosting a website like IsoHunt is fairly lightweight in comparison to hosting YouTube. Torrents are tiny files, $30k server bills per month at most, probably they spend $10k/mo. They have ads and paid membership. I doubt they earn $110 million, but I do believe it's likely that they atleast earn $4 mill per year. Keep in mind there website has a lot of traffic.
Who would want to advertise on TPB, though? I have to wonder how much those ads could possibly go for considering it's a website focused on giving you something for free which you would ordinarily have to pay for. I am aware that there are legitimate files on TPB, but most people visit for pirated content.
I've never been a user of TPB so I can't tell you who has advertised there, but there are lots of people out there who will drop $600 on a phone and then jailbreak it so they can pirate 99 cent apps. For a lot of folks there is a clear line between digital content easily gotten and other stuff and they'll pay a lot for the other stuff but will pirate digital content when it is convenient to do so.
I'm not saying this is right, but in my experience it is pretty common. I've witnessed multiple instances of people teaching other people how to torrent including once in a jury lounge in a county courthouse and many times at workplaces that produce digital goods (software) and the general idea seemed to be that if they can get whatever digital thing (eg. the latest episode of Game of Thrones) for free, why not? And yet these are people who drive nice cars, wear nice clothes, and buy lots of expensive gadgets, squarely in the demographic of people that advertisers of non-digital goods like to target.
OTOH, I would suspect TPB (like 4chan) has a problem where advertisers of "upscale" goods just don't want to be associated with the "brand" of the site, regardless of the demographic match. But I don't think the fact that the users are people who want things "for free" is a disqualifier.
"Download accelerators" like installerex.com or "anonymous vpn" (they advertise getprivate.net at the moment) which installs adware. Also, Samsung advertises on TPB ( https://torrentfreak.com/samsung-exposed-as-top-advertiser-o... ). Adware can generate high revenue even on websites like TPB since the adware wont appear on TPB but replace a legitimate sites ad banner. The industry has gotten a little harder mind you, since adsense recently stopped adware software from using adsense's "custom search" ad.
> because that's the image their PR machine has very carefully cultivated
That's perfectly written. TPB once stood for freedom of the internet, even I don't deny that. However, when the original founders gave the website to an offshore company it became a website purely for profit but continued using the "freedom" excuse to create some kind of moral high ground.
Then perhaps they're not really trying to defeat piracy? If they're trying to justify the position of middle-men (say, recording studios in music), then the lawsuits show them adding value. Even when distribution is no longer difficult, thanks to the internet.
Recording studios are not middlemen. That's where records get made. You can only go so far in your bedroom before you need a room with a million dollars of equipment in it.
That's the problem with these modern ideas about people producing content off their own back, it's not actually possible. You can't make star trek on a macbook pro with final cut, and you can't make a highly produced album with 10 musicians in your bedroom.
You can make truly amazing music without the million dollars of equipment though! It's an optional extra, and I would argue that we would not be culturally less rich if those studios went out of existence. Worst case is that we would just have equally good music with a few slightly rough edges. As an example, I still choose Seth Lakeman's early recordings over his more recent even though they were made on a budget of a quarter of a macbook pro.
Unfortunatelly, so few people, even on this board, understand this. And the whole "artists should be poor and art should be free" idea expressed here many times is all that taken to extreme.
I don't think "middle man" is an accurate way to describe record labels. Record labels are mostly about financing recording (just like a bank finances your mortgage), driving the A&R process (this is crucial for pop music) and managing distribution. Publishers are, however, the real middle men with very real profits…
So that they can later justify draconian piracy laws.
"It took us seven years to get this one site down, a site that caused us over 110 million dollars in piracy, and we couldn't even collect any of it.
Within hours of a court order, the site was back up with a new name.
<Thus, you should require ISP's to filter their traffic, or whatever> "
I was hoping to go with a parrot and a speedboat off of the Horn of Africa, but with the economy as it is I've had to settle with a parakeet and a dinghy in the local catchwater.
While I'm not personally bothered by this (from the point of view of someone who used IsoHunt) I do find this settlement quite annoying and Dodd to be completely abysmal as a person.
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[1] http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-redirects-us-visitors-to-lit...