Being a torrent site is pretty rough these days as Canadian torrent site isoHunt can readily attest to. Not only did they lose a recent legal battle in the United States but is seems that 26 major record labels in Canada (wow, didn’t know we had that many) have launched as massive lawsuit, $4 million, against the site.
Of course the Big Four labels: Soney, EMI, Warner and Universal, are leading the charge against Gary Fung and his company, which also run Podtropolis and TorrentBox, claiming these sites facilitate copyright infringement on a massive scale.
“The isoHunt Websites have been designed and are operated by the defendants with the sole purpose of profiting from rampant copyright infringement which defendants actively encourage, promote, authorize, induce, aid, abet, materially contribute to and commercially profit from,” the court filing reads.
“The defendants and users of the isohunt websites act together, in and part of a file-sharing community, to reproduce and distribute plaintiffs’ sound recordings and other copyright content,” the record labels add.
Through this lawsuit the labels hope to permanently shut down isoHunt and Fung’s two other sites. In addition they are asking the British Columbia Court for statutory damages for each of the listed recordings (over 200 in total), which adds up to well over $4 million.
via TorrentFreak
To say that this sucks is an understatement and while Fung’s chances of prevailing are pretty slim I, as a fellow Canadian, wish him all the luck in the world.
