Torrent Search Engines Unlawful, U.S. Judge Says

You know, I use Torrent search engines to time-shift TV (we pay for pretty much every piece of premium cable except Cinemax), and so I get a lot of value out of sites like Isohunt, but even so it's hard to escape the fact that these sites are deliberately coming as close to the line of "overtly criminal" as you can get.<p>Because, give me a f'ing break: the first link in the categorized breakdown of indexed Torrents on Isohunt is to "Videos/Movies"; it is only the fact that Isohunt is a <i>crappy</i> torrent search site that results in that link <i>not</i> being entirely composed of trivially regexable horrific copyright violations.<p><i>For what it's worth, I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting"; to whatever extent that that's a reasonable definition of what I'm doing, it also ignores the fact that many (most?) torrent peers haven't paid for the content in any form and are free-riding with my assistance.</i>

<i>Fung was “fostering a community that encouraged — indeed, celebrated — copyright infringement.”</i><p>True. Too bad that's perfectly within his rights. "Free speech", have you heard of it?

"The more prohibitions there are,<p>The poorer everyone will be.<p>The more weapons are used,<p>the greater the chaos will be in society.<p>The more that people seek "knowledge" for its own sake,<p>the stranger the world will become.<p>The more laws that are made,<p>the greater the number of criminals." - The Tao<p>The MIAA/RIAA wishes to impose more regulations regarding the distribution of cultural goods. This mean less ease of access to cultural goods. Everyone will be poorer, checked.<p>Lawsuit is used to coax individuals into paying rather than focusing their energy on adapting their business model to the internet. Weapon usage, checked.<p>This cause chaos in society by inciting an angry crowd of consumers who felt the injustice resulting from agression. So chaos does follows, check.<p>Hmm, don't know about what knowledge seeking means, but I'll try. Everyone is asking the question which length of years is correct for copyright to maximize economic benefit. It can be said that they seek knowledge without questioning the reason "why?". A check, maybe?<p>Copyright laws make everyone a criminal when they merely copy something. With a push for more power to punish people, this mean more force of law. So the law is making people into criminals, checked.<p>So in the end, what the court did is rules in favor of chaos over harmony.

Now that we have DHT + PEX + magnet links (<a href="http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and-magnet-links-explained" rel="nofollow">http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and...</a>), someone should come up with distributed torrent search and make the whole chain distributed.

Pretty sad. Google links almost completely to copyrighted content. Why isn't it illegal?<p>This article reads much more like a condemnation of ISOHunt specifically, though.

Tell that to Google.

"These technological details are, at their core, indistinguishable from the previous technologies"<p><i>cough cough</i>

All this is doing is just giving the bright minds behind the services that we love so much reasons to move and incorporate offshore and stop worrying about the evil power organizations such as MPAA and RIAA have to sue them, shut them down, send them to prison, you name it.<p>File sharing is not stealing. File sharing is caring.<p><a href="http://www.vincentchow.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.vincentchow.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy...</a>

Then the popular torrent search engines should become really crappy general purpose search engines, that just happen to be good for torrent searching.

I love ISOHunt! Confound those lawmakers...