
MPAA Demands Source Code of isoHunt’s “Failing” Piracy Filter - Lightning
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-demands-source-code-of-isohunts-failing-piracy-filter-130720/
======
MWil
In the legal world, this is why something called "specific performance" is
rarely ever enforced by the court. Say I hire someone to build me a house and
they fail to do so for whatever reason. Should the court really be in charge
of babysitting and making sure this party builds me the house I ordered in
exactly the way I ordered it? Probably not.

This filter was a bad idea from the beginning. If someone had ordered my
business to do something like this, I would have said "You build a working
filter without any help from me and you can order me to install it if it is
compatible, but you can't order me to build a working filter because that's
indentured servitude"

~~~
shasta
Except the order wasn't to build a filter, full stop. It was to build a filter
if isohunt wants to continue operating in the US.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
That doesn't seem any different in practice than ordering them to build the
filter under penalty of a fine equivalent to 100% of their US-derived income.

~~~
eru
Not quite. The fine would be conceivably bigger than 100%.

------
kristopolous
This page fails to load phenomenally in a number of browsers (might be because
the disqus comments are baked into the page load), here's the copy:

The major hollywood movie studios have filed a motion for contempt against the
popular torrent site isoHunt, arguing that a court-ordered piracy filter is
not working properly. The MPAA informs the court that isoHunt has
“deliberately engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective” and
wants the site to turn over its source code to prove their claims. In
addition, the MPAA wants millions of dollars in compensation for the damages
the studios have suffered through the isoHunt site.

isohuntAlmost three years ago the U.S. District Court of California ordered
BitTorrent search engine isoHunt to start filtering its search results.

The injunction was the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the
MPAA that began back in 2006. The Court ordered the owner of isoHunt to censor
the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by
the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S.

isoHunt implemented the filter for U.S. visitors which allowed it to remain
online, but at the same time owner Gary Fung took his case to the Court of
Appeals. Through the appeal, isoHunt hoped to reverse the permanent
injunction, but this didn’t come to pass.

With the appeal concluded the movie studios are now asking for a summary
judgment, hoping that the court awards them compensation for the many pirated
movies that were downloaded via the isoHunt site. In addition, the MPAA has
filed a motion for contempt claiming that the current keyword filter on the
isoHunt Lite site is not doing its job.

“The Isohunt Lite filtering problems are too serious and consistent to be mere
matters of innocent ‘mistake’ or unavoidable filtering ‘leakage’ as Defendants
have variously claimed,” the MPAA tells the court, suggesting that isoHunt is
making these mistakes intentionally to keep up its profits.

“The record to date supports the inference that Defendants have deliberately
engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective in preventing access to
Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. As the Court found, because Defendants profit
from infringement, they have a powerful economic incentive to continue
providing users with access to Plaintiffs’ popular movies and television
programs.”

Backed up by screenshots, the MPAA cites several examples of popular movies
whose titles are on the ban list, but are still available thought the site.

“One work on Plaintiffs’ title list is the popular film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ for
which Plaintiffs provided Defendants the movie title, release date and media
type. Yet, the movie is available to any Isohunt Lite user who looks for it.
Typing the term ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ into Isohunt Lite’s search box returns
innumerable dot torrent files for the movie.” MPAA’s screenshot of isoHunt

zerodark

The movie studios argue that nearly all movies are still accessible through
the site, which would mean that isoHunt is not in compliance with the
injunction. While isoHunt has claimed that these are mere mistakes, the MPAA
believes that it supports their motion for contempt.

“These are not isolated instances. Virtually every movie Plaintiffs looked for
using Isohunt Lite returned innumerable dot torrent files for Plaintiffs’
copyrighted works. Defendants’ so-called filter does not even appear to block
access to dot torrent files that match a movie’s exact title,” MPAA writes.

“Facially, such a filter is wholly ineffective and cannot be the basis of
compliance with an injunction that enjoins Defendants from ‘hosting, indexing,
linking to, or otherwise providing access to any Dot-torrent or similar files
that correspond, point or lead to any of the Copyrighted Works.’”

The MPAA asks the court to order isoHunt to hand over all filter-related
source code and databases, so the movie studios can show that the filtering
failures are not “innocent mistakes” or “mere unavoidable leakage.”

TorrentFreak asked isoHunt owner Gary Fung for a comment on the allegations
put forward by the MPAA, but he chose not to respond at this time.

It is clear that the MPAA is not letting the isoHunt case rest just yet. In
addition to the motion for contempt there is also a motion for summary
judgment pending. The movie studios are currently in the process of
calculating the damages they have suffered as a result of isoHunt’s
operations, which is expected to be in the millions.

The MPAA previously won a $110 million judgment against the TorrentSpy site,
and it’s expected the damages claimed against isoHunt will be in the same
range, or perhaps even higher.

------
belorn
Whats the case history for demanding source code? I remember airplane crash
victims asking for the source code for the plane computer, people demanding
source code for voting machines, and others demanding source code for medical
instruments in malpractice suits.

Did anyone of those actually get the court to force disclosure of source code,
in what capacity/scope, and did anyone win a legal case because the software
was found as faulty after source code was disclosed and inspected?

------
tjtrapp
It's funny to me that the MPAA has the time and resources for a code review on
3rd party code but still has yet to build an app that allows me to pay for
streaming their content.

~~~
cclogg
I am personally not a huge fan of streaming, I'd prefer to just pay a decent
price per movie (not $30 like Blurays) and get a nice HD file with no DRM, no
ads, and freedom to do whatever I want with the file (like iTunes music I
guess? Though I don't even want to use that service... I prefer to just find
songs on Youtube now... convenience I guess).

Convenience really is my big issue; Steam has proven it's true for others too.
It's much quicker to get a movie via tpb or where ever, than to go hunting
around the few remaining video stores or try to find any legit place online
(especially if it's a foreign film or an obscure 70's one).

The other annoying thing is Youtube take-downs. There have been so many times
where I wanted to show a clip of some show/movie to a friend and then couldn't
find it on Youtube anymore :(.

~~~
tjtrapp
I like the idea of downloads.

~~~
beedogs
This is why I enjoy torrent sites.

------
jrockway
How exactly did the courts get into the business of censoring websites,
anyway? Is it not isoHunt's first amendment right to tell people where to get
pirated movies from?

Follow-up question: how come the Usenet providers are not caught in this
dragnet?

~~~
benologist
Courts got into the business of censoring websites when they found websites
got into the big business of infringing other's rights.

Usenet is not immune: [http://torrentfreak.com/newzbin2-the-mpaas-usenet-
enemy-1-ca...](http://torrentfreak.com/newzbin2-the-mpaas-usenet-
enemy-1-calls-it-quits-121129/)

~~~
jrockway
To me, the problem is that torrents are descriptions of how to get the
content, not the content. It's like banning a chemistry textbook because you
could learn how to make a bomb.

~~~
anigbrowl
_the problem is that torrents are descriptions of how to get the content, not
the content_

For all practical purposes, they have become the same thing. Courts are not
obliged to accept carefully worded definitions when the technology involved is
a mere instrumentality.

Also, even if we do accept the description argument, you still have to
consider that it's a description of how to obtain someone else's property. The
first amendment doesn't give you the right to market detailed instructions on
how to rob individual branches of a bank, for example, which is loosely
analogous to IP infringement (insofar as physical currency is only a
representation of a currency abstraction, this is actually a good parallel).

~~~
jrockway
_The first amendment doesn 't give you the right to market detailed
instructions on how to rob individual branches of a bank, for example_

Citation needed.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
[http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf](http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf)

Relevantly, the section reading:

The Supreme Court held that "advocacy of the use of force or of law violation"
is protected unless "such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing
imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

This was specifically referring to the case the famous line about "shouting
fire in a theater and causing a panic" not being protected speech; it would
certainly seem to me that attempting to "market detailed instructions on how
to rob individual branches of a bank" would match the exception above. You can
publish material telling someone how to make an explosive device, but material
telling readers precisely where best to put that explosive device to crack
open the safe at the Bank of America office on Fifth Street? Probably not
going to survive a legal challenge.

~~~
jrockway
I've never seen a case where printed material has been considered to "incite
or produce imminent lawless action". If I recall correctly, the classic
example of "imminent lawless action" is when the KKK is having a rally and
they start yelling about lynching someone. That's different from a book about
how to hang someone; the government itself publishes material on how to kill
people (capital punishment and all that).

~~~
anigbrowl
All the examples you're offering are generic - how to kill 'someone', or
'people'. That's not the same a book on 'how to kill jrockway' that goes into
copious detail about how to kill you, specifically, in the most expeditious
manner possible. The example I mentioned above was about a publication on how
to rob _individual_ bank branches - which security guards to target, where the
safe was located, where to cut the wires for the power or security cameras,
and so on. There's a significant qualitative difference here, because in these
examples you're enormously increasing the probability of a crime being
committed, possibly up to the point of conspiracy.

------
beedogs
Here's what I'd submit to them:

    
    
        10 PRINT "GET FUCKED"
        20 GOTO 10

------
tracker1
Maybe IsoHunt should demand a $10 million bond be posted against the release
of their very proprietary and important intellectual property?

~~~
anigbrowl
Pointless. The court can simply take the evidence under seal, which is how
these things are normally done.

------
codewiz
[THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO A DMCA COPYRIGHT CLAIM]

