VANCOUVER, B.C. — Popular Vancouver-based BitTorrent website isoHunt has agreed to shut down and pay $110 million in damages for massive copyright infringement.
The proposed settlement was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
isoHunt has been wrangling with the Motion Picture Association of America for years in court over millions of torrents of movies and television shows shared online.
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The website is headed up by Vancouver resident Gary Fung and is the 426th-most visited website on the Internet, with 7.5 million unique visitors. It has been operating for over 10 years.
In a statement, Fung said: “I’ve done the best I could pushing the social benefits of bittorrent and file sharing, the searching and sharing of culture itself, but it’s time for me to move on to new software ideas and projects.”
In March, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against isoHunt, stating it is not protected by the “safe harbour” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It said the website knew copyright infringement was happening and profited from it through advertising.
An injunction was actually issued in the U.S. against isoHunt in 2009 but the website continued to operate through Canadian servers.
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