A federal court in Los Angeles yesterday permanently enjoined IsoHunt and its principal Gary Fung from assisting users in illegally downloading movies owned by the major studios. The injunction follows Judge Steven Wilson's grant of summary judgment to the studios last November, in which he found that Fung and IsoHunt had induced copyright infringement on a massive scale and was not eligible for the DMCA's safe harbors.
Isohunt Permanent Injunction
h/t Barry Sookman
Friday, May 21, 2010
3 comments:
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How is this enforceable when IsoHunt is a Canadian company, with a Canadian owner, and (I presume) servers located in Canada?
ReplyDeleteI'm quite concerned with the ease with which the judge extends the US law to other countries ("US copyright law does not require that both parties be located in the US"). If all countries successfully exported their local laws to internet sites in other countries, the internet as a global network would quickly break down.
IANAL (and correct me if I'm wrong) but the judge seems to be ordering mandatory filtering based on a list of keywords supplied by the plaintiffs without any legal responsibility for the plaintiffs if perfectly legal, non-infringing content is blocked because of their supplied keywords? They might just as well send the entire dictionary to Gary Fung, I guess.
Not just specific movie titles must be blocked (it's not uncommon for two movies to have the same title, as a couple of IMDB searches reveal), but generic words such telecine, warez and even the word/name Axxo (does that include aXXo?) must be blocked as well.
Lots of non-infringing material will be blocked by this requirement as collateral damage when plaintiffs are granted ownership of, at least, parts of the dictionary by the judge. If this "privatized censorship" principle was extended to other parts of the internet (e.g. Google search engine), it would be a true disaster for the internet as we know it.
Hear! Hear, Jesper Lund.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically, what non-infringing material will be blocked containing the words telecine, warez, or Axxo?
ReplyDelete