VANCOUVER TECH ICON SETTLES PIRACY SUIT
Gary Fung, the Vancouverbased founder of the nowdefunct BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, has settled his second and final lawsuit with the music industry.
The $66-million settlement with the record company trade association Music Canada closes a decade-long legal battle that pitted a recent computer science graduate in his 20s against the full force of an industry being gutted by the Internet. IsoHunt didn’t host pirated files directly, but Music Canada argued it profited by making them easy to find.
In an interview, Fung said he was glad the saga was over.
“I obviously can’t say I’m happy about the actual damages,” he said, “but I’m happy I’ve put all the lawsuits behind me so I can move on.”
Fung started isoHunt in 2003, two years after music file-sharing service Napster was similarly sued into oblivion. The Internet had made it possible for people to upload music and movies, and share them with strangers for free, a practice that was either as innocent as making a mix tape or as nefarious as robbing a record store, depending on who you asked.
Fung said he saw an opportunity to simplify the frustrating experience of hunting for content on file-sharing sites by creating a search engine that did it all in one place. It worked, and people loved it — for years, isoHunt was one of the most popular torrent search engines on the Internet, with 100 million unique visitors a year.
That popularity brought the company to the notice of the music and movie industries, who were grappling with how to deal with the phenomenon. It’s debatable how much impact piracy was having on revenue, but one academic study found file sharing was responsible for a 13 per cent drop in album sales among some customers between 1999 and 2003.
IsoHunt was shut down in 2013, after Fung reached a US$110-million settlement with the Motion Picture Association of America. In a court filing, the association said although US$5 million would be enough to bankrupt the company, it was seeking far more than that to serve as a deterrent to others.
In a release announcing its settlement with isoHunt, Music Canada said the $66-million penalty “sends a strong message that anyone who builds a business by encouraging and enabling copyright infringement faces legal consequences for these actions.”
Canada passed the Copyright Modernization Act in 2012 in an attempt to bring the law up to date with the realities of the 21st century.
The legislation made it illegal to operate a service whose primary purpose is to enable copyright infringement and required Internet service providers to forward notices to customers suspected of illegal downloading.
Fung said he’s glad Canada prevented copyright holders from getting personal information about suspected pirates without a court order, but he thinks the law remains murky.
“It’s still so vague, what’s legal and what’s not, in terms of sharing files,” he said. “I just hope there’s more clarification about this type of sharing among friends.”
He declined to comment on whether he can pay the millions he owes Music Canada and the MPAA.
He said he’s already moving on to his next project: improving the process of searching for information using a smartphone.
“I hope, this time, I strike a chord similarly with people who are frustrated,” he said.