While I'm not personally bothered by this (from the point of view of someone who used IsoHunt) I do find this settlement quite annoying and Dodd to be completely abysmal as a person.
_____________
[1] http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-redirects-us-visitors-to-lit...
If I'm reading correctly, it would be isoHunt, not the founder, responsible for the judgment, so they would just declare bankruptcy, and the MPAA would get whatever assets are left in liquidation. The founder wouldn't be responsible for paying the remainder.
[1] http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-says-piracy-damages-cant-be-mea...
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-...
I wasn't sure because the article indicates the judgment was against both isoHunt and the founder (Gary Fung).
I think this is not a coincidence.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-says-piracy-damages-cant-be-mea...
I don't understand why people think torrent websites are not profitable. Reddit and TF comments always claim it's not-for-profit. IsoHunt might not have as much profit as TPB due to it's constant lawsuits. However, hosting a website like IsoHunt is fairly lightweight in comparison to hosting YouTube. Torrents are tiny files, $30k server bills per month at most, probably they spend $10k/mo. They have ads and paid membership. I doubt they earn $110 million, but I do believe it's likely that they atleast earn $4 mill per year. Keep in mind there website has a lot of traffic.
This is how you do it:
That's the problem with these modern ideas about people producing content off their own back, it's not actually possible. You can't make star trek on a macbook pro with final cut, and you can't make a highly produced album with 10 musicians in your bedroom.
"It took us seven years to get this one site down, a site that caused us over 110 million dollars in piracy, and we couldn't even collect any of it. Within hours of a court order, the site was back up with a new name.
<Thus, you should require ISP's to filter their traffic, or whatever> "
The shut down date os Oct 23, 2013 (in a week from now).
For others, use torrentz.eu and Adblock.
ThePirateBay, for one, no longer even stores torrents--only magnet links. I wonder what kind of profit margin their ads pull in...
I'm not saying this is right, but in my experience it is pretty common. I've witnessed multiple instances of people teaching other people how to torrent including once in a jury lounge in a county courthouse and many times at workplaces that produce digital goods (software) and the general idea seemed to be that if they can get whatever digital thing (eg. the latest episode of Game of Thrones) for free, why not? And yet these are people who drive nice cars, wear nice clothes, and buy lots of expensive gadgets, squarely in the demographic of people that advertisers of non-digital goods like to target.
OTOH, I would suspect TPB (like 4chan) has a problem where advertisers of "upscale" goods just don't want to be associated with the "brand" of the site, regardless of the demographic match. But I don't think the fact that the users are people who want things "for free" is a disqualifier.
That's perfectly written. TPB once stood for freedom of the internet, even I don't deny that. However, when the original founders gave the website to an offshore company it became a website purely for profit but continued using the "freedom" excuse to create some kind of moral high ground.
The way I use it is to search for the torrent, and then use the results to pick a torrent site [that appears in the results] to stick with. Then that gets shut down, I head over to Torrentz, run another search, pick another site and so on..