IsoHunt to Shut Down as Part of Settlement With Studios (opens in new tab)

Kickasstorrents is the best atm in my opinion. TPB is good but their legal issues make them unreliable technically and I prefer non-magnet links for use with rtorrent.

TPB works fine enough for me.

If you're trying to find anime, I recommend nyaa.se. It's where most fansubbing groups upload torrent files to.

For torrent searching alone, torrentz.eu or bitsnoop. For a community, kickasstorrents.

http://thepiratebay.sx/ ? I admit their search function is terrible, but it has nearly everything. They've had great uptime for a while now too.

There is btdigg.org, which builds its database by crawling the bittorrent distributed hash table.

It appears they were suing the founder, Daniel Fung, personally and in addition to suing the company. The lower-court case is Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung, 06-cv-05578, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). The appeals court case is Columbia Picture Industries v. Fung, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 10-55946 (San Francisco).

http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-...

>The founder wouldn't be responsible for paying the remainder.

I wasn't sure because the article indicates the judgment was against both isoHunt and the founder (Gary Fung).

> let alone profit

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.

Recording studios are not middlemen. That's where records get made. You can only go so far in your bedroom before you need a room with a million dollars of equipment in 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.

I don't think "middle man" is an accurate way to describe record labels. Record labels are mostly about financing recording (just like a bank finances your mortgage), driving the A&R process (this is crucial for pop music) and managing distribution. Publishers are, however, the real middle men with very real profits…

I'd say lawsuits show them "doing something". And pirates are there to hang all their failures on to when they need.

That's brilliant.

Sounds like a lot of effort just to watch some crappy movies.

I hear they made a movie of that. Captain Phillips, I believe it's called?