Jun. 09, 2010 - Issue #764: Hot Summer Guide 2010

Enter Sandor

On the Hunt

Canada locks its target on IsoHunt

Once again, the ruling Conservative Party has begun the process of altering the Copyright Act, bringing our country in line with international anti-piracy treaties.

This column isn't about the new get-tough legislation. Here's my one-paragraph take: you can make the fines for breaking DRM as high as $1 million per song, but the laws are only as effective as your regime's willingness to enforce them. Canada can change the rules as much as it wants, but unless it dedicates resources to track piracy the law is simply rhetoric with a signature.

Instead, the column is about the pressure that Ottawa is under to get this amendment signed.

Less than two weeks before the Tories reintroduced amendments to the Copyright Act, Canada was the subject of a report from the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus, a committee of four American senators who have been asked to identify the greatest threats to their country's copyright laws.

Right from paragraph one of the report: "In an effort to combat international copyright piracy by calling attention to countries where piracy has reached alarming levels, the Caucus announced they will closely monitor the serious problems of copyright piracy in the following five countries: China, Russia, Canada, Spain and Mexico."

Yup. We are in the top-five. With a bullet.

"Organized crime has become heavily involved in foreign DVD and CD piracy. Criminals are using the same formidable distribution network and resources that were developed for drug trafficking and arms smuggling. The result, in these and other countries, is a virtual evisceration of the legitimate market for American entertainment."
Wow. Talk about hyperbole. Comparing piracy and illegal downloading to arms smuggling ... whew.

"These countries make the Watch List because of the scope and depth of their piracy problems, which cost US copyright industries and millions of Americans who work in these companies billions of dollars, and because piracy in these countries is largely the result of a lack of political will to confront the problem. These same countries were included on the 2009 Watch List. However, in the last year, no meaningful progress has been made to enforce intellectual property rights."

Make no mistake about it: Canada's ruling party wants to be off the Watch List (I will capitalize it because the Americans capitalized it. Makes it read like Evil Empire or Regime Change.)
And the report specifically targets one Canadian site, IsoHunt (isohunt.com).

According to IsoHunt's own front page, it is "the most advanced BitTorrent search engine. With cross-referenced trackers statistics for all torrents indexed updated to the hour, this is the best P2P files search engine and community."

As of the first week of June, IsoHunt had 1 282 337 members and an average evening (in Canada, that is) will see at least 20 000 of those members online at the same time.

I surfed over to IsoHunt on an evening in the first week of June, at about 11 pm. There were just over 5.1 million active torrents and over 121 million files.

While IsoHunt hasn't yet become popular enough to have its name used as a synonym for "piracy" like Napster, LimeWire and Pirate Bay were able to achieve in their heydays, it is massive.
IsoHunt's own copyright section is so confusing that it suggests the reader contact a law firm for advice if he or she can't get through the legalese.

But this much is clear: "Note that as of Jan 22, 2007, we have moved servers to Canada and are no longer subject to US DMCA laws. We are keeping this copyright policy and procedure modeled after the DMCA, as it worked for us and for copyright owners in the past, and we find this procedure and takedown process to be mostly fair."

Well, IsoHunt may have moved, but it's still on a hit list. And Canada, obviously, is worried.

Steven Sandor is a former editor-in-chief of Vue Weekly, now an editor and author living in Toronto. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus