Founder IsoHunt settles with Canadian music industry for 46 million euros

Gary Fung, the Canadian founder of the torrent search engine IsoHunt, which was taken offline in 2013, has closed his latest lawsuit. He has to pay the equivalent of 46 million euros to the Canadian music industry. Fung says he has never handed over user data.

Fung explains the lawsuit’s conclusion in a Medium blog post on Friday. The 66 million Canadian dollars he has to pay consists of 55 million dollars in damages, 10 million in punitive damages and finally one million dollars to pay the costs of the lawsuit. He also has to pay interest on all this.

In 2008, Fung tried to have his website declared not illegal by a Canadian court because it does not distribute copyrighted material itself. However, the action was unsuccessful.

In 2013, the founder of the torrent site also had to pay 80 million euros to the American film industry. In any case, that was the amount reported; behind closed doors, these kinds of amounts can be lower. The publication of a higher amount is then intended to deter others. It is not known whether this is also the case in the Canadian lawsuit.

The then-popular torrent search engine IsoHunt went online in 2003 and was taken offline in 2013. The two lawsuits against Fung ran from 2006 to the present, ie ten years. Today, popular copies of the website can still be found at similar URLs, but that’s not what Fung’s original torrent search engine is about.

Fung begins his blog post by declaring that now that the lawsuits are over, he is “finally free.” At the end he mentions that his sarcasm is not always as clear as he thinks. The Canadian says he is now working on a legal project. He builds an app called AAG, or App to Automate Googling. With this he wants to streamline internet searches on smartphones. He is looking for testers, he reports in the same post.