| | By Nick Farrell in Rome @ Wednesday, March 18, 2009 7:11 AM
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| | A small ISP has bought a case against the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) which, if it loses, could result in Google, MSN, and Yahoo being shut down. ISOhunt has had a gutsful of getting threats from the Canadian Recording Industry Association which claims that it is a pirating site.
 The outfit has gone to court looking for a ruling that it acts in the same way as all the other search engines and if it is a pirate then so are they.
It wants the Supreme Court to decide if search engine companies are liable for the actions of users who share pirated content online.
On the outfit's site http://isohunt.com/ISOHunt president Gary Fung explained that the company decided to launch its own suit after numerous legal threats from the CRIA.
ISOhunt is a search engine for Bittorrent sites and links posted by users, but that it doesn't store any of the content, nor work directly with those sharing the files.
It never touches any of the files which are exchanged over external person-to-person networks and that ISOhunt serves cached links to those files. In court, ISOhunt's lawyer demonstrated to the judge that Google can be used to find all kinds of legally questionable files that can also be found through ISOhunt.
The only thing that ISOhunt does different is that it is used specifically to find Bittorrent files, while Google searches for all file types. The CRIA is spoiling for a fight and has demanded that the ISOhunt's request for a ruling should be converted to a full court case. The court agreed.
Fung said that it was disappointing to see CRIA wanting to unnecessarily complicate the site's well defined petition in attempt to bog us down with time and money through messy discovery and in the process the court's time too.
ISOhunt is also involved in a legal row with the Motion Picture Association of America. Court proceedings there have been underway for more than a year. X
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