isoHunt

One man, seven years of litigation, $110 million

Shut down
19902026

isoHunt was one of the largest BitTorrent indexes, built and run largely by one Canadian, Gary Fung. It indexed more than 13 million torrents and handled 40 million searches a month. After seven years of litigation with the film studios, Fung agreed to a $110 million judgment and shut it down in October 2013.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2003
  2. January 2003 Launch
    isoHunt goes online

    Gary Fung builds a search tool for files shared over IRC.

  3. 2006
  4. 23 February 2006 Legal
    The MPAA sues

    The film studios file for copyright infringement.

  5. 2008
  6. 19 October 2008 Peak
    One petabyte indexed

    isoHunt passes a petabyte of content in its torrent index.

  7. 2013
  8. 21 March 2013 Legal
    The Ninth Circuit affirms

    The appeal court applies the Grokster inducement standard to a search index.

  9. 17 October 2013 Shutdown announced
    $110 million settlement

    Fung agrees to close isoHunt and his other sites permanently.

  10. 21 October 2013 Shutdown
    isoHunt closes

    Fung takes the site down ahead of the deadline.

The site through time

Browse isohunt.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Gary Fung 2003–2013 Founded Sole founder and operator, based in Vancouver

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Monthly active users ▲ 44 million 2013 Reported Users claimed for isoHunt at the time of the settlement

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Gary Fung settled with the MPAA in October 2013, agreeing to a $110 million judgment and the permanent closure of isoHunt and his other sites, including TorrentBox. isoHunt closed on 21 October 2013, ahead of the deadline.

Our analysis: isoHunt indexed torrents rather than hosting files, and Fung spent seven years arguing that this made him a search engine. The Ninth Circuit disagreed in March 2013, applying the Grokster inducement standard, and the settlement followed within months.

History [edit]

An index, not a warehouse

Gary Fung started isoHunt in January 2003 as a search tool for files on IRC. The name comes from ISO image, the disc copies that were its early speciality. It grew into one of the four largest BitTorrent sites in the world: 13.7 million torrents indexed, 20 million peers, 7.4 million unique visitors a month by 2006, and more than 40 million searches a month.

Fung's defence was structural. isoHunt held no copyrighted files. It held pointers to them, the same way a search engine holds pointers to everything else on the web. Take the index away and the torrents still work.

Seven years

The MPAA sued in February 2006. The district court in California found Fung liable in 2009. He appealed, and in March 2013 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the parts that mattered, applying MGM v. Grokster: the question was not whether isoHunt hosted anything, but whether it had been built and promoted to encourage infringement.

That left nothing to argue about. In October 2013 Fung signed a settlement with six major studios: a $110 million judgment, permanent closure of isoHunt, and the shutdown of his other sites including TorrentBox. He took isoHunt down on 21 October, days before he was required to.

The name kept walking

Within a week of the closure, sites appeared using mirrored isoHunt content. One of them, isohunt.to, became the de facto replacement and is still running. It has no connection to Gary Fung or to anyone who worked on the original, which is worth knowing before you follow a link to it.

Similar projects

Megaupload The file locker the FBI took down 2005–2012 Napster Every song in the world, free, right now 1999–2001 Kazaa The post-Napster free-for-all 2001–2012 LimeWire Half your MP3s, half your malware 2000–2010 Oink's Pink Palace Raided by Interpol, and its founder walked free 2004–2007 Morpheus Cut off its own network overnight, and kept going anyway 2001–2008

Sources [edit]

  1. isoHunt Piracy Settlement: Site Comes Down Earlier Than Required Variety 21 October 2013 [archived]
  2. isoHunt to Shut Down Following $110 Million Settlement with Film Studios Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 1 October 2013 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).