David Flynn12 November 2009, 9:00 AM
While the stoush continues over The Pirate Bay, fellow Torrent hub IsoHunt is rolling out its own ‘social file sharing’ project.
Two Scandinavian ISPs have won the latest round of court battles in attempts to shut down popular Swedish Bit Torrent hub The Pirate Bay.
A ruling in Norway’s district court earlier this week will allow Norwegian ISP Telenor to continue allowing its customers to access The Pirate Bay, despite efforts by the entertainment industry to have Telenor block the site.
Telenor claimed that there was no legal basis requiring ISPs “to act in the interests of digital intellectual-property rights holders” by blocking individual Web sites.
The following day, Swedish ISP Black Internet won the right to appeal against a court order to disconnect The Pirate Bay.
The original judgement was passed earlier this year when Black Internet provided hosting for The Pirate Bay, although within hours of Black Internet complying with the ruling (in order to avoid a $75,000 fine) The Pirate Bay had switched to a new host in The Netherlands.
Black Internet subsequently launched an appeal against the ruling, with the ISP’s CEO Victor Möller saying “This is the first time in Sweden that an operator has been ordered to stop delivering Internet to someone. We want to know if it’s correct to do so.”
“This is such a fundamentally important issue as far as ISP responsibility goes. It is not important for us if we can deliver bandwidth to The Pirate Bay or not – it is about the principle” Möller said.
Meanwhile, BT hub
IsoHunt has opened
invitations to its new
Hexagon ‘social file sharing’ service in order to ‘stress test the system’.
Hexagon sports a predictably clean Web 2.0 design
Hexagon revolves around private and public groups which users can create themselves and also control who is invited to join.
“These groups can be public, based on interests or made by independent bands, film makers, game studios, etc. for promotional purposes” explains the team at IsoHunt.
“ They can also be made private, so you can very easily and comfortably invite your friends to a private group for sharing your private videos and such. You can do this on YouTube and similar sites, but with BitTorrent, you can share any type of file and not only video, and there's no restriction on file format or size (as much as you can seed). In Hexagon groups, you can also share both torrents as well as flash videos so you get the best of both worlds.”