I’ll preface this by mentioning that I have a very limited experience with downloading torrents, although I do have a pretty firm grasp of the technology and the process involved to do so. I came across an interesting article about Canadian entrepreneur Gary Fung who is a co-founder of one of the leading torrent sites called ‘IsoHunt.com’ (12 million monthly visitors) which was started while he was attending the University of British Columbia and currently indexes the locations for approx. 500 terabytes worth of digital content – primarily movies, plenty of illegal copies of such. Not surprisingly, the lawsuit-happy Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is suing Gary for breach of copyright. Gary’s position is that IsoHunt is basically just a tour guide. You can’t download the movies from his site, but you can download a digital map (torrent) from his site that will tell your computer where to go to get the movie, legal or otherwise. Maybe the downloading of the torrent file is his biggest legal hurdle, but it sure seems that he has a winning case provided he can put food on the table while the MPAA lawyers try to starve him out to the tune of $22,000 a month in legal bills – it’s a good thing he lives rent-free with his parents. While the whole P2P debate has a long history and received no shortage of press, it does bring up an interesting issue. At what point does a P2P or discovery service become a plain-old, perfectly legal search engine? For example, on Calacanis’ Mahalo.com, the #1 most-trafficked page on his site today is “How To Download Free Music“. Sure, he has all of the legal-friendly platitudes on there, but plenty of information on that guide page ‘could’ be used as a road map to download illegal music. Is Mahalo breaking the law? Of course not. What about MP3 aggregators? Again, totally legal, because no files are being hosted or downloaded. Copyright is in flux, and this is just another example of someone who is getting caught in the undercurrent of change. Last word on this goes to Gary…

“The natural progression, as we’ve seen with YouTube and MySpace, is a lot more media distribution is going to be done online, and that’s going to converge with the client and P2P technologies….I think copyright holders will have to accept the internet as a new way of distributing content and not just look at it as a liability”