For anyone who runs torrents, today is a sad day. If you don’t know what they are or if you’re a media producer, it’s a victory. Isohunt.com has been shut down.

A little background: Those who remember the glory days of pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing client Napster will be familiar with the point of torrents. Napster didn’t have central servers, it allowed you to connect to the machines of other individual users to download files, usually illegally, including music, movies, and software. Of course, with no central controls, it was also a haven for viruses and other malware that would do terrible damage to someone’s machine. It was a risky activity.

Napster

Nowadays, we have torrents. I don’t condone it, but I understand it. The way it works is as follows: You want to download a movie or television show, say. You would locate the appropriate torrent online (it actually has the .torrent extension), download it, and then click on it, which would open your chosen torrent client software, and the tv show/movie/whatever would download. It would then be added as a ‘seed,’ meaning others could connect to you to download the same file.

Similar to Napster, you are connecting to multiple other users to download the file with no central server which makes the transfer very difficult to track. In fact, ISPs (COX or Comcast or whoever) try to identify those running torrents by the amount of data transmitting over their connection.

Isohunt screen

Isohunt was the main site for locating these torrents, along with a comment section and listing of uploaders and downloaders to help verify the integrity of the file. However, because it was obviously a pirating site, it has agreed to shut down and pay a $10 million fine, although they have no way of paying. The creator of the site tried to argue that it simply listed he torrents without supplying them, as users connected to other users and not the site, but that logic was unsuccessful. It’s hardly the only torrent site out there, so I suspect others will pick up the slack.