I woke up on 12 June 2012 and found out that Pirate Bay
was blockaded and this morning I visited Facebook and found that isoHunt is
shut down, and this time for good.
I used to be a netter and really depending on those kinds
of site, thought I’m no more spending my 24 hours in front of laptop and
surfing the internet, I know some of you might be mad about this shut down
since isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent sites.
Speaking of piracy especially from internet; sometimes I feel
hopeless even the mighty Google found it is really difficult to fight against
it because the only possible solution for piracy to be extinct is by eliminating
the pirate or all contents to be pirated; which is impossible.
Somehow, piracy culture reminds me of Monsters you found
in all Rick Riordan’s books. No matter how hard heroes has tried to kill them
and send them back to Tartarus, they always be able to regenerate and coming back
to the world. The theory is the same; however does it mean that you should give
up on piracy? Well, the same question then, should heroes give up on monsters
and let them lurking in the world? I don’t think so. Monsters might be able to
regenerate but also heroes, there will always heroes to fight monsters and in
some circumstances heroes become friend of monsters.
Here we are as the heroes or as monsters? I know it’s a
trick question because I’m not a hero but I don’t want to be a monster either,
but I could live with half hero and half monster. Yeah, since there is always
two sides in every person’s soul, well at least I don’t want to be a hypocrite.
Indonesia is not a country where you could find cheap movie, music and books
and I do piracy like downloading ebooks and epubs but at the same time I also
the member of some major online bookstores in Indonesia and purchased bunch of
books for my collection every month, but my needs of books is not once a month
but like every day or even every minute, so I need solution to get book fast
and cheap. That’s why I call myself half hero and half monster.
Interesting thing about isoHunt is, well like the others
similar websites, they are fighting for “Freedom of Information”, could anybody
explain to me regarding this matter? What kind of freedom they really want and
what kind of information that supposed to be freed? Difficult question isn’t
it? But in my wildest dream I also want a world where all information you want
to get is free, well at least until now there is no charge against dream, so
dream anyway.
Should we blame IsoHunt for all the piracy practice?
Interesting fact, MPAA which represents some major studios you ever know like Paramount
Pictures, Walt Disney, Sony Picture Entertainment, Universal Studio, Warner
Bros and 20th Century Fox might launched the legal challenge to
IsoHunt and forced Gary Fung to pay $110 million settlement, however do you
know that perhaps half of people who work for those studios also depend on
IsoHunt for some home entertainment? Who is the hypocrite here?
Besides, would those studios collapse because of this
piracy? I don’t think so, they do it because they just lost like, well 5% from
their income, yeah they still could make billion Dollars with or without
isoHunt even the $110 million from Gary Fung could not compete with billions
they make with their high quality movies. If they lost because some idiots just
making some stupid movies and people prefer to download and watch it in bad
quality format instead of paying bunch of money to go to cinema and watching it
in 3D, then no one should be blame but themselves.
I personally don’t mind to pay extra money for the best
experience of 3D movie in big cinema as long as the movie is good but I will
feel like punching someone in the face if I pay extra money for low quality
movies.
Furthermore, just stated by Gary Fung, though he should
pay the settlements and forced to shut down IsoHunt, the truth is the 95% of
torrent files could be easily found in Google and indexed in several BitTorrent
websites. So, what’s the point? Should we shut Google down too?
No answer for that. As I said, it's just another stupid move against piracy.
Yeah, at least we still could get farewell statement from
Gary Fung.
Just visit IsoHunt.com and you will find this statement:
Initiating Self Destruct
This is it. We are
shutting down isoHunt services a little early. I'm told there was this Internet
archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I'm
honoured that people think our site is worthy of historical preservation. But the
truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless
and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place. So
I might as well do a proper send-off to you dear isoHunt users, before final
shutdown sequence on Tuesday. It's been an adventure in the last 10.5 years
working on isoHunt, a privilege working with some of the smartest guys I've
worked with, and my life won't be the same without this journey. For what I'm
working on next, please look up my blog on Google and follow me there. Because
as the Terminator would say with a German accent,
I'll be backkk.
- Gary Fung
At least we know, he will be back.
e