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No longer around in its original form, Isohunt was one of the world's most popular torrent sites in its day. The founder, Gary Fung, fought courts for years keeping the site open, but ultimately relented after a loss and shut the site down. While it may have reformed under a new banner, Fung himself is all about streaming these days and even sees Bitcoin as a way to deliver the torrenting experience, but in a way that compensates artists for their work.
In all fairness, while Fung did spend a decade running Isohunt, he has been pushing for a paid-for torrent model for some time. Back in 2009, he launched a site called Hexagon, which was designed to offer a digital distribution platform for artists and content creators, but it never took off.
Today, the landscape is very different from when Isohunt was founded. Thanks to the likes of Netflix and Amazon, streaming is becoming the dominant media viewing method. Fung of course, sees it going much further though:
“Technologically, I envision studios and other media companies creating open APIs and platforms so new innovative streaming services can be developed on top. […] That would solve the studio’s fear of single players like Netflix dominating media distribution and eventually dictating terms in the industry,” he said in a chat with TorrentFreak.
However it's with bitcoin that he really sees as the future, with it providing a way for universal payments to lead to peer to peer media sharing, which keeps costs low. That makes it easier to price the content more fairly.
“Imagine when everyone can watch and listen to anything, anytime, anywhere, with mere cents, automatically and continuously deducted from your Bitcoin wallet”, he said.
Theoretically such a system would cut out the middlemen like Amazon, Apple and Netflix, thereby giving a lot more money straight to the artists. While that might lead to less exposure in some respects, artists would theoretically be able to create their own streaming and download platforms easily, again using the bitcoin purchase model.
Fung also reached out the the media lobby groups that dogged him for years, giving them a suggestion for the future: “Here’s my tip to industry associations like the MPAA and RIAA for continued relevance in this Internet age, possibly for everyone’s benefits,” he said. “Become standards bodies for programmatic APIs over media rights, metadata and micro-transaction details. Record labels and movie/tv studios can use these standards to make their own works available for streaming and to accept payments from third parties.”
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KitGuru Says: What do you guys think of Fung's ideas? And do you miss the days where he was in charge of Isohunt?
Image source: Gary Fung
“And do you miss the days where he was in charge of Isohunt?
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I miss the days of ISOHUNT….
isohunt.to – use a VPN
The answer isn’t bitcoin. The answer is dissolving the entire copyright, patent, trademark system. Intellectual property is a huge scam. Binding government power and ideas is how to kill innovation. Free up all intellectual property and allow anyone to use any idea and watch the possibilities explode.
oldpiratebay.org | thepiratebay.cr | limetorrents.co
Never stop downloading, never stop sharing. Everyone pump up their upload caps by ~15Kb and lets get this show on the road!
I had thought of some counter points but now I think that there have got to be a way to allow content creators to create content and for consumers to consume that content to make everyone happy without all the barriers that exist (like money, or intellectual property protections). I think that’s possible, somehow. Youtube is a prime example of content creators making their creations freely available and being able to make a living creating quality content (through adsense, merchandise, and other forms of revenue) where piracy is completely unnecessary. Digital distribution platforms like Steam are making piracy less and less necessary — as people will pay for the convenience of being able to download a game instantly, guaranteed that it will work and will not have any malicious software components bundled with it. Gary Fung has a point. If you can find a way to make it so convenient for people to download and install content that they will be willing to part with their cash, or their time, or their attention (e.g. advertisements) to see it then many will take the route that makes sense to them and compensate creators for their time and effort. Maybe they don’t want to spend $40 on a Blu Ray disk, and you either have them pirating it, or simply not consuming the content; when they could have given you ‘something’ for it instead of them giving you what you want vs nothing. Nowadays content has the possibility to be so ubiquitous and everywhere that content creators can afford to have 500 million people give them 20 cents as opposed to have 20 million people give them 5 dollars. The content production industry can and should change to match up with this new reality. Shedding part of that enforcement mechanism they use and providing incentives for people to give them what they want.
Think of content in terms of food. This helps to understand how open source serves as a money making model.
You can’t patent, trademark, or copyright a recipe. That’s why restaurants and other businesses keep their recipe’s secret. Coca-Cola, KFC, etc come to mind. The result of all food being treated as open source is that anyone, anywhere can replicate a recipe without paying royalties to the guy that invented it. And the guy that invented it, clearly a content creator, gets nothing. This would be exactly the same as musicians or other artists.
Clearly, chefs aren’t broke. They make content that people want and consume and even share. People even hand over their cash to experience the food in a restaurant or in a pre-packaged meal from the store, or for the convenience with fast food. Dissolving the intellectual property system does not mean they’ll go broke, it means no one else will be prevented from using their ‘ingredients’. Obviously, the 100% open source food industry isn’t hurting.
I can go to any restaurant in the world, take their recipe for something I want, and then go home and replicate it and the food industry won’t come after me for stealing the profits/intellectual property of the content creator who created that food.
Think about it . . . to make a copy of a recipe is no different than making a copy of music, movies, or other art. Information is information. You can’t steal something when you copy it because the original is preserved. Someone once said, piracy is like having your car stolen at night and when you wake, it’s still there in the morning.