IsoHunt Shuts Down: Site Prepares To Go Offline Ahead Of Its Scheduled Closing As Part Of $110 Million Settlement With MPAA

Update Oct. 23, 8:33 a.m.: IsoHunt is officially offline as of Oct. 23.

Original story below:

IsoHunt began shutting down on Monday, ahead of its one-week deadline, as part of a settlement reached Thursday between the popular torrent site and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The settlement by isoHunt and its owner, Gary Fung, ends a lawsuit brought seven years ago by the MPAA, which alleged that isoHunt facilitated movie-copyright infringement.

While Fung agreed to pay $110 million to the Hollywood trade group, it’s unlikely that isoHunt will be able to pay the entire amount. The MPAA will likely receive more like $2 million to 4 million, according to court documents obtained by the BBC.

On Monday, ahead of its scheduled shutdown, the familiar homepage of the 10-year-old isoHunt was replaced by a simple HTML page titled “Initiating Self Destruct.”

Below the title was a farewell left by Fung as part of the final actions to take isoHunt offline forever.

“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 thinks 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 it. 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”

Showing a little humor, Fung also posted a video below the farewell letter, which purports to be a trailer for “Terminator: Salvation” but is actually one of the most famous Internet memes of all time.

IsoHunt will formally shut down entirely on Tuesday, Oct. 22.