Q&A: isoHunt founder says P2P can help create post-piracy world

07.11.2009

Would you ever do P2P and stream content like Hulu or YouTube does? That is one thing in the works. The technology is in progress, but it's not useful enough to be ready for public use.

Do you think isoHunt will still be around five years from now? Judging from the fate of many other filesharing sites, I do see a lot of bad precedents. At the same time, I am hopeful that there will be positive change so that we can actually work with copyright owners, instead of them continuing to play Whack-a-Mole with us.

Legally, I'm hoping that we will have the same happy ending as Hollywood was crying foul over the VCR, like they are now with P2P. The courts said that as long as there is a lot of non-infringing use cases, you can't just make a new technology illegal.

I think that is a fair judgment and a very big precedent for technologists and copyright owners to go by, and we are hoping that we can rely on that precedent in our case.

Ironically, Sony is now one of the Hollywood companies suing me.