ONE gets the sense from chatting with Canadian Gary Fung that he is waiting for the tide to change. Great expectations are imbued in his answers, as if a single sweep of the moon could change his website from a black market to a media warehouse, convert his profile from digital pirate to entrepreneur, and turn the legal threats he receives into partnership offers.
The 24-year-old has ample reasons for hope. The website isoHunt.com, which he created to help visitors find downloadable BitTorrent files (often containing illegally copied movies, music or software), has grown to 12 million visitors a month in just four years. While he won't disclose earnings, he says he still earns a profit despite a recent $33,000 hardware upgrade, $6640 each month for hosting, and legal fees that he has estimated at $22,000 a month.
But perhaps the greatest promise lies in the shifting sands of media distribution, stirred by disruptive models including Napster and YouTube, which have many experts believing that the shared processing power of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is the inevitable path forward for mainstream media.
Mr Fung longs for the day when big media players become buyers rather than a barrier.
"BitTorrent really helps make content distribution cheaper and faster," he says. "The natural progression, as we've seen with YouTube and MySpace, is a lot more media distribution is going to be done online, and that's going to converge with the client and P2P technologies."
He envisions a model for fee-based "premium" torrents, where corporations distribute higher-quality torrents than those currently uploaded by amateurs, using corporate bandwidth as well as the scalable efficiency of P2P networks to deliver downloads faster. Yet aside from some pay-per-download partnerships at BitTorrent.com, the entertainment industry has been slow to embrace P2P technology.
While Mr Fung waits for success and recognition, his court date awaits him. In February 2006, a lawsuit was initiated against isoHunt.com by the Motion Picture Association of America, an advocacy group representing entertainment giants including Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. The MPAA press release cites a study by Smith Barney estimating losses of $US5.4 billion ($A6.3 billion) due to film piracy in 2005. "Mr Fung has chosen not to enter into any negotiations with anybody, but rather to steal that creativity and to use it for his own ends in an unlawful manner," MPAA spokesman John Malcolm said in a televised interview.
Unlike many small enterprises that the MPAA has litigated into extinction, Mr Fung has dug in his heels, hiring a Los Angeles-based legal firm to represent him.
As a portal to more than 500 terabytes of torrent files, isoHunt.com is an obvious target. The distributed nature of P2P sharing, in which hundreds of users will simultaneously upload and download the same file with each other, is a daunting challenge for the MPAA. Its strategy has been to attack the enablers, such as newsgroups listing torrent file locations and search engines that index torrent files.
Mr Fung maintains that his site is nodifferent from a typical search engine like Google or Yahoo. IsoHunt.com is a searchable index of files shared by millions worldwide. When you find and connect to the latest blockbuster film on isoHunt.com, you can download a small torrent file, but this file only contains information on where the actual media content will be downloaded from. "It's all search engines," he says, pointing out that you can also find torrent files by searching Google's index.
Bolstering his defence, Mr Fung employs a copyright policy modelled after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act created by US Congress in 1998, a stricter policy than required under Canadian law. When violations are submitted, he removes the listing from the search engine index, a process similar to Google's for handling copyright complaints, but with greater efficiency. "Google's process is to return documents through snail mail, whereas we use email," Mr Fung says.
Mr Fung is confident he'll win his case. But that potential outcome probably won't erase his frustration with the litigious antics of an industry that, he feels, suppresses innovation in order to save a distribution model in need of reinvention. "I think copyright holders will have to accept the internet as a new way of distributing content and not just look at it as a liability," he says.
For now, it's a David and Goliath-like battle. Mr Fung is accountable to perhaps even more imposing advisers, his parents. He lives at home with his parents who emigrated from Hong Kong to British Columbia, Canada, 13 years ago. "I've explained what I can to them," he says. "I think the copyright issue is something that's going to come up more and more with the internet and I think they understand that I'm already doing what I can."
Mr Fung's persistence is evident, but his motives are less clear. It's hard to tell whether current profit, future potential or a simple love of new technology drives him. One thing is clear - the hobby he began as a computer science student at the University of British Columbia has become a day job, taking more than eight hours each day. In perhaps the same way that Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web became Yahoo, Mr Fung's enterprise has changed from a hobby to a business based on an enthusiastic community of early-adopting users.
With his name high on the MPAA's most-wanted list, one wonders how much long-term career risk the young man is taking on. Phil Morle, CTO of online storage company Omnidrive, has an answer for that. He cut his teeth in P2P with a popular client Kazaa, a role that earned him fame in P2P circles but also earned him an appearance in Australia's Federal Court in 2004.
He believes innovation will go far in the marketplace.
"P2P platforms were the origin of the two-way web," Mr Morle says. "People who have worked in the fires of P2P understand how the web is changing and will never be out of work on the modern internet."
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