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Gary Fung is going on the offensive rather than waiting for the copyright police to come for him.

Mr. Fung is the Canadian owner of Isohunt.com, one of the most popular torrent search engines on the Internet, which is used by thousands of Web surfers looking to download music, movies and computer games. Isohunt indexes BitTorrent files, a technology commonly used to quickly transfer various media files, many of which are copyrighted.

After receiving letters from the Canadian Recording Industry Association last May, which insisted he remove all links to copyrighted material, Mr. Fung is launching a pre-emptive strike and is asking the Supreme Court of British Columbia to rule on whether his website violates the Copyright Act of Canada.

"What he's asking for is a declaration that by operating the website he is not infringing Canada's Copyright Act and that he's not infringing the copyrights of any of the members of CRIA," said Arthur Grant, Mr. Fung's lawyer.

"CRIA has written to him advising him that in their opinion, by operating the website, he is violating the act, and they have threatened legal action," he said.

According to Mr. Fung's petition to the court, letters he received from the record companies that make up CRIA argue that Isohunt is responsible for "causing, authorizing, and contributing to a staggering amount of illegal music uploading, downloading and file sharing."

A spokesman for CRIA in Toronto declined comment.

However, the 25-year-old native of Richmond, B.C., argues that he is merely an indexer, similar to a search engine such as those operated by Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc., and that he only provides links to files. He neither provides the software which can illegally duplicate copyrighted files, nor does he host any of the files on the company's servers, he says.

Although there are many so-called torrent tracker sites such as Isohunt in existence, torrent files can also be found through such mainstream search engines as Google.

Isohunt, which links to about 1.5 million files, has a takedown policy which states that it will remove links to any files if it is contacted by the copyright owner, a process similar to that employed by the popular video-sharing website YouTube.

"They [CRIA]are not willing to accept that," Mr. Grant said.

Technology legal experts will be watching the case closely because it could have ramifications for search engines, as well as any other website that provides links to digital content on the Internet, said Michael Geist, a professor of e-commerce and Internet law at the University of Ottawa.

"If the court isn't careful, the kind of language that it uses could apply far more broadly than to this particular case," he said.

Isohunt is among the Top 200 most popular sites on the Web and one of the most popular Canadian-based sites in the world, ranked No. 197 globally, according to the Web traffic tracking company Alexa.com.

However, the site doesn't register on the list of the Top 100 most-visited sites by Canadians. And more than 25 per cent of Isohunt's users are based in the U.S., where Mr. Fung is facing another lawsuit in a California district court brought by the movie studio Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. According to documents filed by Columbia in that case, more than 95 per cent of Isohunt's visitors are using the site to infringe copyrights.

In June, federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice tabled new legislation designed to amend the aging Copyright Act of Canada and bring the country's laws into the digital age.

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