isoHunt was an online torrent files index and repository, where visitors could browse, search, download or upload torrents of various digital content of mostly entertainment nature. The website was taken down in October 2013 as a result of a legal action from the MPAA; by the end of October 2013 however, two sites with content presumably mirrored from isohunt.com were reported in media. One of them – isohunt.to – became a de facto replacement of the original site. It is not associated in any way with the old staff or owners of the site, and is to be understood as a separate continuation. It originated in 2003 as isohunt.com website for IRC files search and reached over 13.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents. With 7.4 million unique visitors , isoHunt was one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents were added to and deleted from it every day. Users of isoHunt performed over 40 million unique searches per month. On October 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally. The site was the third most popular BitTorrent site . According to isoHunt, the total amount of shared content was more than 14.11 petabytes . The site came to an end when the legal battles that isoHunt's founder had been in for years with conglomerates of IP rights holders over allegations of copyright infringing came to a head. A settlement with the MPAA was reached in 2013, stipulating a $110 million reimbursement for damages and the site's closure that followed on October 21, 2013. History isoHunt was founded in January 2003 by Gary Fung, a Canadian national. Its name is derived from the term ISO image, used to describe a 1:1 soft copy of a disk (typically a CD or DVD). On February 23, 2006, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) issued a press release stating they were suing isoHunt for copyright infringement. On September 2, 2009, isoHunt announced the launch of a spinoff site, hexagon.cc. The goal of hexagon.cc was to have a place for social groups based on certain niches to share specific content relevant to their interests. It is down until further notice. In early 2010, users in the US and along south eastern Canada were redirected to a stripped-down version called isoHunt Lite in order to remove some of the factors that