The Pirate Bay and Mininova are still around, but crippling legal pressure has gutted Mininova's index. Similar legal pressure and technological necessity forced The Pirate Bay to shut their tracker network down. There's a lot going on, and it may all come down to isoHunt to hold the line.

It's becoming clear that the once stable BitTorrent world is being upended. This could be for the better of worse. The Pirate Bay is still works as search engine and can still point the end user to content. That's what matter most, much more so than its technical background. Despite losing the trackers, according to Alexa.com, The Pirate Bay has actually gained traffic since the change.

Maybe The Pirate Bay will persevere and continue existing as a BitTorrent search engine for a long time to come. But considering the judgment against Mininova and the upheaval in general, The Pirate Bay is no longer taken for granted.

If The Pirate Bay were to shut down or remove their index, that would leave Gary Fung and his creation isoHunt.com as the last major public BitTorrent website. It's been a rocky legal road for Fung as well. Their legal troubles with the CRIA (Canadia Recording Industry Association) go back to May of 2008, when Fung received cease and desist letters for isoHunt, and sister sites TorrentBox.com and Podtropolis.com.

Anticipating a lawsuit, Fung filed a petition with the court in September of 2008, seeking protection and to be declared a search engine. If the gamble worked, it would likely offer greater safe harbor protections for isoHunt his sister sites.

But the petition was never answered. The legal paperwork had to be upgraded from a petition to a claim. This is a longer process, and one that could lead to a trial. The claim was filed by isoHunt on November 27.

isoHunt is again seeking the protection of the court, by asking it to declare that the isoHunt website and its search engine search do not violate Canadian copyright law. Fung is also seeking protection for his other websites, TorrentBox.com and Podtropolis.com.

It's a bold move, especially considering the CRIA has been quiet lately. But things are moving fast on the global scale - and your favorite BitTorrent site may vanish right now. What happens to isoHunt will either end one chapter in file-sharing history or prolong another.

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