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

I don't know if you can call that victory or not. But I think it makes a difference that we are a search engine like Google. Thus, we have a lot of immunity under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and its Safe Harbor provisions. Also, we work with copyright owners to take down infringing content as prescribed by U.S. copyright law.

There are horror stories about malware on P2P sites or in the files themselves. How do you combat that We mostly rely on user reports. Some of the really shady advertisers try to sneak in malicious ads from time to time. We work with ad networks to locate them.

We can't do anything about viruses or malware in the files being shared. But we do have a fairly good system for users to comment on and rate files. They show up next to the search results. If you see a negative rating, you can guess that it might be a fake file. We can't do those kinds of checks ourselves.

Do you think Hollywood or record companies will seed P2P networks with dud files Yes. There were those e-mail leaks that showed MediaSentry working with Hollywood to send out fake files to P2P. It's a prime example of how the content industry sends out their own fake files to entrap users, either to sue them or annoy them into thinking P2P is not easy.

This goes back to our legal fight. They are telling us we have all of these infringing files on BitTorrent. At the same time they are contributing to this by adding their own fake files. How am I supposed to know what is fake, what is spam, and what is infringing