Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, christine balderas

Gary Fung, who runs the Canadian torrent search engine isoHunt, is pre-emptively asking the Supreme Court of British Columbia to rule on whether or not his site is in violation of Canada's Copyright Act.

"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," writes The Globe and Mail's Matt Hartley. "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.com has a policy of taking down links to files when contacted by copyright owners and has removed more than 50,000 links since 2004, Fung said," according to CTV.ca. "It's similar to the policy that was imposed upon the makers of the Napster downloading software when they were sued for copyright infringement."

More here from The Canadian Press.