Digital pirate or entrepreneur? Guilty or not Guilty?

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ONE gets the sense from chatting with Canadian Gary Fung that he is waiting for the tide to change. Great expectations are imbued in his answers, as if a single sweep of the moon could change his website from a black market to a media warehouse, convert his profile from digital pirate to entrepreneur, and turn the legal threats he receives into partnership offers. The 24-year-old has ample reasons for hope. The website isoHunt.com, which he created to help visitors find downloadable BitTorrent files (often containing illegally copied movies, music or software), has grown to 12 million visitors a month in just four years. While he won't disclose earnings, he says he still earns a profit despite a recent $33,000 hardware upgrade, $6640 each month for hosting, and legal fees that he has estimated at $22,000 a month. But perhaps the greatest promise lies in the shifting sands of media distribution, stirred by disruptive models including Napster and YouTube, which have many experts believing that the shared processing power of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is the inevitable path forward for mainstream media. http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/bittorrent-entrepreneur-faces-his-day-in-court/2007/08/13/1186857427342.html