RICHMOND, BC — The owner of one of the Web’s most popular file-sharing indexes has asked the Canadian Supreme Court to rule about the legality of his business model.Gary Fung, 25, owns the BitTorrent search engine IsoHunt.com. Although the site does not host shared files itself, it does assist file-sharers in finding the files they seek. IsoHunt currently offers links to more than 1.5 million shared files. It routinely cracks Alexa’s Top 200 most popular websites list.

Fung said he filed the Supreme Court petition because he’d like to cut to the chase in ongoing legal battles with copyright-protection groups. In 2006, he was named in an American lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America. In May 2008 he began receiving what he characterized as threatening take-down demands from the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

“We filed the court documents because we were threatened by CRIA,” Fung explained to The Canadian Press. “Essentially they’re saying that all we do is infringe on their clients’ copyrights.”

According to TCP, the CRIA letters promised to pursue damages of as much as $20,000 per song listed at IsoHunt.com, because the site is “responsible for causing, authorizing and contributing to a staggering amount of illegal music downloading, uploading and file sharing.”

Fung disputes that assertion. His site doesn’t break any laws because it simply provides information, he said. In fact, IsoHunt is no different from any other search engine, Fung declared. Even untouchable Google can be used to find BitTorrent files.

“IsoHunt does not consider that its operations … infringe or violate in any way the Copyright Act and therefore seeks the protection of … [the Supreme Court] in the form of declaratory relief in relation to clarification of its legal rights in respect of its operation,” Fung’s petition states.

Fung is particularly annoyed with CRIA’s methods for enforcing client copyrights. He told TCP that since 2004, IsoHunt has removed more than 50,000 links after requests from copyright holders. Fung said he asked CRIA to submit requests according to the conditions outlined in Canada’s copyright law, but the recording industry association has refused to do so.

A copyright expert at the University of Ottawa said the case has some implications beyond the realm of file-sharing.

“The interesting question is how will the court characterize [Fung’s arguments], because the broader legal implications for copyright and for many parties — search engines and the like — could be affected by the outcome of this case,” Michael Geist told TCP.