A U.S. judge is ordering Isohunt, one of the world's leading BitTorrent search engines, to remove all infringing content. Isohunt's operator said Tuesday that the decision would likely shutter the site, which has 30 million unique monthly visitors.

The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance.

A federal court sided last year with the MPAA, ruling that Isohunt was an unlawful avenue to free movies, music, videogames and software – the first U.S. ruling on the legality of a BitTorrent site. Hollywood's legal tactics shuttered TorrentSpy in the United States in 2008, but the merits of the case were never decided.

Gary Fung, the 27-year-old Canadian who runs Isohunt, said he and the MPAA are now haggling over how to comport with March 23 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles.

"It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of plaintiffs' works through defendants' websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market (.pdf) for consumers to purchase access to the same works," Wilson wrote in support of his injunction.

The judge added that "upwards of 95 percent of all dot-torrent files downloaded from defendants' websites" return infringing material or works "at least highly likely to be infringing."

Wilson ordered Fung to comply within his order within 14 days of the MPAA providing Fung a list of content to be removed.

And therein lies the dispute.

The judge, while giving the parties until April 12 to hammer out an agreement, is demanding that Isohunt cease "creating, maintaining or providing access to browsable website categories of dot-torrent or similar files using or based on infringement-related terms."

That's jargon for keyword searching. "Filtering against keywords. It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine," Fung said in a telephone interview.

Fung's position is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires Hollywood to provide links to files to be removed. Keyword searches, he said, could scoop up non-infringing works.

"We're discussing the mechanics, the process that is reasonable for an injunction," Fung said. "We're still trying to hope that the judge will do the right thing."

The MPAA was not immediately prepared to comment.

The sites included in the judge's ruling include ISO Hunt, Torrentbox and Podtropolis.

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