Earlier this month, IsoHunt, one of the world’s largest torrent trackers, shut down after settling a seven year lawsuit with the MPAA. There were efforts to archive all of IsoHunt upon the news, but founder Gary Fung killed the site earlier than planned to thwart those efforts. Now an entirely new team has resurrected the site in its entirety.

TorrentFreak reports that a carbon copy of IsoHunt is now online at isohunt.to. The new site has nothing to do with the original site as it was brought back by a team that feels the site was a “file-sharing icon.” The team confirmed just as much in a post on the new IsoHunt under the title of “IsoHunt is back!”

Hey everyone! IsoHunt is back online! It’s the same old isoHunt from the outside but very different from the inside. We have nothing in common with the isoHunt Inc. that made the original website. We proudly copied it and are happy to share. Isn’t that what we’re all here for?

Feel free to search and download torrents like you used to. We’ll try to bring some of the old features back so we can recreate everything together.

So, how similar is the new IsoHunt compared to the one one? The team behind it tells TorrentFreak that they have rescued about 75 percent of the original IsoHunt’s torrent database, and that they’re trying to bring more back online. They also might be able to bring back user comments, but it looks like the forums and user profiles will not be coming back.

The death of IsoHunt was a big win for the MPAA in its tireless crusade to remove all file-sharing sites from the Internet, but its return is a powerful reminder that the the Internet doesn’t tolerate forced censorship. Even if what the site is doing is deemed illegal by the justice system, somebody on the Internet will ensure that it survives. That has happened here and it will happen again if the MPAA forces this new version of IsoHunt to shut down.

In short, we may just have a new Pirate Bay-style game of whac-a-mole here, folks.

[Image: IsoHunt.to]