Mininova, based in The Netherlands, is up against local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which has a reputation for forcing torrent sites offline. Through legal action, BREIN now hopes to convince the court that Mininova has to filter its search results, so that all .torrent files which may point to unauthorized content are removed.
The initial date for the trial was set or May 20th, but was postponed today. “The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case,” Mininova’s staff writes in a response to the news.
The Mininova trial will set an important precedent for all other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands. If the court rules against Mininova it could mean that copyright holders get more control over what is shared on Mininova, and hundreds of torrent sites that use their torrents as input for their indexes.
“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content,” Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak previously.
“In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not,” Erik added.
Earlier this month Mininova already started experimenting with a content removal system that allows copyright holders to filter and remove ‘infringing’ torrent files from the world’s largest BitTorrent index. As a consequence, thousands of popular movie and TV titles disappeared from the site overnight.
