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Mininova Court Trial Postponed Until June

The trial against Mininova that was scheduled for this Wednesday has been postponed until June. The outcome of the civil dispute between the anti-piracy group BREIN and Mininova will decide if the BitTorrent indexer has to actively filter torrents from the site.

mininovaMininova, 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.

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  • Dan

    Ive removed 200 of my 300 torrents off mininova. try filtering that!!

  • Hom3r

    “trial was set or May 20th”

    typo

  • riaarard

    BREINless!!!!!!

  • P2P Worshiper

    @3
    It was set FOR May 20th (this Wednesday)

  • Jasper

    breinless stupid brein

  • anon2

    heard that this postponement is because TPB judge is busy this month. (hint, hint) what does that indicate??

  • Wolfy

    Shodai!!!!!

  • mister_playboy

    The first post meme is internet wide… if you haven’t seen it before, then you must be new here (to use another internet meme).

    Where does it come from? Our shared economic culture is all about competition, and getting a “first post” is like winning a competition. Silly? Sure, but it’s just a reflection of who the world currently works.

    Secong place is just the first loser, right? :)

  • UltraleetJ

    I would disagree with the stance this tracker is taking. It encourages the industries to keep on using the legal system to bully others. And you know that once you please the bullies they will keep on bullying even more.

  • ZNZNZNZNZ

    UltraleetJ: So very true. Could not have said it better myself!

    Come and join the short and easy game mybrute:

    http://burpnassker.mybrute.com

  • Ad

    Eh, I avoid Mininova now as much as possible anyway. Shame, as their content is fairly decent, but they way they’re going they’ll turn into the new Torrentspy…

  • Mr Blobby

    They already are the new TorrentSpy. It’s a shame because I thought their site was better than The Pirate Bay myself.

    I’d suspect BREIN themselves have delayed this trial for now, to see how thing go with their Mininova (stoke) BRIEN partnership. I would not be surprised to see this trial dropped by BREIN also if things go well.

  • Cujothemadog

    hey u guys ,, just post ur torrents somewhere else and post a torrent of the torrent file on Mininova for the torrent u posted elsewhere

    i seen orbit30 do that ;)

  • RzmmDX

    At least TorrentSpy tried. Mininova just rolled over… Well, we can’t expect all trackers and indexers to be like TPB.

  • psst

    u guys realize that isohunt been fighting the MPAA in court for over 2 years, before either tpb or mininova and added CRIA to the list of bullies recently, and is still live and kicking?

    http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38933
    http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-sues-the-cria-to-legalize-bittorrent-sites-080905/

  • maryphilbin

    psst: yes BUT the MPAA won its lawsuit against cinematube and showstash for linking, just this last may. However, I don’t see how they’d win this, whether mininova filterd the searches or not, wouldn’t they have had to knowingly and actively “engaged in contributory copyright infringement and inducement of copyright infringement by actively searching for, identifying, collecting, posting, organizing, indexing, and posting links to infringing material, which has been posted on thirdparty websites”??

  • Crimson

    A cute idea (only one of several dozen, each more intelligent and involved then this, and each already in use):

    1. Rename your content files
    2. Upload them under their new, harmless name
    3. Run a 3rd party “Rumor site”, a la:

    “On mininova, torrent ‘Swedish_Traffic_Safety_PSA_1952.torrent’ is actually ‘Star.Trek.DVDrip.AXXO.torrent’

    Done!
    1. Mininova is innocent of hosting “bad” files.
    2. But they are there anyway :P

    Obviously this is a toy example; the real workhorse solutions, aren’t posted in places like these:)

  • Howitworks?

    So do they have to check every file or does the post above have the right idea, that all you need is to rename your file and they cant remove it.

    How about st@rtr3k.torrent? Can they remove that? Or do they have to check the validity?

    So many loopholes, so little time to plug them all.

  • amir
  • calumais

    i reckon we will all loose in this story , the fact that the experiement a filtrage for torrent is a lost on his own …. so long mininova, it seen that your are like naspter failing after been the greatest …

  • Swopyl

    I thought did do anything to not go to court :o

  • debjit

    If one mininova dies thousands mininova will take birth. Those hipocrates can never stop sharing.

    Best of luck ‘Mininova’ for the trials.

  • icecream

    I don’t use Mininova anymore, i guess by the time they appear in court that will have legal fees to pay an no way to pay it – near zero traffic will not generate income, will it.

    They did bite hand that was feeding them (users that is), now they are going to pay for that.

  • khmuprince

    I am officially stop sharing and visiting Mininova.org permanently because they are sold out to the RIAA/MPAA for an undisclosed substantial financial amount.

    I’ve used that site since October of last year and I like the interface and it has nice statistic status for the upladers to monitor their torrents to see how many downloads, comments,bookmarks and etc…

    I never download/upload any any music or movie. I only uploaded tutorial training videos on graphic design,website development/design because I like to promote and share knowledge so people can improve their skills for career advancement opportunity.

    In fact, if you type the keyword search “khmuprince” at their site, you will see the list of torrents I’ve uploaded to share.

    Recently, I was shocked to learn the moderator at the site has banned me from using my account without any explanation or reason. I have never received any warning or any request to remove my torrents.

    I could not login to my account and it listed an IP address, which was not my IP address. So I wrote a letter to moderator asking why are they banning me from their site? The moderator asked for my login and my IP address. I gave the moderator my login, but not my IP because they might use my correct IP to falsify and fabricate in order to accuse me of any wrong doing.

    The moderator replied by saying that my account is not banned. The person also listed my IP address, which is different than the IP address that was banned at the site.
    I try to login again, and stated that I was banned from contributing to the site and denied my access.

    It seems to me that the moderators don’t even have any clue as to how the filter from the RIAA/MPAA works and how flaw it is to randomly ban users for no reason even with the wrong IPs and user names.

    Because Mininova is working collaboratively with the RIAA/MPAA and using their flaw filter to collect IP addresses of all the users to manipulate,fabricate and falsify information for RIAA/MPAA to use in the courts for wrongly accusing the innocent people, I’ve made the decision to never ever use their site again for the rest of my life.

    I also encourage others not to use their website for torrents because you will be victim for their database manipulation and wrongly accuse so they can collect money to feed their greedy egos.

    This is a permanent GOOD BYE to Mininova.org! I hope the RIAA/MPAA give you a lot of money because soon or later you will end up just like the Torrentspy and there will be no jobs for people who work there.

    Please go and use the greatest P2P websites such as thepiratebay and demonoid to name just a couple. I hope to see you all there!

    Peace,
    Khmuprince

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  • neostyles

    @17 : Great idea. When they courts realize that Mininova’s users are still trying to take advantage of people’s trust, they will just shut it down.

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  • mininovablows

    mininova run by little kids is pretty much dead, i try uploading a torrent and it say has to be approved by 3rd party before it is posted. they have already complied with filtering torrent
    by court date, it shutdown time.

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