Mininova Faces Legal Action: Filter or Else
Written by Ernesto on May 19, 2008No torrent site on earth is more popular than Mininova. Surprisingly, however, all the legal pressure seems to have been focused on sites such as The Pirate Bay. Mininova - against all the odds - appears to have stayed under the radar. All that changed today as Mininova is now facing legal action by Dutch anti-piracy agency, BREIN.
BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit responsible for shuttering or forcing torrent sites such as Demonoid overseas, has announced that it will take BitTorrent-behemoth Mininova to court. BREIN hopes the court will force Mininova to filter its search results, so that all .torrent files which may point to unauthorized content are removed.
Mininova is currently the largest BitTorrent site with over 30 million unique visitors per month. Mininova displays user submitted torrents and carries legitimate premium content from publishers such as CBC. Unlike The Pirate Bay, the site does not have their own BitTorrent tracker.
It transpires that BREIN and Mininova have been secretly trying to reach a mutually beneficial agreement for more than a year now, but when one side believes they are acting within the law and the other side believes the opposite, a legal clash seems inevitable.
Erik Dubbelboer, one of the co-founders of Mininova, told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN. He expects to have more details about the upcoming lawsuit later this week: “We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.”
Sites like YouTube operate in a similar manner - if the site receives a demand from a copyright holder that it should take content down, it does so under its DMCA obligations and there is no further action. Mininova doesn’t even host any unauthorized content, only .torrent files, which should make it even less of a target than YouTube. Typically, BREIN doesn’t see it that way.
Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said that Mininova’s business model is based on illegal activity. “A notice and take down procedure is absolutely insufficient for a site that makes use of unauthorized files, structurally and systematically,” he added.
The announced legal action will focus on the question whether Mininova has to filter their search results or not. BREIN wants Mininova to install such a filter, Mininova on the other hand doesn’t want to censor the search results. The outcome of the case is likely to have a huge impact on the future of other BitTorrent sites, and even sites such as Google and YouTube.
Previously: The Pirate Bay Enters List of 100 Most Popular Webites
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the bittorrent war goes on…
And Ill keep fighting
there are 2 digg links for this post:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Mininova_Faces_Legal_Action_Filter_or_Else
All can happen these days in Holland.
All our rights here are already being “filtered” by Balkenende and his STASI … (Hirsch-Balin, Rouvoet, etc.)
@enigmax
the same problem we had yesterday…
Mininova is the best search engine out there. But i would still prefer if they had a proper tracker too
Where can I nominate for “21th centurys worst (or totally fucked up screwed) organizations”?
I have some nominees:
RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, BREIN
Continue the list?
CRIA the canucklap dog of the CRIA,
actra bunch a whiney MPAA actors in canada.
Anyone else….
they really suck, they can shove their courtcase up theirs.
if they win this case they have proven only proven 1 single thing, that the juristic system is freely adjustable to one’s own liking. justice should remain justice and laws should not be changed cause a private organisation wants it. one cannot illegally force their will upon millions of others!!!
MININOVA, SUE THEM BACK AND SUE THEIR ASSES OFF
Awesome news, about time this happened.
Go BREIN Woot woot woot!
Well, no list of patheticness would be complete without our favorite legal firm, the WEB SHERIFF! That dude is so awesome, he even teams with Michael Jackson and Prince. Wicked!
lol. take google to court for linking to files, now that would be epic.
I would like to think that Google have already prepared their case and have allocated some of their funds towards legal fees ready to take out all these cencorship and copyright infringement cases. Once they blow them out the water we’re free.
I can’t believe the ugliness and pretentiousness of these self-centred moronic groups who insist on trying to cripple Internet progress for everyone. How dare they!? Who do they think they are? Search engines can’t be responsible for everything users do. They provide a great service in indexing sites by automated means, nothing more. It is not their responsibility to police and monitor every linked item, nor would it be possible.
If they could manage to filter out everything copyrighted, nothing would be left. Utterly preposterous and unrealistic.
Ultimate defense:
- “Sir, where did the copyright infringement occur?”
– “He downloaded a torrent”
- “Sir, can you watch a torrent?”
– “No”
- “Can you listen to a torrent?”
– “No”
- “Can you read a torrent?”
– “No, but-”
- “But you brought all of us here for nothing but your own greed without any proof that copyright infringement took place. If thats the case, why isn’t google or yahoo sitting next to us as co-defendents? How about Microsoft”
– “Because they’re search engines”
- “So are we”
– “No you aren’t, you host infringing content!”
- “No sir, we don’t. Do we need to go back over it? We’ve established that you cannot watch a 10kilobyte meta file. Your honor I move for this case to be dismissed without prejudice and the opposing party render all attorney and court fees.”
— “Granted”.
Maybe users could host their own torrents? That’d stuff em up. Or put them on sites or file storage where they can still be searched for, and always available. Is this not possible?
Tiny little torrents. Love ‘em!
@ May 19, 2008 at 13:34 by Anonymous
“Your honor I move for this case to be dismissed without prejudice”
Actually you would ask for dismissal WITH prejudice so the other party can’t bring the same action again once it is dismissed.
Note that IANALBIRNYCLR!
(I am not a lawyer but I read New York Country Lawyer regularily)
Move the server to a far away place! Brein can’t touch y’all outside of Holland or the E.U.!
@13
“If they could manage to filter out everything copyrighted, nothing would be left.”
Uh, yeah. That’s the whole problem with Bittorrent search engines and trackers to begin with. If the majority of search results contained data that was licensed under creative commons, GPL or public domain, or otherwise freely available, no one would have a problem with them.
If the pirate community believes so strongly in what they are doing, and of the benefits of p2p, they should ban copyrighted material from their search results, and use p2p to demonstrate how musicians and film studios who allow their work to be distributed for free benefit from having their work distributed for free. The RIAA, CRIA, etc. can’t bother you then. Let the two ideologies fight it out.
This is how the FSF, GNU and the Linux communities have worked (via GPL), and they are slowly taking over. If Linux was just a mashup of other peoples’ copyrighted code, it would be long dead.
damn, if the anti-piracy terrorists win.. its really bad..
The industry appear to be now increasingly demanding and vocal toward our political governments and anti-piracy groups. It’s all too obvious that they are sharing information and strategies across borders and conspiring to manipulate or bribe our political processes.
Expecting this for a long time.
Youtube hosts a plethora of copyright material and should be taken down prior to any action against torrent sites hosting . torrent files
Effin arbitary, bias bastards
And to think brein actually is the dutch for brains…
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