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.
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103 Responses
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“filter search” is useless cause how do you know whether this filename is actually contain the copyrights material .
a mystery to me that why label want to waste money to feed a bunch of fools in BREIN. I wonder what kind of education people in there have .
Absolutely no copyrighted material is on Mininova’s servers. Absolutely no copyrighted material goes through Mininova’s servers. Therefore, they do not infringe on anyone’s copyright.
BREIN Dude, You are Fucked UP :)
You don’t know who you’ve Chosen :P
Really, you are Fucked UP ! ! !
Your reputation will be 0. you will see….
To be continue…
@ Ultimate Defence
GOLD!!!!!
“the site does not have their own BitTorrent tracker.”
I know what Ernesto means, but technically not true…the Content Distribution stuff (featured torrents on front page) is tracked by tracker.mininova.org.
It seems the whole world has gone back to the old tech stifling conservative ways.I thought we had a good run of moving forward and now we go back. Places like Holland and Sweden that were the only places on earth with “Sane” laws are no also going backward. It’s all so stupid and comes down to politicians wanting to get their face in the paper. So instead of doing something that matters for the majority of poor folk they stick their dicks in the middle of something they know nothing about. It only serves to help the 1% minority or the rich. This is why I hate politicians and big government. All fucking liars and con men.
If they have to filter results, so do google.. this is an outrage.
Mininova is no different than Google in terms of being a search engine of content. Mininova happens to receive content only from contributing users, while Google goes and steals it from other web sites.
Google really needs to get sued, win, and then stupid lawsuits would be permanently squashed.
Scott - its not any sort of open tracker. It’s closed, and only for certain types of work, that would not be affected by these claims (directly anyway)
(FWIW, one of our researchers is also one of the torrent moderators there, and he helped write the ‘Understanding Copyright Enforcement‘ piece a week ago, based on a mininova forum post we co-wrote.
Fail
What mininova could do is start filtering stuff from private trackers. Or indicating it more strongly than just a small red gif of the letter P somewhere on the right… like marking the entire row a shade of red or something.
Oh Lordy
I’ll back Mininova all the way, heck, I’ll even donate them money to fight those fu(k3r$
They only talk about shuting down torrent sites, they never talk about RapidShare!!!
Pirate in my heart,
pirate in my soul,
take everything you can
and share it all!!!
Brein vs Mininova in court for the first time and last time;
Mininova: You don’t need to see our identification.
Brein: We don’t need to see their identification.
Minanova: These aren’t the torrents your looking for.
Brein: These aren’t the torrents were looking for.
Mininova: Let them go. Move along. Move along.
Brein: Let them go. Move along. Move along.
Mininova: You are Michael Jackson’s secret lover and will go see him in a public bathroom and make out now.
Brein: I’m Michael Jackson’s secret lover and will go see him in a public bathroom and make out now.
@ Belligerent Engine,
how would that help anything relevant to this discussion? private trackers also host only meta files, and are not necessarily copyrighted material.
But, i hope this goes all the way and quickly!, with Mininova as the victor .
if this goes bad and mininova does have to ‘filter’ its searches the site will die and pretty quickly too. also i dont think this type of ruling will affect google/youtube, for one, no one is complaining to the courts about google/youtube (well not anymore)and there business model is not biased on copyright distribution, which is from what i gather, is what BREIN is saying.
tbh im more interested in the TPB case, after all Mininova only searches/trawls proper BT sites. < these guys are the heroes, the trackers and the the seeders,
i just use Torrent Harvester to search public trackers
http://www.download.com/Torrent-Harvester/3000-2196_4-10504489.html
anyway good luck mininova, another pie in the face for copyright enforcement! :P
@19: Even stuff with CC and GPL (and other such licenses) are covered by copyright. So your point on that is mute.
What I would want to see is that all copyrighted works show what license
they are distributed. That would cut down ambigiouty.
I suppose I sound like a broken record, because this is how I feel:
You get paid for doing your job that year - making a Hollywood movie, being a senator, playing hockey, whatever - and that’s it. You don’t keep getting paid for work you did last year. You don’t keep getting paid for work you did 10 years ago. You just do your job, get paid, and go on with life. This whole “royalties” thing is B.S.
So, if all the people involved have already been paid for their work, why keep paying them?
I guess if you were taking some possession of theirs and making it yours, you should do an equal trade, “Here’s $5 for a dvd”; trade is over, everybody is happy. Goods have been exchanged, and there is no net loss of goods.
But in filesharing, you get a file and deprive them of: nothing. You deprive them of the following good, which they no longer have, and you have: _______ . Wait - there IS no net loss !!! They don’t lose anything, and YOU don’t owe them for anything!!!
So, why in HELL is filesharing illegal again? The creators have already been paid, and no goods are being transferred !!!!
BTW, I’m all for paying a content creator for their work (if it is good work and you choose to aquire it); but when they abuse their privilege of giving, justice indicates its completely fair for you to abuse your privilege of taking.
And if they completely abuse their giving privilege (300%-10,000+% overcharge, denial of any legal right to possession for a product you intend to and pay to possess, vicious hatred + legal attacks + financial attacks on any fans who put their money where their mouth is in defying this dinosaur monopoly), I think it is completely fair for the fan to abuse his taking privilege (take what he wants, pay for the best 1% of the material).
To say nothing of freedom. The media in North America has been bought and paid for since more than 20 years ago. The last refuge was the internet, which is fairly actively censored (try downloading a movie via public ftp); the last sub-refuge is the sub-internet: p2p.
Thank God for the pirate bay:
“We’re proud to present a new service - baywords.com. Because of the need of freedom of speech and secure hosting facility of the words being said we could not agree to how people behave towards bloggers.
Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.”
http://baywords.com/
I think this is far scarier to any and all establishments than filesharing could ever be, but they will both be attacked with the same prejudice.
And thank you community/coders/developers, for doing what the rest of us are technically incapable of: standing up, working hard, defending the masses.
I hear a lot of people going “if mininova has to filter results, so should google”
have you ever stopped to think that would be like a wet dream come true for the MAFIAA terrorists?
because more people use google to find torrents anyway, and most people end up finding mininova BECAUSE of google.
example:
user searches for a movie: (lets give it a fabricated title that would be a hit if it ever came out) “movie RIAA and MPAA sons of whores .torrent”
Results from google point to mininova, TPB (of course) and then all the rest… maybe using the same approach the future of torrent indexing sites is not to any links to the actual torrent but instead display a page that says:
“RIAA and MPAA sons of whores” found on thepiratebay and link directly to the first page of TPB… that way, its just like google… while google even links to specific pages… future torrent sites are taking it one step _behind_ and just linking to the torrent sites index page… once there the user types “RIAA and MPAA sons of whores” into the search field and downloads it from the results…
What do you guys think?
Cheers!
http://www.ezee.se/
BREIN, go, get a BRAIN!
I realise they have to be seen to be doing something and the **AA cannot simply let it lie, but surely they must realise that this is a losing battle, they simply cannot win.
The one thing I have noticed is that there are still a lot of big places, Mini, TPB, etc, for the plebs, but there are a lot more specialist closed shops, running SSL trackers for us seasoned pro torrenters. “The tighter you squeeze your grip, the more etc” well you know the rest of the quote!
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