Mininova must remove all illegal torrents

Copyright holders are having great success in the Netherlands, where a court has ordered torrent tracking site Mininova to remove all infringing torrents.

If the site can’t remove all tracking files or links for illegal torrents within 30 days, the court will impose a fine of 1,000 Euros per infringing torrent, at a maximum of 5 million Euros. Even though the court didn’t find Mininova to be infringing any copyrights, the site was still assisting in copyright infringement, and was therefore subject to penalty.

In a blog post, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer wrote that the site is considering an appeal. “We are obviously not satisfied with this ruling,” he wrote. “The result of this ruling for Mininova is that we have to reevaluate our business operations.” It was reported by Ars Technica in May that Mininova earns 1 million Euros per year in revenue.

BREIN, the anti-piracy organization that filed the lawsuit, claims that 80 to 90 percent of Mininova’s torrents are illegal, PC Magazine reports. In early May, Mininova began filtering out copyrighted torrents using a copyright recognition system, but it’s unclear whether this will be good enough to wipe all infringing files from a peer-to-peer site that’s essentially run by its users.

When it comes to the crackdown on piracy, you often hear the term “Whack-A-Mole,” referring to how rights holders may successfully crush one site, but there will always be others to replace it. In fact, that’s how Mininova got started. Even so, BREIN has scored two recent victories — over Mininova and over The Pirate Bay — that should give torrent site operators pause. I don’t think piracy’s going to go away, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be running a Web site that allows piracy to happen.