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Mininova Goes to Court

Copyright backers in the Netherlands have taken the torrent site to court

Jun 4, 2009 13:04 GMT  ·  By
Copyright backers in the Netherlands have taken Mininova to court
   Copyright backers in the Netherlands have taken Mininova to court

With the whole Pirate Bay trial controversy not even close to settling down, here comes another case of copyright taking torrent sites to court. This time it was the Netherlands’ popular torrent indexing site Mininova's turn to go to court with the local anti-piracy group BREIN.

BREIN is accusing Mininova of failing to take down links to copyrighted material when asked to do so and it is also asking the torrent site to implement better protection systems to keep the copyrighted material from reaching the site in the first place. Mininova's representative defended the site saying that it was already taking steps to help rights holders remove the content they found infringing and all that it was doing already was above what the law required.

BREIN's lawyer Dirk Visser told the court that Mininova had over 5 million daily visitors and that its owners made millions in ad revenue from the site. He also said that the site was clearly used for downloading pirated material and that it had taken very little steps to change that.

Mininova's attorney, Vita Zwaan, argued that the owners were doing the best they could to keep copyrighted material from the site and that they had several methods implemented for that. She also stated that the site did not have an internal tracker, like Pirate Bay for example, and that it didn't offer any bittorrent client either. According to her, Mininova has attempted to collaborate with BREIN but it hasn't been very successful. The current system that relies on hash tags of torrents known to be illegal to filter them is working very well but BREIN hasn't delivered hash tags for it to use. This is the core of the problem as Mininova says it would be too costly for it to find illegal torrents on its own and that BREIN should be responsible for that.

The website representatives are optimistic after the hearing and the verdict is due July 15. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we believe Mininova will continue to exist,” Erik Dubbelboer, one of the site's founders said to TorrentFreak.