Mininova Goes 'Legal'
Mininova, the largest torrent site on the Internet, has removed all torrents except those that were uploaded through its content distribution service.
Mininova?s founders took the decision after they lost a civil dispute against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and were ordered to remove all infringing torrents from the site. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.
"From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August," Mininova staff wrote at the company's blog.
"Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We?ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it?s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment," Mininova added.
Mininova launched its Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova.
Last month, a different Dutch court ordered The Pirate Bay to remove all links to the material of a group of Netherlands-based music and film makers.
The action was against The Pirate Bay's former spokesperson Peter Sunde, along with founders Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholmmen.
However, the founders dispute the ruling saying that they sold The Pirate Bay and no longer had any control over its content. The current owner of The Pirate Bay is a Seychelles-based company called Riversella Ltd.
"From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August," Mininova staff wrote at the company's blog.
"Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We?ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it?s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment," Mininova added.
Mininova launched its Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova.
Last month, a different Dutch court ordered The Pirate Bay to remove all links to the material of a group of Netherlands-based music and film makers.
The action was against The Pirate Bay's former spokesperson Peter Sunde, along with founders Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholmmen.
However, the founders dispute the ruling saying that they sold The Pirate Bay and no longer had any control over its content. The current owner of The Pirate Bay is a Seychelles-based company called Riversella Ltd.
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