Article by George Norman

On 19 May 2009

Tomorrow, the 20th of May, representatives from the Netherlands based torrent tracker were supposed to appear in court, in a trial launched by local anti-piracy organization BREIN. The good news is that the trial date has been postponed, meaning that Mininova is due in court in June, and not tomorrow; the bad news is that BREIN is holding on to its claims that Mininova should filter out content.

“The upcoming court trial with BREIN, which was planned on Wednesday May 20th, has been postponed until Tuesday June 2nd, at 13:00 hours. The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case. We would like to thank the parties involved for their cooperation in this postponement,” explained the Mininova staff.


For the people that are not familiar with this Mininova trial issue, here is a little update. Back in March, BREIN demanded that Mininova filter out copyright infringing torrents; with discussions between BREIN and Mininova lead nowhere, the anti-piracy group decided to take legal actions. It should be said that BREIN has somewhat of a scary reputation (file sharing wise) in the Netherlands: it has gotten torrent trackers in the past to either move their content hosting to other countries, or shut their whole operation down.

Mininova President, Erik Dubbelboer, commented at the time, noting that unlike The Pirate Bay trial, the Mininova trial is civil: “The case won’t say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content. In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not.”

This month Mininova introduced content recognition technology that would keep out copyright infringing torrents – at least at a small scale while the technology’s efficiency is tested. The introduction of this feature, according to the Mininova staff, was meant to aid copyright owners in removing copyright infringing torrents from Mininova while at the same time offering a properly good platform to the regular user that shares non-infringing files via the torrent site. This content recognition system is managed by an undisclosed 3rd party; it has not been selected by Mininova.



Tags: Mininova, BREIN, Torrent, P2P, File sharing, Copyright

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