Article by George Norman

On 09 Jul 2009

The month of June kicked off with unpleasant news for the file sharing community: popular torrent site Mininova was dragged to court by local anti-piracy organization BREIN. Actually, the trial was due to start on May 20th, but it had to be postponed until June 2nd because Mininova’s legal representation had some personal matters to attend to. Just like the trial debut, the trial verdict has been postponed Mininova now informs.

“Here’s a short update on the ongoing court trial. The judge has postponed the date of the verdict (originally planned July 15) to August 26, due to the summer holiday period,” explained the Mininova staff.


Well, at least it has nothing to do with the content of the case. Speaking of which, it must be said that this is a civil not a criminal trial that was initiated by BREIN, anti-piracy group that made its name by getting torrent trackers to move their content hosting to other countries or even worse, shut down altogether. BREIN initially demanded that Mininova filter out copyright infringing torrents and to achieve this goal the outfit attempted to negotiate with the torrent site’s representatives. BREIN and Mininova talked it out for a while, but these discussions lead nowhere. Consequently BREIN decided to take the Mininova to court and so it did.

The trial debuted early last month with legal representatives of both parties arguing their case. BREIN’s legal representation argued that Mininova should remove torrents that link to unauthorized content (copyright infringing content) and that an automated system of doing so should be implemented. BREIN also demanded that all costs related to implementing this system be covered by Mininova. The legal representation of Mininova on the other hand argued that the torrent site already has a “notice and takedown” policy in place and on top of that, a technology to filter out copyright infringing torrents has already been implemented. Mininova, added the defense, has never operated on the wrong side of legality and has always taken more measure to ensure rights holders are able to protect their content than required by law.

Let’s just hope that Mininova does not go the way of The Pirate Bay (details here).



Tags: Mininova, Trial, Torret, Tracker

I Hope you LIKE this blog post! Thank you!

What do YOU have to say about this

Popular News

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.