Mininova is dead, must filter torrents
Posted On Saturday, August 29, 2009 at at 12:02 AM by Ronak
A Dutch judge has today killed the large torrent tracker Mininova, telling the site to either delete all copyrighted content from the tracker, or pay a €5 million penalty.
The site had been charged with "contributory copyright infringement," by the Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN, as the site did no direct copyright infringement.
Mininova notably removed links if copyright holders flagged them, but as with all trackers, when one went down, five would take its place, making the whole situation redundant.
The new court decision says Mininova was profiting from "inciting copyright infringement" and made over €1 million in 2007 on ad sales. Estimates have said about 90 percent of Mininova content is infringing.
The site must now "adopt proactive filtering" of copyrighted content or face a large fine.