Andre Yoskowitz
22 May 2008 16:07
BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy agency that has started a crusade against public torrent trackers, has another site in its sights, the world's most popular torrent site, Mininova.
The organization has announced that it will be taking Mininova to court hoping that the court will force the site to filter its search results and effectively remove all unauthorized content.
Mininova, which boasts 30 million unique visitors every month, allows for user submitted torrents as well as authorized content from publishers such as the CBC. More importantly, the site does not have its own tracker, which has gotten the Pirate Bay in trouble recently.
Erik Dubbelboer, one of the co-founders of Mininova added the following: “We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.”
That should be all that is necessary under DMCA obligations, but of course BREIN does not see it that way. The site does not even host the unauthorized content, just the .torrent files to help peers connect.
Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, talked out about Mininova's business model. “A notice and take down procedure is absolutely insufficient for a site that makes use of unauthorized files, structurally and systematically, he added.
The court case could have huge repercussions around the Web if BREIN has its way. They want Mininova to censor their search results, the site does not want to. If BREIN were to win, what is stopping them from starting cases against YouTube or even Google and MSN?