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Digital
Mininova streamlines its service, shuts down infringing bit
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 27 November 2009
Mininova, a Dutch BitTorrent search service which, like The Pirate Bay, helped file-sharers find torrent sources of music and movie files, has shut down part of its operation so that from now on they will only provide links to content sources in its own ‘content distribution network’.
That network consists of content owners who have signed up to use Mininova as a way of promoting and distributing their work, and therefore provides links to mainly unsigned and lesser-known musicians and filmmakers.
A Dutch court ruled in August that the wider Mininova service was guilty of copyright infringement for linking to unlicensed sources of content. The court also ruled that Mininova’s ‘take down procedure’, where they pledged to remove links to illegal content sources if told to do so by content owners, was not sufficient to side step liability for infringement.
It was with that in mind that Mininova have decided to simply shut down the bit of its service where the dodgy links occurred, having not found a viable way to automatically stop infringing links from being submitted by users.
In a statement on their company blog, Team Mininova wrote: “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”.
However, the statement added that the torrent firm was still considering its legal position confirming: “We are still considering an appeal at this moment”.
The General Counsel of the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry, Jo Oliver, welcomed the development, saying: “[It] is further proof that courts will not tolerate operations that offer infringing torrents. By curbing the illegal distribution of content online we can create an environment in which investment in legitimate digital music services can thrive”.
