After the semi-loss for The Pirate Bay in The Netherlands, Mininova is captured under Radar by governments. This was obvious because the defendants did not show up in court to plea their case.What? Today, The Netherlands once again saw a ruling in a high-profile piracy case, and again, there’s a loss for the defendants.

Mininova, possibly the world’s largest torrent listing site, started in early 2005 after the entertainment cartels-initiated demise of the famed Suprnova.org, yesterday chalked up another milestone.

It had already reached three billion torrent downloads and now, “Torrent number 1,000,000 was uploaded yesterday by an anonymous user,” says Torrentfreak, going on;

“Unfortunately, the memorable torrent has no seeds, which makes it likely that it won’t be around much longer.”

Anyway, this time, the lawsuit focussed on Mininova, a bitorrent search engine similar to The Pirate Bay. Like The Pirate Bay case, this one was also started by BREIN, the Dutch variant of the RIAA/MPAA, and again, just like the previous suite, BREIN won. However, it’s easy to misread the actual verdict.

The judge in the case actually makes it quite clear that Mininova itself is not doing anything illegal, that it’s not breaking the law. The judge sentenced Mininova not because it is performing an illegal act, but because Mininova is not doing enough to stop the illegal act. Since downloading copyrighted content in The Netherlands is legal, said ‘illegal act’ is not downloading, but uploading.

More specifically, the judge said that Mininova made it possible for people to breach Dutch copyright law, Mininova promoted these acts, and profited from these acts. Currently, Mininova employs the “Notice and Take Down-procedure”, in which rightsholders can contact Mininova so that they can then remove offending content. This procedure is not enough, the court states.

The verdict, therefore, reads that Mininova must remove all offending torrents from their website, and from here on out, they must actively prevent such torrents from being uploaded to the website. The fine for not complying within three months of this verdict is as follows: Mininova will have to pay 1000 EUR per offending torrent to BREIN, with a maximum of 5000000 EUR.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer isn’t particularly pleased with the verdict, obviously. “We are obviously not happy with the verdict,” he said in a statement. Mininova will most likely appeal the decision, for which they have three months’ time. “The court believes it’s generally known that commercially made films, games, music and TV series are copyrighted and that these works are only copyright-free in exceptional cases,” it ruled. Mininova said it was mulling an appeal. “We are obviously not satisfied with this ruling,” said Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer. “The result of this ruling for Mininova is that we have to re-evaluate our business operations. At this time, we cannot determine what this will actually entail or imply. We will have to examine the verdict thoroughly first.”

You’re fighting the tides, and sooner or later you’ll have to face the new reality of the modern, 21st century entertainment industry. While it may not seem so today, it is still the case that laws should exist to serve the people – not the other way around.

Elsewhere in the land of the freeloaders, The Pirate Bay sale – which has faced fierce opposition and accusations of insider trading since the Global Gaming Factory first stepped in to buy the BitTorrent tracker earlier this summer – is meant to complete tomorrow.

Google translation For Mininova verdict from Dutch to English is here.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]

please wait... Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]