One of the key issues in the recent Pirate Bay trial was the prosecutor's contention that the lads behind the site were raking in something like 10 million kronor (one million dollars) a year. This led defendant Gottfried Svartholm Warg to complain during a court recess: "It's totally absurd, those numbers are totally disconnected from reality." And, for good measure, he took a shot at the prosecutor. "The old bastard's crazy," he said.

Whatever the truth of The Pirate Bay's profits, BitTorrent search engines can rake in quite a bit of cash. Mininova, for instance, earned �600,000 in revenue back in 2006, upping this to a whopping �1,000,000 in 2007. Is it profiting from piracy?

A good business to be in

Mininova is one of the largest such sites in the world (indeed, it claims to be the largest, with over 25 million pageviews a day), but that doesn't mean it tries to hide its contact info or address. It operates as a legitimate business from a canal-side office in Utrecht, which entails certain consequences. One of these is that it is legally required to file a basic financial statement with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce each year, and these statements are available to anyone 1) able to navigate a Dutch-language website and 2) cough up �9.

Ars pulled Mininova's statement from the Chamber of Commerce to see just how much cash such an operation could earn; in 2007, revenue was �1,037,560. Mininova's Niek van der Maas confirmed to Ars that the numbers were accurate, but noted that they don't account for either taxes or expenses. The money comes largely from ads on the Mininova site, but it also includes revenue from the video service Snotr.com, affiliate partnerships, and various toolbar offerings.

Even a casual glance at the site will confirm that a huge percentage of the .torrent files it hosts (Mininova, like The Pirate Bay, does not host actual content on its own servers) infringe copyright, but Mininova isn't quite The Pirate Bay. While the Bay used to delight in posting—and then ridiculing—takedown requests from copyright owners, Mininova claims to comply with all such requests and has a prominent page on its website providing information on the takedown process.

According to van der Maas, this means that "website revenue has nothing to do with copyright infringement."

This seems like a hugely debatable claim (ad revenue from the Mininova site is not boosted at all by those using the search engine to find copyrighted content?), but one sees what he means. Google could also said to "profit from piracy" in this sense, but as the IFPI's John Kennedy said during The Pirate Bay trial, the real issue for rights holders is whether search engines "cooperate" in some way on taking down infringing content.

Mininova does, which would seem to limit the scope for legal action against it. And, given the company's revenue and 2007 working capital of �665,523, it certainly has the resources to put up a fight if IFPI comes knocking.