Mininova ordered to purge all links to copyrighted files

[DaBees-Knees]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/mininova-ordered-to-purge-all-links-to-copyrighted-files.ars

Fresh off a set of legal wins against The Pirate Bay, the music and movie industries have just scored another court victory against the massive BitTorrent search engine Mininova. A Dutch judge in Utrecht has given Mininova three months to purge all links to copyrighted content from its site—or pay up to €5 million in penalties.

As with The Pirate Bay, Mininova's operators weren't accused of copyright infringement. In a peer-to-peer system, the actual files being transferred reside on millions of computers around the globe, and thus any direct infringement would be the responsibility of those users. But, like most countries, the Netherlands recognizes "contributory copyright infringement," which was the charge in this case.

The court case was brought by Stichting BREIN, a Dutch antipiracy consortium. While the charges were similar to those brought against The Pirate Bay admins in Sweden earlier this year, the two cases were quite different; unlike The Pirate Bay's deliberately inflammatory tactics, Mininova has long taken down copyrighted links flagged by rightsholders.

Not that this made rightsholders happy. Complaints had to be made against specific links, not against specific films or albums; if someone uploaded another copy, another takedown request had to be made. The burden of policing such a popular site was tremendous (similar arguments were made in reference to YouTube during its early days, but the site gradually adopted filtering technology that mollified most of the major rightsholders).

The Utrecht court found that Mininova was inciting copyright infringement in others and was profiting from that behavior through ad sales (and the company earned more than €1 million in 2007 alone). A study of randomly selected files made back in June showed that 80-90 percent of them appeared to be copyrighted; a quick look at the front page of Mininova today shows links to Inglorious Basterds, District 9, Whitney Houston, Jay-Z, "Non Nude Homemade Booty Bouncing," and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (Final Release), among others.

According to the judge, Mininova must assume that all commercially produced content is copyrighted unless it knows otherwise, and that the site must adopt proactive filtering of such content

"Mininova must assume that all commercially produced content is copyrighted". A sweeping decision that really does need to be challanged in a higher court. 

[..Ñøßߥ..]

Funny, i don't see anyone challanging google, yahoo or msn/Bing in the same way, yet they index links to torrents in the same manner as mininova.

[ñòóKýçrÕôK]

Assume - assuming makes an ASS out of U and ME. That judge should be wracked on the knuckles for even suggesting someone must assume anything as it pertains to any legal sence. This is the biggest problem there is in legal areas of p2p all over the world. I assume that if I am a part of a vpn that I am above detection and therefor safe from persecution. Not even remotely true. Site tracking software notes every IP address that visits these sites. You now assume an IP address doesn't prove guilt. If I have visual proof that your IP address was connected to mine and downloading from me or allowing me to upload from you, paired up with a date and a time, I have all I need to show proof that you were in violation of copywrite laws. If later I find that someone proxied your IP then the burdon is on me to follow that lead and leave you alone. People assume that once a musical work or a motion picture work is copywritten that it always copywritten. This is NOT the case. Fact is, and they don't want you to know this, some of the original releases of films and music that were once protected by copywrite are no longer protected. This why groups like Paramount, Disney, MGM, all release newer versions of older films that are "Digitally remastered in enhanced vivid technocolor" or some crap like that. So that you will assume that those original releases are still protected by copywrite when they are not. Only the "Digitally remastered in enhanced vivid technocolor" ones are. This same idea also happens with music. Anyway I assume you get what I'm getting at here. There is music and movies out there are original releases that are no longer copywritten. If one could find them and share them, they would be perfectly legal to share and download all of those they wanted. Then this "judge" (use that term loosely as he is likely already in someones pocket) would no longer be able to assume that you asa p2per need to assume anything. He would know you were perfectly within your right to share it as you wish.