The war on piracy continues: just after Swedish officials ordered The Pirate Bay’s webhost to take The Pirate Bay down or face a fine of 500,000 kroner ($70,600), it appears that a Dutch civil court has ordered Mininova, another torrent site similar to The Pirate Bay to pull the plug on all “infringing” torrents published on the site. Stichting Brein, a Dutch pro-copyright lobby group has filed a lawsuit against Mininova.
The Utrecht District Court has today ruled in favor of Stichting Brein, meaning that Mininova has three months to remove all copyright infringing torrents. If they do not comply, they will be slapped with a fine of €5 million (which is around $7.6 million USD). The court had this to say on the matter:
“Mininova encourages users of its platform to make copyright material accessible via its platform, helps users find the desired file with the copyrighted work and ensures through its 'administrators' and 'moderators' for the copyrighted works that are accessible through its platform, also useful for its users”, the court said.
"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", the court ruled.
Mininova also had something to say about this:
“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.”
With the future of torrent sites looking bleak, just how different will the piracy landscape be in the years to come? Could the age of torrents be grinding to a halt, with legal action being taken on the two major torrent sites out there, and, perhaps more in the future?
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