Following the conviction of the owners of The Pirate Bay (which is currently being appealed), another bittorent website has gone to court charged with copyright infringement. It’s claimed that Mininova is the biggest torrent site in the world and the court case against it by Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland (Entertainment Industry Rights Protection of the Netherlands) has now begun. BREIN charges that Mininova has failed to remove torrents linked to copyrighted material.
Mininova recently implemented a system on their site which was supposed to recognise whether uploaded torrents link to copyrighted material, but BREIN has alleged in court that 92% of links on Mininova are to illegal content (a quick look at the Mininova homepage reveals that there still appears to be a lot of movies, games and other copyright material still on there).
Mininova meanwhile maintains that the operators have no knowledge of the content tracked by the site, the copyrighted files aren’t hosted on their servers (and they are therefore not directly trading in copyrighted materials) and that they actually have deals in place with some copyright owners to distribute their work.
A ruling is expected on July 15th, although due to the Dutch legal sytem of appeals the case could eventually go on for years.