BitTorrent Site Mininova Loses Copyright Ruling
A Dutch court has ruled against BitTorrent archive site Mininova.org, and has ordered it to purge its directory of trackers linking to copyrighted files within 30 days or face fines.
The ruling (of which a Google Translate copy can be found here) concludes that the Dutch site tripped up by actively filtering malware from content that its users uploaded, which meant that it had the capability to filter copyrighted content as well.
As a result, the district court in Utrecht ruled that Mininova will have to remove all infringing tracker files or links to those files, or else pay 1,000 euro per infringing torrent with a maximum of 5 million euros. The BitTorrent protocol uses these torrent or tracker files as an index of the file itself, which is compiled from numerous independent members all sharing small portions of it simultaneously.
:story: PC Magazine
