Mininova Must Block The Pirate Bay and aXXo, BREIN Demands
Mininova Must Block The Pirate Bay and aXXo, BREIN Demands
June 06, 2009
Earlier this week Mininova and the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN fought out a civil dispute in court. In broad terms, BREIN demanded a copyright filter but an in-depth look at their demands reveals that they also suggest the BitTorrent site to block torrents tracked by The Pirate Bay and ban uploaders such as aXXo.
mininovaThis Tuesday the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer appeared in court. Mininova, operated by five Dutchmen who turned their hobby project into a successful business, were sued by Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN which protects the rights of several large entertainment industry corporations.
BREIN’s lawyer Dirk Visser told the court that Mininova aids in the distribution of copyright infringing works, and demanded that the site implements “preventive measures” to put an end to this. It is important that Mininova covers the costs of these measures, they say.
When we posted our article summarizing the pleas of BREIN and Mininova’s lawyers we didn’t have access to the exact texts. We do now, and there are a few interesting details in the demands made by BREIN’s lawyer that are worth mentioning.
Not only did BREIN demand a filter based on infohashes of ‘copyrighted’ torrents, they also called for a filter based on infringing keywords and possibly fingerprints. Even more worrying though, is BREIN’s suggestion that Mininova should ban torrents from public BitTorrent trackers that mostly link to copyright infringing content, hinting at The Pirate Bay’s tracker.
Banning torrents that use The Pirate Bay’s tracker is of course an absurd suggestion. No public tracker controls who can use it, so BREIN essentially wants to ban public BitTorrent trackers from Mininova altogether.
The second ‘demand’ (or suggestion) not mentioned in our previous coverage is perhaps more realistic. BREIN’s lawyer suggested that Mininova should ban the accounts and IP-addresses of uploaders who frequently upload torrents linking to copyrighted material, referring to the hibernating uploader aXXo as an example.
Demands aside, Visser also told plain lies to the court. In his plea he referred to aXXo telling the court that he was thanked by Mininova for his uploads, and rewarded with ‘VIP uploader’ status. However, VIP uploaders or any kind of special uploader statuses do not exist on Mininova, and they never have either.
The implications of this distortion of truth are unclear. Mininova’s lawyer didn’t come back to it in her plea because of time constraints, so it probably went unnoticed by the judges too. The verdict in the case is due on July 15. There is no doubt that this case will have huge implications for other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands, for better or worse.
:source: Source: Torrentfreak
