BitTorrent Mininova Ordered to Get Rid of Copywritten Files, Faces 5 million Euro Penalty

Piracy has got hit severely in the last couple of months with the Pirate Bay nearing an illegal shutdown and taking a legal turn with the Global Gaming Factory X probable acquisition. Fresh on the heels of that information, it is now being told that Mininova, one of the biggest BitTorrent Search engine, has also been ordered to purge all links to copyrighted files.

The order comes from a dutch judge in Utrecht who has given Mininova a time span of three months to purge all links to copyrighted content from its site and in case the order is not complied to, Mininova will end up paying a 5 million Euro penalty.

The difference between this development and the one that brought down curtains on pirate bay is that this is not a case of direct infringement of copyrights.

It is a peer-to-peer system where infringement is a responsibility of the users. But Netherlands recognizes contributory copyright infringement and thus the charges were framed against Mininova.

As per the judiciary, Mininova must observe that all commercially produced content is copyrighted unless Mininova is informed about a different situation and therefore it must adopt proactive filtering of such content. [via: Arstechnica]

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