The fight against illegal file-sharing and downloading is getting more and more serious by the day.
A civil court on Wednesday has ordered Minninova, one of the largest index of BitTorrent files, to remove all the files on its servers that point to copyrighted works. The removal is to be done within three months, or it will face a fine of up to 5 million euro ($7.16 million).
The Dutch-based Strichting Brein, an organization funded by copyright-holder groups, was the one who started the petition saying that the BitTorrent index site encourages users to infringe copyrights and gains profit from infringement by allowing ads on their site.
According to Wednesday’s ruling, the Utrecht District Court “didn’t agree with Mininova’s argument that it was impossible for it to find and remove torrents that point to copyrighted materials”.
Before it was ordered to remove all their files, Mininova has already started removing some files. This action however, wasn’t good enough for the court saying that the site should assume that all commercial media works are copyrighted.
Mininova responded by saying that they are considering an appeal.
Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090826/ap_on_hi_te/eu_netherlands_mininova
