Mininova is next to get takedown orders from Netherlands court

The world's largest torrent indexing site Mininova is the next site to fall to anti-piracy group Stichting BREIN, Dutch news services are reporting today.

A civil court order handed down today has given Mininova three months to remove all copyrighted works from its servers or face a €5 million fine. Stichting BREIN (lit: "The Brain Foundation"), which represents copyright holders, took action against The Pirate Bay earlier in the summer and won on similar grounds. However, that particular case is in appeal and awaiting its retrial on October 5.

Unlike the Pirate Bay, however, Mininova was already working with copyright groups to devise appropriate content filters. As its Web site policy currently reads, "Please note that we do not host any copyrighted content on this website. The torrent (metadata) files that we host do not contain data that might be copyrighted in any way."

On its blog today, the Mininova team says it is considering appeal as well: "The court did not agree with Brein on all demands. Specifically, it ruled that Mininova does not infringe copyright and neighboring rights. The court also found Mininova can not be expected to remove files that are 'reasonably likely' refer to infringing material. Remarkably, the verdict does not give any consideration to the fact that Mininova has developed a content filter for Brein, nor to the cooperation between Mininova and other organizations of rights holders. This surprises Mininova, because it has always stressed the importance of cooperation."