The civil trial against Mininova, brought forward by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, has been postponed one month today.
The outcome of the case will determine whether the torrent indexing site will have to “actively filter” torrents from its index daily. If BREIN is triumphant, Mininova will be forced to remove all .torrent files that lead to unauthorized content such as pirated movies, music or TV shows.
“The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case,” says Mininova’s staff.
Additionally, Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer notes:
“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content. In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not.”
Result for: similar services
In September of 2007, the advertisement supported free music download site SpiralFrog debuted with 700,000 songs available , including the entire Universal catalog. In June of 2008, the service added more music, this time from the EMI catalog, putting available tracks at over 2 million.
Today, that service has shut down, leaving all users who purchased any music with 60 days to play their DRM-crippled tunes before they disappear.
SpiralFrog was once dubbed a possible “iTunes Killer,” but financial issues and an executive shakeup shook many consumer’s confidence in the company.
At the time, the service was one of very few that allowed users to listen to music for free but since then much bigger companies have made similar services available, including MySpace, Last.fm from CBS and imeem. Also notably, the behemoth video sharing site YouTube shows music videos, for free, from three of the Big 4 labels.
Result for: similar services
New York District Judge William H. Pauley III has dismissed the RIAA’s copyright infringment lawsuit against MP3Tunes‘ CEO Michael Robertson but has said the lawsuit against the company itself will go on as planned.
The lawsuit, brought forward by the RIAA on behalf of EMI and 14 other labels claims that MP3Tunes “infringed on copyrights as it offers an online music storage service, allowing users to upload their music collections and access them from virtually anywhere.”
Robertson is quick to point out that much larger corporations offer the same exact service as his company does and that “MP3Tunes was targeted because of its comparatively small size, ensuring EMI an easier victory that would then be used to shut down similar services and cripple consumers’ rights.” A few notable examples of other similar services are AOL’s Xdrive, Microsoft’s Skydrive and BT’s The Vault.
When the case is eventually ruled on it will determine whether customers can store their legally-obtained music in cloud services. MP3tunes currently has 150,000 customers who have uploaded their music into online “lockers.” The music is then accessible from any web-enabled device.
