Anti-piracy outfit BREIN has proudly announced this week that it shut down 393 torrent sites in 2009, with the largest being massive indexer Mininova, which was forced to go legal.
Overall, the group shut down 615 “illegal websites,” with the good majority being torrent trackers.
Additionally, 35 eD2K servers were taken down, 38 streaming movie stires, and 14 NZB (Usenet portals) were part of the group.
TF is reporting that the sites taken down must be very, very small since they received “a grand total of zero emails requesting information on the other several hundred closures.” (Not including Mininova, TorrentVault)
As is always the case with torrent site shutdowns anyway, one goes down and at least one new one goes up to take its place.
Result for: torrent trackers
One of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, TorrentValley.com, has been shut down in a raid by Bulgarian authorities. The so-called Cyber Crime Unit got tipped off by the Bulgarian Association of Musical Producers (BAMP).
“Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries,” said the BAMP representative Ina Kileva.
The press release by IFPI estimates that TorrentValley aided the distribution of more than one million copyright infringing files.
This is not the first time Bulgarian authorities have acted against BitTorrent sites. In 2006 police arrested the admin of Arenabg.com, who was soon released due to lack of evidence.
Result for: torrent trackers
BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy agency that has started a crusade against public torrent trackers, has another site in its sights, the world’s most popular torrent site, Mininova.
The organization has announced that it will be taking Mininova to court hoping that the court will force the site to filter its search results and effectively remove all unauthorized content.
Mininova, which boasts 30 million unique visitors every month, allows for user submitted torrents as well as authorized content from publishers such as the CBC. More importantly, the site does not have its own tracker, which has gotten the Pirate Bay in trouble recently.
Erik Dubbelboer, one of the co-founders of Mininova added the following: “We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.”
That should be all that is necessary under DMCA obligations, but of course BREIN does not see it that way. The site does not even host the unauthorized content, just the .torrent files to help peers connect.
Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, talked out about Mininova’s business model. “A notice and take down procedure is absolutely insufficient for a site that makes use of unauthorized files, structurally and systematically, he added.
The court case could have huge repercussions around the Web if BREIN has its way. They want Mininova to censor their search results, the site does not want to. If BREIN were to win, what is stopping them from starting cases against YouTube or even Google and MSN?
