Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

Pabugs writes with news that popular torrent site Mininova has abandoned their attempts at filtering and simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service. According to their blog post, they were left "no other option than to take [their] platform offline" after a court ruling from August. "The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros."

Comments

Debate!

[headkase]

There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic. We need to educate people to enable a wider debate. That is the only thing that will lead to fair change. Piracy is not the answer. There is a place for copyright that is not todays distorted parameters. Boycotting in the mean time is the answer, however, unless boycotting is whipped into shape it is also not the answer. Debate! Educate your friends and family it is a small start but it is the only way.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

The whole thing smells more and more like the old P&P RPG Paranoia. Everyone hates secret societies, everyone hates mutants, yet everyone is a mutant in a secret society.

I worked for our version of the RIAA for a while (I didn't mean to, they were part of the bundle of companies I had to support). My moment of "wtf" came when one of their lawyers approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.

My answer was "since you're suing people who know aynthing about flashing Nintendos or even do it, my answer has to be no". This is when he offered money...

Re:Debate!

[ivoras]

There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic.

I'd rather look at the cause of this "issue" - i.e. *why* does it exist. And I'll offer an answer - because it is harder and harder to get rich quickly while staying legal. The fact that I download movies all the time didn't influence my moviegoing one bit - I still go out to the movies every week or two because of the experience and the company of friends - both of which suck over DIVX. My problem is that there usually isn't anything good out there to see. Some nights, we don't remember what we watched around 5 minutes after leaving the cinema! I doubt the problem is with a lack of quality writers or actors or directors - I think most of it comes from producers and other financiers trying to cram in special effects, political correctness and crowd-pleasing stories (especially endings) to try to maximize the profits, like art can be expressed by equations. I don't feel one bit bad about downloading "2012" but I watched Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen twice (just a recent example) and I have a hefty collection of (legal, bought) DVDs of good films and TV shows. My point is that that a significant part of the piracy issue (not all of it!) is the direct result of the fall in quality and resorting to formulaic "this script equals this much $$$" thinking on the part of producers.

I'm sure the same thing goes for music.

One other large thing is convenience - sometimes people just don't feel like going to the movies and it's easier to download the film right now and watch it than waiting months for it to come on DVDs, etc. It is human nature - the baby wants what it wants. There are surely more problems, but I have a feeling these two combined are the cause of over 50% of the piracy issues. Heck, solve the distribution issue (make it cheap and easy and at the same time worldwide as the cinema releases) and I'd bet that 40% of all piracy would simply disappear over night.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I am doing something. See my signature. And I actually don't have anything to lose so I'm choosing to stick it to the man because I can. People can force change through virtue all that is needed is the appropriate vehicle. Slashdot almost gets there, see my signature for a vehicle-in-progress that would allow you to say fuck you in as neutral a setting as possible. Organization is the key. Individually we are relatively intelligent, collectively we are a juggernaut. All we need is the mechanism to arrive at fair truth. What policy maker will risk flying in the face of that? They'd be taken to the nearest tree and hanged. Figuratively of course, we are a democracy.

Re:Debate!

[MachDelta]

Q:Could you call 911 since I am about to go into cardiac arrest?
A:No

Depending on where you live, that answer may technically be illegal. Plenty of countries and a few states (oh and Quebec too) have a "Duty to rescue" law which, in a nutshell, states that you must attempt to assist an individual in peril provided that it doesn't also put your life at risk. At the very least, you would be expected to call for help.

It's all semantics though. I can't imagine any decent human being simply standing there and watching while another human has a heart attack, no matter who they work for.

Re:Debate!

[Znork]

There is a place for copyright

I used to think that, but I don't any more. Any monopolies handed out by the government and whose cost is borne by the public and the distributed economy will be treated as of interest for the receiving stakeholders only, and thus will permanently expand as the paying parties will not be represented in discussions around the issue. See the claims about IP jobs 'lost' to piracy, yet where are the discussions about jobs among plumbers, pizzamakers or other branches of the economy when copyright shifts money and resources from one part of the economy to the other? Are those branches represented when it's arbitrarily decided that they should be deprived of resources in favour of media industries? Copyright creates no resources, it merely redistributes them.

So no, there is no place for copyright. Any honest industry or creators support scheme requires that it be managed within the normal budget of governments and, like any other redistribution scheme, have its benefits weighed against its costs, and accounted for to the public. No other government scheme has anywhere close to as bad efficiency of copyright; if any other program had less than 5% of funding going to the actual intended beneficiaries there'd be an uproar.

That's not to say there can't be reasonable schemes for encouraging creativity; the easiest would simply be mandatory licensing which dispenses of any contracts no matter what outlet or reproduction, and simply requires a percentage (50-75%, for example) of any revenue derived from the copying to be paid to the creators (via a public agency, such as the IRS, not through private entities like in radio, and modulated by policy). Then it would also be easy to manage reasonable cost/benefit levels (should there be a ceiling on payouts and the rest spread along the long tail to encourage more production, for example, how many years of payout is the optimum to keep creative material flowing, etc).

Boycotting is not enough, the corrosive effect of corruption on politics is too strong, and politically it's only used to claim that anyone boycotting is pirating anyway. But it's certainly a right thing to do; paying for anything from the RIAA/MPAA corps means supporting the type of corruption going on as ACTA and other back-room deals, which I find utterly unacceptable by now.

Re:Debate!

[Maxo-Texas]

Let's see.

Imagine that other human being destroyed your life and put you in prison for five years.

How about, your children were sexually abused while in child protective services and one committed suicide.

Of course, if the law requires that I go get help, I'd have

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possible.

I've done the non-vengeance thing and I've done the vengeance thing and let me tell you, vengeance was damn sweet and I have no regrets. It's the only thing that made me smile now and then for a couple years while I recovered back to human.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I'll give you some background. Where I live, Newfoundland, Canada, there is a province wide radio station: same broadcast for everyone. They have a 1-800 number you can call into. It is a debating forum at heart, it is called Open Line. It has a very balanced and intelligent moderator running the show for people to engage with. It is insanely popular here. Everyone listens to it and enough people call into it that it has built its own momentum for issues of the day. People call in and address what pisses them off. Politicians also call in all the time when they get sniped to refute or otherwise manage the issue. When a politician, or policy maker, calls they are put right through to address the issue. Everyone else gets in a queue but eventually does get their say (1-800 number..). This program enables a feedback mechanism that works extremely well here. Perhaps our history and culture explains how it came to be established. In the 1990's our primary industry, fishing, collapsed as the stocks were not properly managed from a government and citizen perspective. This sowed the seeds of doubt and lead people to question authority. As the inertia grew more people jumped on the band-wagon. As a result now that this singular institution is established in our culture our government functions better because of it. This is a lesson that can be drawn from us. It deserves to be shamelessly copied, my signature proposes implementing it on the web. I'm not a good mechanic however so I am asking for your help - please add your opinion to it.

Not too sorry to see Mininova die

[Chris Tucker]

Mininova included far too many torrents on private trackers. Sort of defeating the purpose of BitTorrent, actually.

No great loss, all things considered.

I'm curious...

[naasking]

...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links? If they're not liable for that content, then they shouldn't have to remove anything.

Not necessarily

[Mathinker]

> But, collectively, we have to have room for compromise or we will all get nothing.

I can think of a lot of futures where this is not true.

For example, the future where copyright law is unchanged, infringement is rampant and unenforceable, and the content industry merely has to scale down because of lowered profits.

Or the future where the content industry pushes copyright law so out of whack that no one infringes, but their profits are just as lowered because many people are so afraid of the possible penalties they totally avoid buying their products and instead go for the safe indie products which have CC/alternative licensing and/or viewing the content only in ephemeral ways (like on television or a movie screen).

BTW, when I finished school I was a model "responsible citizen" in that I would never have thought to break any laws. Now that I am an adult, I see that the simplistic "law == morality" equivalence is far from being correct. So you might have a big problem in your plans, there, eh?

Tip of the iceberg

[Mathinker]

You've made a good start, but forgotten all the rest of the bad things of copyright law.

• Ridiculous statutory damages.
• Fair use is relatively useless because its boundaries are only prescribed by the courts, not by copyright law itself. The law itself should clearly define a "safe" area for fair use of various types of works (but not limit fair use to that definition, only).
• It is impossible to check if what you think is an original creation is actually just a derived work, since there are no registration requirements for copyrighted works. If your creation turns out to be a derived work, you shouldn't be liable for unreasonable damages.
• Currently accepted usage of most copyrighted works requires copying them (to various players/devices, between locations within your house, to offsite backup) yet this copying is actually illegal (since copyright law was designed in an era when copying was difficult and blatantly infringing).
• Copyright law varies widely from country to country but the net is international in nature.
• Copyright law has expanded to restrict and criminalize behavior which only enables others to infringe on copyright, and the extent of this expansion is only defined by the courts, enabling litigation-happy companies to effectively extort money from a section of the public which they would struggle to actually prove guilty. But lack of due diligence in pursuing copyright claims is not effectively punished.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

Pirates already have an entitlement complex.

No, you've got it backwards.

Copyright holders have an entitlement complex: they expect to get paid over and over in the future for work they did decades in the past. They think one big hit entitles them to a free ride for the rest of their lives, and they think they're entitled to tell everyone else what they can or can't do with their own property.

Pirates only want to be able to freely exchange information. The only "entitlement" a pirate feels is the right to communicate. Pirates don't expect other people to change their behavior to benefit pirates; copyright holders do expect other people to change their behavior to benefit copyright holders.