Technologizer

A Dutch court has ordered Mininova, a popular torrent search Web site, to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted content from its Web site within three months, or it will face hefty fines.

Dutch anti-piracy organization Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland (BREIN) filed a lawsuit against Mininova that resulted in the judge’s ruling.

Torrents are a terrific way to distribute large files, but the technology has been abused by copyright violators. While sites such as Mininova do not host pirated content, they do host torrent files that link to tracker servers that facilitate piracy. Tracker servers coordinate communication between peers that are distributing files.

Mininova took measures to remove torrents that link to copyrighted content from its site by deploying a content recognition system in May. That was not enough to appease the judge, who ruled that Mininova had to do more to prevent piracy – even though it was not directly responsible.

That may just be a sisyphean task. Mininova is a community Web site where its users upload torrents, and there are many thousands of torrents. I do not see how it will be able to keep every “bad” torrent off of its site without reviewing each submission manually.

With BREIN examining Mininova under a microscope, and a court imposed penalty of 100 Euro per infringing torrent, it is probably just a matter of time until the site dies a death of a thousand cuts. The fines are capped at 5 million euros, but that might be too much for Mininova to swallow.

I think we all can agree that The Pirate Bay makes much of its living off of piracy. Well, if it wasn’t for the apparent ineptitude of Swedish prosecutors in the trial against the site, we might have that set in stone legally. Not so fast.

According to TorrentFreak, the prosecution’s weak evidence will lead to at least half of the charges against Pirate Bay being dropped. It has been ruled that the prosecution cannot use .torrent files as evidence of TPB’s wrongdoing, as there is no clear correlation between the site and the illicit files.

There is still charges of “assisting and making available” infringing files hanging over the site’s head, but any allegations of actually participating in the act will now need to be withdrawn.

Why is The Pirate Bay getting away with it? It seems that the prosecution built its case around the fact that BitTorrent’s “trackers” (a server that assists in connecting two peers to initiate and continue downloads) were reproducing the files, thus making them liable.

However, in building this evidence, they were not able to show that TPB’s trackers were actually being used. OOPS.

Wounded but still fighting, the record industry insisted the case was still not over, calling the dismissal of those charges a “technicality” and that prosecutors could now focus on the crux of the case, the fact that the site makes available illicitly copied files.

As for The Pirate Bay? Defiant as ever. “EPIC WINNING LOL” commented TPB admin brokep on Twitter this morning.

If you cannot wait for Windows 7 to make its public debut sometime next month, you can get on BitTorrent now and download it. The next generation operating system has appeared on the P2P service as an ISO file.

The build number is 7000, which is believed to be the one which will get the “Beta 1″ label. It is a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, according to sources. About 1,500 seeders are available for the file and it is approxmately 2.5GB in size.

Windows 7 Beta 1’s leak onto BitTorrent follows a similar incident where an Alpha of the OS that was debuted at PDC also ended up being available on the service.

Reviews seem to indicate that overall the beta seems quite stable, probably indicating that we will only see one public beta of this OS before it rolls into the Release Candidate stage.

All in all, it appears as if Microsot is ready to push 7 out the door as fast as they can…

Today’s big stories involve what you can and can’t do with PCs and phones. BitTorrent over Comcast? Okay. iPhone tethering? Not okay. Skype on a plane? On its way to not being okay. List starts after the jump…
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