Mininova: Tax-Paying Internet Pirates
As the trial of Pirate Bay, one of the most prominent torrent tracking Web-sites in the world, unfolds in Sweden (the verdict is expected on April 17th), the subject of Internet piracy has attracted a considerable amount of public attention. The common misconception about sites like Pirate Bay is that they are usually run by ...
As the trial of Pirate Bay, one of the most prominent torrent tracking Web-sites in the world, unfolds in Sweden (the verdict is expected on April 17th), the subject of Internet piracy has attracted a considerable amount of public attention. The common misconception about sites like Pirate Bay is that they are usually run by shady criminals operating on the margins of the shadow economy, hiding their servers in the third world or, at least, in deep basements of their houses. To dispel this myth, TorrentFreak, the go-to source for anyone who wants to understand Internet piracy and file-sharing, has posted highlights of an interview (in German) that the founders of Mininova, which, by some counts, is even more popular than the Pirate Bay, gave to the Austrian public radio.
Quite surprisingly, Mininova is a very successful and fully legal (and even tax-paying) Dutch company, with revenues of over one million dollars a year (and they seem to have a very nice office too, to judge by the photos over at TorrentFreak). Mininova’s secret? They have a proper copyright takedown request system, so the rightholders could complain to Mininova’s management about copyright violations (the Pirate Bay doesn’t like to compromise at all – hence the lawsuit). This is apparently enough to satisfy Dutch authorities (although BREIN, the prominent Dutch anti-piracy group had been pressing Mininova to pro-actively censor their content even before they hear from the rightholders).
Photo by earcos/Flickr
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