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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