In its stupid and relentless march to control the digital availability of video and music the entertainment industry trade groups and other organizations have won another battle with Dutch judge ordering that Mininova, one of the world’s largest torrent search engines, remove all infringing torrents. In the judge’s opinion Mininova may not be directly responsible for any copyright infringement but they are not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders.

Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN, a European entertainment industry trade organization, claims that it isn’t its intention to shut Mininova down. Instead it wants is to have all existing illegal torrents removed and the implementing of an improved filtering system along with digital fingerprints that would allow rights holders to protect their content.

The judge in their finding that Mininova isn’t doing enough to to protect rights holders has given Mininova three months to remove that content, or pay a penalty of €1,000 per infringing torrent to a maximum of 5 million Euros ($7 million). The court reasoned that Mininova already had a proactive team of moderators who dealt with removing adult content, viruses and fake files and therefore had systems in place that could deal with such copyrighted material.

According to the team over at TorrentFreak the co-founder, Erik Dubbelboer, of Mininova is considering appealing the decision.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said in a response: “We are obviously not happy with the verdict.” Mininova is considering to appeal the decision, which they have to do within three months

At the end of March of this year I wrote a post about Mininova’s interesting attempt at providing musicians with a storefront on the site for their music. This was a part of their move to try and legitimize torrents as a way to download legal music files. Now it would seem that they are going even further down that road by instituting a content recognition filter system for all torrent file uploads in order to reduce the number of torrents pointing to illegal media files.

One of the interesting things about this is that system being used isn’t one that the team behind Mininova selected themselves. Instead it was one selected by the media companies that currently have a lawsuit pending against the torrent search site. Up until this point Mininova has always been trying to use the “we’re just a search engine” defense and are protected by the DMCA Safe Harbor exemption. As Ernesto at TorrentFreaks points out this has obviously changed.

Additionally Ernesto reports on the negative reaction from the users of the torrent site

The response from Mininova’s users is mostly negative, with one commenter saying “Shame to see such a nice site decide to go hang itself,” and another adding “Wow, guess you guys are caving under the pressure. Too bad its all over now.”

This raises a rather interesting thought. Piracy is going nowhere, no matter how hard the entertainment industry tries, and for sites like Mininova; as well as other popular torrent sites, these ‘illegal’ torrents are what bring people in. Take away those files and you are endanger of losing the biggest reason for people to use your search engine over some other one. They are in fact what is called in the real world of marketing – loss leaders.

So rather than doing everything they can to remove those files and lose users in the process why not use them to your advantage. The idea here being that you clearly label them as pirated files but at the same time provide links to legal versions that are of better quality and faster download. Pull the users in with the lure of easy to find pirate torrents and then convert them into legal owners of those self-same files. It’s not that hard to do and the benefits far outweigh treating everyone as a criminal before giving them an options to be customers.

Where on one hand Mininova look so much like a forward thinking web business it now looks like nothing more than a lackey for the very people that the majority of their users hate. I wouldn’t be at all surprise to see Mininova pay dearly for this move as users begin looking elsewhere. It is another case where everyone loses.

According to a post at TorrentFreak this is something that Mininova will be changing. In a move to encourage even more artists to use their service and possibly to prove to labels that BitTorrent is a valid alternative marketplace Mininova has launched an addition to their distribution service. Starting today artist, in just a few clicks, will be able to add links to CDs, concert tickets and other merchandising products that they want to sell alongside the torrent download link.

The new feature integrates a link to products in the artist’s myshopify.com store, as the record label Beep! Beep! has done with one of their latest releases.

The label even gives Mininova users a 20% discount for helping out with seeding. According to the label, the reason why they have decided to give all their albums away for free is simple. “Because it’s only fair not to pay for something you haven’t heard yet,” they say.

“In our opinion torrents are an excellent way to present you with our music. That’s why Beep! Beep! and Mininova have teamed up. We like the fact that you’re taking the effort to get to know new music. In fact, we’d like to thank you for downloading and seeding our music by giving you a discount on our hardcopies,” the label announced.

I gotta admit this is a pretty cool feature to see added and in my opinion actually puts Mininova a definite step above The Pirate Bay.