Copyright Law

Mininova Tests Out ?Content Recognition System?

By soulxtc

BitTorrent tracker site wants to make it "easier for copyright owners to remove torrents that refer to infringing content from Mininova."

Dutch-based BitTorrent tracker site Mininova has announced that it’s running a content recognition trial as part of its overall efforts to "improve" its platform.

"Today, we decided to extend our platform and run a trial with content recognition," says a blog post from today. "This basically means that likely infringing video files referred to by torrents are checked by a third party content recognition system. If the system finds that the file corresponds to unauthorized content, we remove and block the torrent that refers to this file on Mininova."

The BitTorrent tracker site wants to help copyright holders.

"We hope that this system will make it easier for copyright owners to remove torrents that refer to infringing content from Mininova, while still offering the best platform to our users," it adds.

Mininova is no doubt trying to better position itself when it faces the similarly Dutch-based anti-piracy organization BREIN later this month.

Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer said believes the upcoming case is not meant to determine the legality of BitTorrent tracker sites, but rather to determine what sort of filters they should be forced to use.

'The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don't link to illegal content," Dubbelboer said previously. "In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not."

This content recognition system trial is surely part of that effort.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on May 06, 2009 (boomark / email).