With BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay struggling its way to stay online, one of its closest competitors, the BitTorrent archive site Mininova. org too has lost a legal battle - as per the ruling by a Dutch court, Mininova will have to pay fines in case it does not eliminate from its servers the directory of links pertaining to copyrighted material.

In its ruling, the Utrecht district court asked Mininova to remove all infringing tracker files and their links within 30 days; else it would be fined euro1,000 per infringing torrent, up to a maximum of euro5 million.

A Google Translate copy of the ruling, which Mininova would likely appeal, read that Mininova, involved in copyrighted content distribution, had tripped up by actively filtering malware from the user-uploaded content; thus reflecting its ability to filter copyrighted content too.

Noting that the BitTorrent procedure uses torrent or tracker files that are indexed as the file itself, compiled from independent members who concurrently share parts of it; the court said that Mininova itself is an occasional contributor to copyright infringement.

Siding with Stichting BREIN - a Dutch association embodying different copyright-holder groups - the court said that Mininova had not only promoted the violation of copyrights, but had also profited from the copyright infringement activity because of advertisements on the site.