The Netherlands anti-piracy organization BREIN director, Tim Kuik said, “We applaud the fact that Mininova now uses the BitTorrent technology for legal business. We are not against the technology but only against the use of that technology for illegal purposes.” BREIN is similar to the RIAA of America or the CRIA of Canada, but represents both the music and film industry of the Netherlands.

According to Mininova’s official blog, they attempted to install a filtering system, but found that they were unable to create a reliable filter that would comply with the court ruling. This led to them eventually deciding to remove all copyright-protected material and moving their business into the direction of hosting legal content.

File sharing sites or applications, the process of peer to peer sharing, or file hosting itself is not illegal, as long as the content is not copyright-protected or if you own the rights to the material and wish to share online. In fact, some businesses use secure file sharing applications and certain copyright holders choose to distribute their works online voluntarily.

Mininova becoming a legal safe file sharing site will probably only be a small comfort to a hurting music industry as other large torrent sites continue to operate. For example, the legal battle against Pirate Bay started with raids in 2006 and court verdicts in 2009, which included multi-million dollar fines and prison time. The sites owners remain defiant, appealing the verdicts, and keeping the site operational as of this writing. On a page on The Pirate Bay, they list legal threats against them and state that “0 torrents [have] been removed, and 0 torrents will ever be removed.“

Whether or not Mininova’s fate will be a sign of things to come remains to be seen. Many countries’ laws are years behind the technology, but the corporate trend seems to show that the larger sites are beginning to respect copyrights. YouTube is widely known to comply with copyright claims, yet is still rampant with copyrighted material. Smaller musicians and film makers embrace the online sharing and view it as promotion, while the bigger corporations view it as stealing. Facebook has started to filter some material posted that was linked to The Pirate Bay, but just like YouTube, is still filled with illegally shared content.