Mininova, one of the biggest torrent file-sharing websites in the world, has removed links to all copyrighted content that it does not have official agreements for.

The most surprising thing about this story, is that it is news.  However, Thursday’s move is a win for the entertainment industry as users of the site are now cut off from a major source of television shows, music, movies and other copyrighted content. The victory is likely to be short-lived, though, as peer-to-peer file sharers move on to other torrent sites and new technology.

Mininova, which was founded in 2005 in the Netherlands by five students, made the concession as the result of a court case brought forward by BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy group. In June, a judge ruled that Mininova was not directly responsible for copyright infringement but ordered the website to remove links to such torrents within three months or face a fine of up to 5 million euros.

In the U.S., we call that “contributory infringement” and it’s the theory that essentially ended Napster. (Napster lives on as a Best Buy company that has copied the business model of Rhapsody.com.)

The question now becomes:  what mode will folks use to rip off content? Will it be the more distributed peer-to-peer torrent network?  Or will the entertainment industry take the initiative to innovate, using a model that permits more content to be accessible by folks who want it?  Like the innovative collaboration between Netflix and Tivo:

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What is the “Public Domain?”

Under U.S. Copyright law, a work that is “created” (fixed in tangible form for the first time), is automatically protected from the moment of its creation for a term lasting for the author’s life, plus an additional 70 years. For works made for hire, a copyright lasts for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.  Once this time runs, the work is no longer copyrighted and becomes part of the public domain.  No one controls it anymore.

What can you do with a work in the public domain?  Pretty much anything you like.

Introducing the 50-page Creationist’s Introduction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (read the Living Waters’ introduction here), a project of Conservapedia to remove “liberal Bias” from the Bible, and for nostalgia’s sake, one of the earliest attempts to edit religious text-the 19th Century Woman’s Bible.

While folks may have a knee jerk “thats-not-right” response to editing controversial works, it underscores the fact that any work in the public domain-from the Bible to On The Origin of Species-is free for anyone to make use of, however they see fit.

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Francis Gurry, director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), on Thursday said music copyright protection was “under the most severe stress in making the transition from the physical world to the digital world” and the problem will likely spread to films as web connections speed up.  However, the heavy punishment of illegal file sharers on the web will be counter-productive in the global fight against Internet piracy and copyright infringement.

“So, we need to reflect on the fundamentally important question of how we are to finance culture in the future — the future evolution of the copyright system, is of course central to this debate.”

Among other things, Mr. Gurry is in India to discuss making copyright-protected material available to the visually impaired and wrote an op-ed for The Hindu noting that a recent study estimated that the Indian entertainment industry loses some 820,000 jobs and around $4 billion each year to piracy.

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Public Knowledge is ALL fired up by the proposal of the Motion Picture Association of America’s request to the FCC for permission to engage in “selectable output control” (SOC).

If the FCC agrees, the MPAA and the movie studios it represents would be able to “turn off” any output plug they choose, like those on the back of consumer electronics devices of an entertainment system, during special video-on-demand movies on cable television.

Public Knowledge opposes SOC and along with Consumer Federation of America, Digital Freedom Campaign, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, and U.S. PIRG, has filed comments urging the FCC to deny the MPAA’s request.

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