Mininova

One of the key issues in the recent Pirate Bay trial was the prosecutor's contention that the lads behind the site were raking in something like 10 million kronor (one million dollars) a year. This led defendant Gottfried Svartholm Warg to complain during a court recess: "It's totally absurd, those numbers are totally disconnected from reality." And, for good measure, he took a shot at the prosecutor. "The old bastard's crazy," he said.


Whatever the truth of The Pirate Bay's profits, BitTorrent search engines can rake in quite a bit of cash. Mininova, for instance, earned €600,000 in revenue back in 2006, upping this to a whopping €1,000,000 in 2007. Is it profiting from piracy?
A good business to be in

Mininova is one of the largest such sites in the world (indeed, it claims to be the largest, with over 17 million pageviews a day), but that doesn't mean it tries to hide its contact info or address. It operates as a legitimate business from a canal-side office in Utrecht, which entails certain consequences. One of these is that it is legally required to file a basic financial statement with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce each year, and these statements are available to anyone 1) able to navigate a Dutch-language website and 2) cough up €9.

Mininova does, which would seem to limit the scope for legal action against it. And, given the company's revenue and 2007 working capital of €665,523, it certainly has the resources to put up a fight if IFPI comes knocking.