Mininova goes “legal”
My usual waking up routine a few days back was shocking as I saw the news on the mininova.org website. Hard to believe though, that they’re turning to the “light side” as they are limiting their services to just content distribution. All is said and done as they are complying to the ruling of the Court of Utrecht last August.
Looking back to the supernova created by the demise of Suprnova, a lot of similar torrent sites have emerged, but not has been as successfull as Mininova. Founded in early 2005 by 5 tech-savvy Dutch teenagers, what started out as a hobby project turned out into a successful business that raked in millions of dollars in revenue.
As its popularity increased, so did the complaints of copyright holders who saw their intellectual property being shard freely on the site by its users. As the years went by, Mininova has complied with takedown requets. Unfornately this year, BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy outfit took the torrent site to court, demanding that the site operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.
The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.
To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.
During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.
Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.
In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.
The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.
It’s time for us torrent users to find other sites to park on and refresh everyday to check the latest torrents.
Source: Torrentfreak.com
