Sunday, January 10, 2010

RIP Mininova


Mininova is dead.

One of the best torrent sites on the Internet was forced to provide legal torrent files and delete all existing torrents from their website as they messed up with copyright infringement uploads.

In May 2009, a Dutch copyright enforcement organization filed a civil action against Mininova demanding the latter to filter torrent files pointing to copyright protected works. In August, the Utrecht court ruled that Mininova needs to remove all torrent files pointing to copyright protected material from the platform within three months or face damages of upto €5 million.

On November 26, 2009, Mininova announced in its blog that it could not find a filtering system against copyrighted content, and limited its platform to Content Distribution torrents only in compliance with the ruling. All other torrents, copyrighted or not, (more than 99.3% of the torrents) were removed. The website traffic dropped by 66% in a few days, and daily downloads fell down to 4%.

Now, Mininova doesn’t yield any results for movies or music search. No contents such as movies, music, and copyright works will be available on Mininova now and in the near future. Sigh.

But have no fear, Piratebay is still here.

- Glaisa PO
(entry no. 9)

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