Mininova Deletes All Infringing Torrents and Goes ‘Legal’

[jefferson_dem]

Mininova Deletes All Infringing Torrents and Goes ‘Legal’
Written by Ernesto on November 26, 2009

Mininova, the largest torrent site on the Internet, has removed all torrents except those that were uploaded through its content distribution service. Mininova’s founders took the drastic decision after they lost a civil dispute against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and were ordered to remove all infringing torrents from the site.

Mininova’s decision to delete all infringing torrents from its index marks the end of an era that started five years ago.

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the 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.

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http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-deletes-all-infringing-torrents-and-goes-legal-091126/

[superduperfarleft]

1. No big loss.

After all, google is the best torrent site out there when it comes to public trackers.

[Forkboy]

2. Stamp out one and 5 more pop up.

[Sinti]

3. Good for them

actually they have a setup in place for legal torrents - some very good legal torrents I might add. I don't want P2P to become generally illegal, which is what will happen if they don't do things like this. The more legal use of the technology the better. Optimally, this technology could be used to distribute copyrighted material while giving the copyright holders a fair return for their work - cutting out the middle man (profit plundering publishers) as much as possible.