Article by George Norman

On 08 Dec 2009

Here’s the Mininova story so far. This summer anti-piracy outfit BREIN took the popular torrent site to court. BREIN demanded that Mininova filter out copyright infringing torrents and that Mininova remove all torrents that link to copyright infringing content. Mininova argued that it operates legally and that it already implemented a technology to filter out copyright infringing torrents. Still, it ended badly for the torrent site – the court ruled that the BitTorrent Mininova platform acts unlawful.

What followed came as a shock to the torrent community: Mininova decided to remove all the torrents, except for the ones that are part of its Content Distribution Service. Thanks to the Content Distribution Service, artists and producers can publish and distribute their content free of charge via Mininova.org. Everything else though has been deleted – that’s millions of torrents that let users download pirated movies, albums, software applications and so on.


For 5 years Mininova has provided a torrent fix for millions of users. Just to put things in perspective, there used to be about 5 million Mininova.org visits per day previous to it going legal. Now that Mininova turned legit and partly shut down the site, traffic has plummeted – from 5 million visits to 1.8 million visits. That is a 66% drop in traffic. The number of downloads dropped from over 10 million to about 370,000; the number of searches dropped from 10 million to 3 million.

It is hardly surprising that Mininova’s traffic took a nosedive. But as TorrentFreak points out, BREIN’s success over Mininova has had little impact on overall BitTorrent traffic. Users have simply moved to other torrent sites.

“There is no doubt that Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN will be proud of their accomplishment, but aside from ruining Mininova’s business it will not have a significant impact on the overall volume of BitTorrent traffic. As always, new sites emerge by the dozens as old ones are shut down and users quickly adapt to the new situation. A network engineer at a major Aussie ISP has confirmed that Mininova’s partial shutdown has had no noticeable effect on traffic volumes,” said TorrentFreak.



Tags: Mininova, BitTorrent, BREIN

I Hope you LIKE this blog post! Thank you!

What do YOU have to say about this

Popular News

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.