Mininova Deletes all copyright infringing torrents and Goes Legal
In a blog post in their official blog they said Mininova limits its activities to content distribution service.
“Mininova was one of the largest BitTorrent index sites. It is a directory and search engine for many kinds of torrent files. It does not, however, host its own tracker.”
Mininova was sued by BREIN, a coalition of Dutch publishing, music film and software lobbies. In August the court ruled it must remove links copyright material or face a €5m fine.
Well this left no choice except 2 for mininova, either to go for an appeal, or remove all the infringing torrents. In their blog post they says they are thinking about going for an appeal. But to save their own a** they removed all the infringing torrents. Now the website is almost as good as empty.
They do offer this so called “Content Distribution Service”, but the question is whether it worth? I dont think so. The whole concept of torrent came for filesharing. But almost all of the users are using it, for getting copyrighted materials, which are not available for free.
The blog post says,
“Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict (Dutch link) we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We’ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it’s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment.
We launched our Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova. The launch of Content Distribution has proven to be a success. Countless content owners have used Content Distribution to distribute their content (e.g. albums and documentaries) for free to millions of users. For example, the Dutch band Silence is Sexy released their complete album on Mininova and received the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so. The Dutch television broadcaster VPRO decided to start using Content Distribution in 2009 in order to distribute documentaries.”
