Mininova Removes All Links to Copyrighted Files
A week ago we reported that Mininova, one of the most popular sites around had hit another important milestone – 10 billion torrent downloads served to file sharers across the world. The site hit the news again, this time with something less pleasant for p2p users – it has removed all torrents to copyrighted content.
However, this doesn’t come unexpected –“earlier this year, Mininova lost the case against the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. The court ordered the site to remove all torrents that link to works protected by copyrights. So farMininova hasn’t decided if they will push for an appeal;” this is what we told you in our previous post about the site. It seems that meanwhile, Mininova has done some thinking and the outcome is this complying with the court ruling.
Of course, the decision was welcomed by the entertainment industry along with its trade groups. BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy organization that has been targeting Mininova for quite some time, happily announced: "We applaud the fact that Mininova now uses the BitTorrent technology for legal business.
"We are not against the technology but only against the use of that technology for illegal purposes."
While the crew behind the popular torrent site commented that there is "no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the content distribution service," they didn’t give up entirely the idea of an appeal against the court order.
From the blog:
Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August.
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’ll keep you posted if anything related to the matter shows up.
