The site has grown steadily over the years and continues to do so, despite a setback in court this summer. In fact, today the 10 billionth torrent file was downloaded from Mininova, an impressive achievement to say the least.

Although the site is still going strong, with the increasing visitor numbers month after month, things have definitely changed behind the scenes.

When asked for a comment on whether they had predicted the site would grow this rapidly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can.”

Previously the Mininova team welcomed these download records with more enthusiasm, but times have changed. In common with their counterparts at the Pirate Bay, we get the impression that the torrent site is not their core business anymore, which is not really that surprising considering the legal troubles Mininova faces.

In August, Mininova lost in court against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer had to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content. Mininova has yet to decide whether or not they will appeal the case.

Possibly related to this uncertain future, Erik said that they are not going to release any new features or major upgrades to the site anytime soon. “At the moment we are mainly focusing on other projects besides Mininova,” he informed us.

This year has undoubtedly been a turbulent one for Mininova. Nevertheless, we want to congratulate the Mininova team for reaching this new milestone, whether they like it or not.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today, the judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer has been ordered to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content.

BREIN’s intention was not to shut down the site. Instead, the organization called for a filter based on infringing keywords and possibly digital fingerprints to guarantee that the rights holders have sufficient means to protect their content.

The court agreed with BREIN’s assessment that Mininova is not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and ordered the site to remove all torrent files that link to infringing content within three months, or pay a penalty of 1000 Euro per infringing torrent with a maximum of 5 million euros ($7 million).

Mininova’s notice and takedown policy that allows copyright holders to remove infringing torrents is not sufficient, the court said. Interestingly, the recently announced copyright filter that Mininova launched together with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) wasn’t mentioned in the verdict.

The court did not agree with Mininova’s defense that it is impossible to moderate all torrents that are uploaded to the site. It further said that Mininova is encouraging its users to download copyrighted material, helped by the several moderators that the site has in place.

The moderators keep the site clean and ‘family friendly’ by removing torrents that link to adult content, viruses and fake files. They do this proactively and in response to user feedback, the court concluded, pointing out that they should also be able to moderate torrents that link to copyrighted material.

It was further concluded that Mininova profits from copyright infringement though the ads that appear on the site.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said in a response: “We are obviously not happy with the verdict.” Mininova is considering to appeal the decision, which they have to do within three months

Developing story.

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Late last week the band’s BitTorrent link was revitalized after a new Radiohead track leaked onto the Internet. After this advance release of “These Are My Twisted Words,” rumors began to grow that Radiohead themselves might be behind the ‘leak’.

Speculation grew on the back of comments made by Thom Yorke of the band to The Believer: “We’ve actually got a good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out”.

Today, on the band’s Dead Air Space blog, Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar and keyboard) seems to solve the mystery:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.

We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

At the bottom of the post are two links to downloads, one directly from Waste and the other the original torrent uploaded to Mininova a few days ago. In fact, it was uploaded twice.

An enthusiastic commenter on Mininova exclaims: “OMFG! This torrent is being redirected from the radiohead official store, so there’s no album, just this song finished, this is very edgy, i mean thom yorke is way ahead from any other artist, at least we know he’s not doing his music to get some profit, at least not anymore, this is history being made, again, GREAT!”

Sounds like the first of many happy listeners.

Mininova is happy with Radiohead’s move also. The site’s co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “It’s great to see that artists use Mininova to distribute and promote their content for free. We encourage everyone to do this, which is why we provide our Content Distribution service.”

Radiohead uploaded the torrent the old fashioned way though, seeding it themselves. Apparently they are well aware of the latest developments in the BitTorrent community, as they used the newly founded OpenBitTorrent tracker.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Now FPM is claiming that a “major offensive” is underway against what it describes as “new forms of illegal file-sharing.” The group is claiming that it has successfully removed from the Internet more than 30,000 links to unauthorized music, which together generated 10 million illicit downloads.

Singling out Mininova as the single biggest host of links on its hitlist, FPM claims to have successfully ordered the torrent site to remove more than 20,000 torrents. Another 10,000 items were removed from online storage sites including Rapidshare and MegaUpload. FPM says that it will now work to have further infringing links removed on a daily basis.

In further action against file-sharing services, FPM claims to have shuttered a further 12 eD2K and Direct Connect servers although no further details have been made available.

Interestingly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer was not aware of FPM’s takedown bombardment. He told TorrentFreak that they haven’t received any emails from FPM. So, unless FPM was sending the requests from a different email address not associated with its domain, their claim might be a bit overstated.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The committee concluded that downloading should be criminalized once the entertainment industry has come up with sufficient legal alternatives. Worryingly, the report also included some factual errors about Mininova that could potentially hurt the BitTorrent site in its ongoing court case against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Among other things, the parliamentarians wrote that in common with The Pirate Bay, Mininova doesn’t allow copyright holders to remove torrents from the site upon request. In fact, Mininova has a full notice and take down system. In response to these and other statements, Mininova demanded a public rectification from the Dutch parliament.

“We demand that the spreading of false information related to Mininova will be stopped. In addition, we demand that the working group removes the name Mininova from the report and places a rectification on the website of the Dutch parliament and in several national newspapers,” Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said.

“We take this very seriously,” Erik Dubbelboer said. “If these demands are not met, we’ll consider to take legal steps,” he added, in order to emphasize that their demands should not be taken lightly.

Legal threats or not, the committee announced today that it does not intend to rectify their earlier statements, even though they admit to having made a mistake.

The committee of the Dutch Parliament has, however, changed the original report based on (some of) Mininova’s complaints. Initially it stated that the torrent site had no “notice and takedown” policy to handle the complaints of copyright holders, but this has been corrected in an updated version.

In the updated version of the report the committee also added that Mininova’s “notice and takedown” system is not sufficient, even though it follows European law. Arda Gerkens, the head of the parliamentary committee said that Mininova’s copyright policy is not very efficient, since Mininova demands that rights holders send the full urls of the torrents they’d like to see removed.

This minor correction is of course far from what Mininova had demanded and they are not satisfied with the committee’s handling of their complaint. Mininova is currently discussing with their lawyers if and what legal action they are going to take against the Dutch Government.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In their advice to the government, a working group consisting of four members of the Dutch parliament looked into the matter. They suggested criminalizing downloading once the entertainment industry has come up with sufficient legal alternatives.

The conclusions of the report were widely debated in the Dutch press. Worryingly, also some of the factual errors about Mininova that the parliamentarians dreamed up were recited in the media, which may hurt the BitTorrent site in the ongoing court case against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

For instance, the report claims that Mininova ignores complaints form copyright holders and refuses to remove torrents from their site. This nonsense of course, since the site has had a copyright policy for years and is known to follow up every complaint.

Another inaccuracy in the report is the claim that Mininova adds “reviews” to the torrents their users have uploaded, something we’ve never heard before. The rumors that they actually host copyrighted content and that they filter porn from their site pro-actively don’t hold up either.

The Mininova staff are not happy with these allegations, especially since they are currently involved in a lawsuit against the entertainment industries that covers the same issues. “We are very displeased with the fact that the working group didn’t contact us prior to releasing this report, or even took a look at mininova.org,” Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said.

“We demand that the spreading of false information related to Mininova will be stopped. In addition, we demand that the working group removes the name Mininova from the report and places a rectification on the website of the Dutch parliament and in several national newspapers,” Dubbelboer added.

“We take this very seriously,” Erik Dubbelboer said. “If these demands are not met, we’ll consider to take legal steps,” he said to emphasize the seriousness of their demands.

Arda Gerkens, the head of the parliamentary working group pointed to her parliamentary immunity when she was confronted with the news. However, legal experts said that parliamentarians don’t have any immunity when they speak out in public, which she did.

Mininova demands that the rectifications are made before the verdict in their case against BREIN is due, so it wont influence the decision of the judges.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Our traffic sponsor Digg is no stranger to BitTorrent. Before the MediaDefender debacle Digg’s weekly video podcast Diggnation was published on Revision3’s very own BitTorrent tracker, but times have changed.

However, with their latest Dialogg video Digg has again decided to embrace the Internet’s most powerful distribution method. They’ve teamed up with Mininova, the largest BitTorrent indexer, to make the file available to millions of Bittorrent users.

“We see BitTorrent as a smart way to legitimately distribute content amongst millions,” Matt Van Horn, Business Development Manager for Digg told TorrentFreak. “That’s why we’re excited to share Digg Dialogg via torrents as one of the ways in which people can enjoy Digg’s interview with Bruno,” Matt added.

In addition to a regular torrent, Mininova is also testing a BitTorrent-powered video stream using Bitlet’s services. By clicking on the “stream this video” link users can directly watch the stream in their browser, fully powered by BitTorrent.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told us that they are delighted to be working with Digg. “We have always liked Digg so when they asked us to work together we jumped on it immediately. This was also a nice opportunity to test the new video streaming from Bitlet which we had just implemented into our Content Distribution service,” he said.

With its Content Distribution service Mininova is seeding the file on its servers which guarantees a high speed download. The advantage for the Digg team is that they save some bandwidth and don’t have to seed Bruno themselves.

The Dialogg with Bruno can be both downloaded and streamed using on Mininova. Geil!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The results of the survey clearly showed that avid file-sharers would rather hide their identities than stop downloading. And indeed, more and more BitTorrent users are seeking ways to protect their privacy online, rendering all the newly proposed anti-piracy laws useless.

TorrentPrivacy, BitBlinder and The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator are just a few examples of services launched in the past year, targeted at concerned BitTorrent users. The goal of these and other anonymity applications is clear; hide the IP-address of the file-sharer so he can’t be tracked down while swapping files.

Currently in beta, The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator uses the same tech platform as the VPN service Relakks. For a few dollars a month it routes all your traffic through its servers, hiding your IP address. Ipredator is currently limited to 3000 users but according to the Pirate Bay team there are another 180,000 users on the waiting list, eager to join.

Running a VPN network for hundreds of thousands of hungry BitTorrent users will prove to be quite a challenge. The infrastructure and bandwidth required by a service targeted at file-sharers is significant, not to mention costly. This undoubtedly leads to problems.

The aforementioned Relakks saw its subscriptions double in just a month when the controversial Ipred law came into effect in Sweden this April. This surge in subscriptions led to to major problems with support and updates according to Relakks’s chairman Jan Erik Fiske.

Unlike more traditional VPN services, BitBlinder recently introduced a free solution. Instead of routing the traffic through a central server BitBlinder passes it on through multiple peers. Each peer in the chain only knows the IP address of the next person in the chain, not the original requester/sender.

A few days after its launch BitBlinder had signed up more than 30,000 new users. Right now registrations are temporarily closed to make sure everything runs smoothly for those already using the service, and while they iron out bugs. “We want to make sure it works, and is secure for everyone,” Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder told TorrentFreak.

Because of the increasing interest in anonymity, the Swedish ISP Alltele decided to offer a free service to conceal the IP-addresses of its customers. According to Alltele’s CEO Ola Norberg thousands of users have downloaded the application, which nearly killed the server it was running on.

These examples clearly show that the scare tactics of the entertainment industry are not going to work. There is no doubt that with every new anti-piracy initiative introduced, more and more users will find their way to one of the many anonymizing services out there.

Instead of stopping the pirates in their tracks the entertainment industry has simply inspired a new ‘industry’ worth millions of dollars.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Mininova’s lawyer argued that the site is already taking measures to ensure rights holders can protect their content, and this amounts to more than they are required to do under the law. The site has a ‘notice and takedown’ policy and recently started offering an infohash filter where content owners can blacklist torrents.

Mininova’s case against BREIN was heard at the Utrecht court. Three judges have been appointed to the case. One of them is a replacement for a judge who was taken off the case a few weeks ago because he was connected to the entertainment industry. The hearing started at 1 PM with BREIN’s lawyer Dirk Visser.

Visser began by informing the court that Mininova has over 5 million daily users who use the site to download copyrighted content. A brief look at the site’s homepage clearly shows that they link to illegal content, and their business models is to make money off the millions of ads that are displayed, he said.

Mininova’s attempt to offer a distribution platform to publishers through their “featured content” section is nonsense, BREIN’s lawyer insisted. According to research conducted by BREIN 92% of the torrents on Mininova point to ‘illegal’ content, and the tag cloud with popular searches also shows that illegal content is what people are mainly looking for on the site.

In 2006 and 2007 BREIN and Mininova had lengthy discussions on how to deal with copyrighted content, Visser said. Mininova wanted BREIN to come up with specific infohashes that should be in the filter, and BREIN wanted Mininova to cover the costs. They never reached an agreement and the negotiations ended.

All in all Visser is arguing that Mininova aids in distributing copyright infringing works, and BREIN demands that the site installs a filtering mechanism that will put an end to this. Mininova will have to cover the costs of such a copyright filter themselves, they say.

Next up was Mininova’s lawyer Vita Zwaan. She started out by informing the court that this is a landmark case because it’s the first to make a judgment about the legality of the BitTorrent platform in The Netherlands, pointing out that this case obviously has far reaching consequences.

Zwaan further told the court that, while the hearing was taking place, approximately 180 torrents would be added to the site’s database and that Mininova has no knowledge of the content currently tracked by these torrents. In addition Zwaan explained that Mininova has partnerships with content owners to distribute works though their distribution platform.

On top of this, Mininova offers several options for content owners to take ‘infringing’ torrents off the site, the lawyer explained. Together with the Motion Picture Association (MPA), Mininova started experimenting with a content filter through which torrents can taken off the site by the content owners.

The filter trial is a success according to Mininova’s lawyer, who quoted one of TorrentFreak’s recent articles to point this out. BREIN also had to option to participate in the filtering trial so they could see for themselves how it works, but BREIN rejected this offer.

It is unclear what BREIN’s demands actually are according to Zwaan. They want Mininova to implement “preventive measure” but are vague about the details. However, BREIN doesn’t want to provide the info-hashes for the torrents it wants removed, and argues that this is something Mininova should do themselves. This is the opposite of what the MPA (a member of BREIN) is doing now.

According to Mininova’s lawyer, this disagreement on who should provide information on what to filter is what the case is all about.

A keyword filter that was proposed by BREIN is unworkable according to Zwaan because it would result in too many false positives. A filter for the keyword ‘office’, as BREIN suggested, would result in the removal of 92 torrents linking to “Open Office” she said.

Mininova’s lawyer then discussed some of the costs Mininova made thus far to take down torrents upon request from copyright holders (though the old system). She said that 155,876 takedown requests have been reviewed which cost the site 250,000 euro ($350,000). In addition, Mininova invested several thousand euros in the content filter.

Zwaan went on to explain that Mininova is not a necessary nor sufficient part of the BitTorrent download process. Unlike The Pirate Bay they don’t host a public tracker, and neither do they offer a BitTorrent client through which users can download torrents. BREIN argued otherwise and this is incorrect Zwaan said.

Towards the end of her plea, Zwaan argued that Mininova is not infringing the rights of various copyright holders as BREIN stated. She cited several cases in and outside The Netherlands to make point out why, and pointed out that The Pirate Bay may not have been found guilty if they had a notice and takedown policy like Mininova has.

After a short break the hearing continued briefly and the judges asked both lawyers for clarification on some issues. Mininova’s lawyer was asked about the moderators that Mininova has, and why they remove porn but not copyrighted content. Mininova explained that the moderators handle problem reports from users (about virusses, porn, etc.), while the Mininova admins handle the copyright complaints. The site has around five moderators, a number which the changes from time to time.

After roughly three hours the hearing ended and it’s now up to the judges to come up with a decision. The verdict is due on July 15. Erik Dubbelboer and the other Mininova founders think they have the law on their side. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we believe Mininova will continue to exist,” Erik told TorrentFreak.

This is a developing story, info might be added.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The initial date for the trial was set or May 20th, but was postponed today. “The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case,” Mininova’s staff writes in a response to the news.

The Mininova trial will set an important precedent for all other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands. If the court rules against Mininova it could mean that copyright holders get more control over what is shared on Mininova, and hundreds of torrent sites that use their torrents as input for their indexes.

“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content,” Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak previously.

“In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not,” Erik added.

Earlier this month Mininova already started experimenting with a content removal system that allows copyright holders to filter and remove ‘infringing’ torrent files from the world’s largest BitTorrent index. As a consequence, thousands of popular movie and TV titles disappeared from the site overnight.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

But did The Pirate Bay Four receive a fair trial? Today, an event on Swedish national radio SR threw everything into doubt – and it’s barely believable, like something straight out of Hollywood.

The copyright industry likes to have the outcome of processes clear before engaging them so it’s perhaps unsurprising that SR today revealed that the judge Tomas Norström is in league with it on many fronts. The judge has several engagements – together with the prosecution lawyers for the movie and music industries.

Swedish Association of Copyright (SFU) – The judge Tomas Norström is a member of this discussion forum that holds seminars, debates and releases the Nordic Intellectual Property Law Review. Other members of this outfit? Henrik Pontén (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau), Monique Wadsted (movie industry lawyer) and Peter Danowsky (IFPI) – the latter is also a member of the board of the association.

Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR) – The judge Tomas Norström sits on the board of this association that works for stronger copyright laws. Last year they held the Nordic Championships in Intellectual Property Rights Process Strategies.

.SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) – Tomas Norström works for the foundation that oversees the .se name domain and advises on domain name disputes. His colleague at the foundation? Monique Wadsted. Wadsted says she’s never met Norström although they have worked together.

Commenting on the revelations, Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde brokep said, “Spectrial Cliffhanger in S01 with the verdict – S02 started with the judge being biased. Reality beats fiction yet again!”

There are several renowned lawyers and judicial commentators that are attacking Tomas Norström’s decision to take the case, in spite of having a clear conflict of interest.

“I wouldn’t have taken the case,” says former judicial ombudsman Rune Lavin.

Former Director of Public Prosecution Sven-Erik Alhem said, “You cannot hide controversial facts. The attention this gets only leads to unnecessary questioning of bias in Swedish courts. Of course the judge should have informed people of the situation prior to the process and thereby allowed the involved parties to decide if it was suitable or not.”

Lawyer Leif Silbersky made a comment all Pirate Bay supporters want to hear, “If the lawyers [for the defense] act on this immediately, this could mean a re-trial.”

Peter Sunde’s lawyer Peter Althin says he has already put in a request for a re-trial. “In my appeal, I will claim the court was biased and that the appeal court should cancel the verdict and re-submit the case to the district court,” he said.

And the judge himself? “Every time I accept a case I make an assessment on whether I am part of it or not. But I have not felt that I am biased because of those commitments,” he said.

During the trial it was the judge, Tomas Norström, that was responsible for ensuring that the trial was fair and that the lay judges did not act in their own interests.

Previously one of the original lay judges in the case had to step down when his involvement in a music rights group became known;

“Three lay judges were appointed,” said Judge Norström one week before the trial. “On a question from me to the lay judges on whether they had any involvement in copyright associations or similar, or if they are or have been artists one of them answered Yes.”

That lay judge was removed. It’s anyone’s guess why the judge didn’t think the same should apply to him.

Whether or not Tomas Norström allowed his personal interests to get in the way of a fair verdict is open for debate, but there can’t be an intelligent human being reading this news that doesn’t feel that it would’ve been better for everyone if he simply backed away from this case and let someone else take over. He has compromised the entire case and verdict.

Rick Falkvinge of Sweden’s Pirate Party said the revelations were indicative of “corruption on a completely unforgivable level.”

This is a breaking news story, check back for updates.

Thanks to Billy

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When combined, Mininova’s visitors have been downloading well over 10 million torrents a day and performing an equal number of searches on the site. These millions of downloads add up quickly and since the birth of the site a massive 8 billion torrents have been downloaded by Mininova users.

Mininova’s growth rate is not reducing either, and the site still has several relatively untapped and upcoming markets to look forward to. India for example, where torrents are quickly gaining popularity. Over the past year the number of visitors to Mininova from India has doubled, and with 1.1 billion people and only a couple million broadband subscribers to date, there is a huge amount of untapped potential.

In common with fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, Mininova hasn’t been spared from legal troubles. The site will appear in court this May, where the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN will demand a filtering mechanism to restrict access to copyright infringing ‘links’.

The Mininova trial is likely to set an important precedent for all other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands. Erik and the other Mininova founders think they have the law on their side. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we don’t think Mininova will cease to exist,” he told TorrentFreak earlier.

In the meantime, Mininova continues business as usual in their new office. Lately they have been emphasizing the legal use of BitTorrent currently employed by hundreds of independent filmmakers and musicians. In March the site released a new feature that aims to help artists to not only distribute, but also monetize their work.

Whatever the outcome of the trial will be, Mininova will undoubtedly see the 10 billionth torrent download later this year.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Mininova, based in The Netherlands, is up against local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which has a reputation for forcing torrent sites offline or to hosting in other countries. Through legal action, BREIN now hopes to convince the court that Mininova has to filter its search results, so that all .torrent files which may point to unauthorized content are removed.

The date for the trial was set today for May 20th, and it will take up only one day. Before it came to legal action, Mininova and BREIN have had lengthy discussions on how to deal with copyrighted content, but they never reached an agreement.

“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content,” Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak. “In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not.”

With the Pirate Bay case still fresh in everyone’s memory, a comparison between the two cases is easily made. However, they are more different than most people would assume. First off, Mininova’s case is against the company, not the individuals involved with the site. “The Pirate Bay case is a criminal trial, ours is civil,” Erik told TorrentFreak.

Erik further noted that Mininova doesn’t operate an open tracker and that they, as opposed to The Pirate Bay, take down torrents when they get an appropriate takedown request. “These are all big differences that clearly distinguish the two cases,” Erik said.

There is no doubt that the Mininova trial will set an important precedent for all other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands. Erik and the other Mininova founders think they have the law on their side. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we don’t think Mininova will cease to exist,” he said.

To be continued.

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Operating out of its new offices in Utrecht, The Netherlands, Mininova and its five company directors go about their daily business with unparalleled openness. In a new interview with ORF.at, they further peel away the mystique usually associated with running a huge torrent site.

Erik Dubbelboer, President of Mininova told ORF that although some people believe that The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent site, in truth Mininova is quite bigger in terms of page views. The site is commercially-driven now, however, it hasn’t always been that way. Erik explained that in the beginning there was no plan to have Mininova operate as a company. “We wanted to make a cool website and experiment with the exciting Bittorrent technology,” he told ORF

But of course, the site was a huge success and now receives a staggering number of visitors. Managing Director Niek van der Maas explained that this substantial traffic is used to drive the site’s main source of revenue – advertising, including deals with companies like Yahoo.

The increased popularity of the site has allowed the Mininova team to grow. “We have turned Mininova from our hobby into a profession,” said Erik. Indeed, the site now has five young employees (average age of 24) who are all studying computer science.

While other torrent site admins choose to stay in the shadows, Mininova’s owners operate openly as they believe that under current law in The Netherlands their operations are entirely legal. Unlike other large ‘open’ sites, such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova does not operate a public tracker, and unlike their Swedish counterparts they operate a proper copyright takedown request system. If a copyright holder wants a torrent removed, they can write to the site and the necessary action is taken promptly.

Unfortunately, even this isn’t enough to keep anti-piracy outfits at arms length and like The Pirate Bay before them, Mininova also faces legal action. BREIN, the prominent Dutch anti-piracy group (which has already run many torrent sites out of The Netherlands) had been in secret talks with Mininova for over a year, ostensibly trying to reach a negotiated settlement.

But it wasn’t to be. BREIN wanted Mininova to proactively filter their search engine, something the site was not prepared to do. At the time, Erik told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN.

“We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.” The court showdown with BREIN will take place May 20th. Mininova is being defended by lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who is known for his legal victory while representing KaZaA in The Netherlands.

Erik told ORF that he believes the first major process in the case will try to determine if the type of service operated by Mininova is legal or not. He noted that there are key differences between their case and the recent one involving The Pirate Bay – the action in The Netherlands is a civil suit, while the case in Sweden was a criminal trial directed at the individuals, not the site itself.

Erik went on to say that he’d spoken recently with Peter Sunde about the TPB case, one which Peter firmly believes they will win. Erik says they speak with Gottfrid too on technical issues but other than that, there is no cooperation between the sites. When asked how he felt the court would rule in The Pirate Bay case, Erik said it was too difficult to call.

One of the reasons that sites like Mininova exist is due to the changing viewing habits of tech-savvy individuals, something which torrent sites have embraced while mainstream media continue to lag behind. “I would like to see content when I have time for it – not only at the time when it’s broadcasted,” Erik told ORF. “Some companies are starting to think and rethink, asking us how they can benefit from our “content distribution” model. They recognize that the fight against file-sharing is hopeless,” he said.

In a further indication that BitTorrent is able to move from the PC screen to the living room, regular visitors to Mininova will have noticed the recent addition of a link labeled ‘New: Devices Overview‘. Listed here are various BitTorrent-compatible ’set-top box’ type devices recommended by Mininova. Erik Dubbelboer says that at the recent CeBIT trade show, several manufacturers showed an interest in having a ‘Powered by Mininova’ logo/license for their devices, including Hauppauge who are perhaps best known for their PC TV tuner cards.

Mininova is very interested in experimenting with new business models for content creators, Dubbelboer said. He said that most people download copyrighted files because it’s so easy and convenient, not because they’re free. One thing is certain, BitTorrent is a great distribution model which allows many artists just setting out to get their work in front of millions of people.

Silence is Sexy is one band that has teamed up with Mininova to distribute their latest album for free, with great success. They even put up a ‘Powered by Mininova’ banner at one of their latest concerts.

This year will be an exciting one for the Mininova team. On the one hand they are still experiencing a substantial increase in visitor numbers as well as interest from content producers and device manufacturers. However, the legal battle with MPAA’s affiliate BREIN may ruin this party if the worst case scenario becomes truth. Let’s hope for the best.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Jonas Bergling is one of the young politicians who believes in being politically active for the public benefit. His story, however, may shed some light on why the young voices are effectively silenced in the daily grind of politics.

Last Monday, Jonas Bergling took part in a chat session with the local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda (NA) in the city of Örebro, Sweden. He was there in his spare-time position as head of the constituency for the Pirate Party in Örebro. Readers of the newspaper were invited to ask him questions regarding topics such as anti-piracy efforts, the Pirate Bay trial and the politics of the Pirate Party.

Since Sweden’s Pirate Party is running for seats in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament, there was a lot of interest in what he had to say. For Bergling, maybe it turned out to be too much interest.

When not pursuing his political interests in his spare time, Jonas’ day job used to be as an IT consultant for EDB Business Partner. It used to be, because the chat with the newspaper didn’t go unnoticed by the company’s Chief of Security, who wasn’t amused. Three days later the aspiring politician was fired because of the political opinions he’d aired in the chat.

“When I left work on Thursday, I got a call from my boss who told me I couldn’t come in on Friday morning and that I had to hand in the keys and security card. It doesn’t feel good to be treated this way. This isn’t how it should be in a democracy,” Jonas said to NA.

According to Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge’s blog, the decision to fire Jonas came from the head office in Stockholm, where the management group made its decision despite protests from Jonas’ local bosses in Örebro.

“It came from the highest ranks within EDB and that makes this a dead serious matter,” writes Falkvinge. “To me, it doesn’t matter if the harassment stems from someone being a pirate, socialist, capitalist or feminist – to harass someone in this way is completely and fundamentally unacceptable.“

“I’ve always been careful not to mix my political views with my work,” Jonas told NA, and he said his supervisor knew of his involvement with the Pirate Party when he was given the job.

As his employment terms were more like those of a consultant rather than an employee, EDB did not break Swedish work legislation when they canceled his contract, even though the termination was explicitly due to his political views.

This isn’t the first time that someone has lost his job for taking a ‘pro-piracy’ stance. Back in 2005, Alexander Hanff, the ex-admin of the now defunct DVDR-Core tracker, appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight show to discuss the Grokster decision. His computer training company employer gave him the time off to appear on the show – then promptly fired him.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Sitting at the top table from left to right were Rasmus Fleischer of Piratbyrån, Sara Sajjad of Piratbyrån, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (aka Anakata), Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) and Magnus Eriksson of Piratbyrån. Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and the fourth defendant Carl Lundström were not at the table.

First off, they said that the whole case can be best described as a theater play and that all the people involved are potential actors. They vowed to make a reality TV-show of the whole trial, in fact Rasmus Fleischer has written the prologue for the show already. It’s a Spectrial, and they are happy to play along. As soon as the cameras stopped flashing, the panel took questions from the media that was present.

The Pirate Bay said that they feel that their overall case would not end quickly, implying legal appeals and were defiant that no matter what happens to them, the site will continue. “What are they going to do? They have already failed to take the site down once. Let them fail again,” said Gottfrid. It isn’t the site facing the courts noted Peter Sunde. “It has its own life without us,” he said.

The Pirate Bay team said that although they face huge financial claims, they weren’t going to be intimidated, with Gottfrid declaring, “I already have more debt in Sweden than I will ever be able to pay off. I don’t even live here. They are welcome to send me a bill. I will frame it and put it on the wall.”

Peter went on to explain there was no basis for the massive financial claims. “It does not matter if they require several million or one billion. We are not rich and have no money to pay,” he said. “They won’t get a cent.”

When asked if it was ok to download media without paying for it, Peter deemed the question to be “uninteresting” and said he was tired of hearing it.

A member of the media then posed this question: “Do you feel like defendants, or defenders of technology?”

Peter responded: “I think it is something in between actually. We have a personal liability for this, we have a personal risk which has some impact on our feelings. But definitely it’s not defending the technology, it’s more like defending the idea of the technology and that’s probably the most important thing in this case – the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn’t like technology.”

Gottfrid added that the prosecutor of the case seems to focus a lot on the individuals in the case. “At least one fourth of the evidence is character assassination of the people involved,” he said.

Peter went on to explain that when he was arrested the police didn’t immediately start questioning him about site, rather his motivation. “When I had my only hearing with the police the first question was if I wanted to explain my ideology and my politics, not if I was involved in The Pirate Bay, which kind of sets the tone for all of this.”

The site’s finances were brought up, with the pair saying they started it and keep it going through advertising revenue, although the pair don’t make any money themselves.

A reporter from the BBC asked what the on-going maintenance costs of The Pirate Bay amount to. Peter responded, “So, the costs for Pirate Bay, I don’t actually don’t have any numbers for it. We use quite a lot of bandwidth and we have to buy new servers every other week.”

Gottfrid said that the tracker itself uses an average of 600mbits of bandwidth which increases further at weekends. He also revealed that their current hardware has to be replaced once a year and is currently estimated to be worth $120,000, therefore it is depreciating at the rate of $10,000 each month.

Towards the end of the conference the pair were asked for their assessment of the way they have been handled by the press.

“Well, that’s a very interesting question,” said Peter. “There are some members of the press who we don’t like so we didn’t invite them today and they are very mad at us.” Peter didn’t mention them by name at this point, but they were Aftonbladet, Metro and TV4. He explained the problem he has with these publications;

“They are just interested in doing something spectacular instead of actually discussing the issues. The media that are not invited today are basically the media that have not been negative, but lying instead and keeping things from the public.”

“We don’t have a problem with negative press,” Peter continued. “There are a lot of people in this room who don’t like us and we don’t really care about that as long as they discuss the issues. But I would say that most of the press have been very good towards us actually, in discussing more and more the issues surrounding The Pirate Bay instead of focusing on us as persons, which is what we actually want.”

The trial starts tomorrow and of course, TorrentFreak will keep everyone updated, but in the meantime, a thought-provoking comment from Peter;

“I do not believe The Pirate Bay will be a major player in five years. But I think BitTorrent technology will improve. File sharing will always exist. I think people will tire of the debate.”

Update: More goodies at Spectrial.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Just a couple of days later, Peter’s wish has been fulfilled.

According to Erik Fichtelius, head of Swedish public broadcaster SVT 24, the trial’s audio will be streamed by them, live on the Internet. “It is a major trial with exciting witnesses and expert interviews,” he told a Swedish journalists’ website.

SVT will broadcast live audio from the entire trial. Additional video would’ve been nice too, but under Swedish law this is not allowed. However, to complement the audio, SVT will have a reporter in the court room adding extra information to the stream and this will be complemented by additional images uploaded to the site.

There will be plenty more coverage though. Jamie King, director of the ‘Steal This Film‘ documentaries told TorrentFreak that his crew will also be present. They are not sure if they are allowed to film in court, but there are planning to interview people entering and leaving the court room. All this material will of course be available on BitTorrent soon after.

The trial will be webcast live from SVT Direkt, starting Monday 16th February.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Most of the users of the service have reported great results. BitTorrent has proven to be an ideal marketing tool for musicians, writers and other creative minds who want to promote their work and engage fans. In fact, the Dutch Band ‘Silence is Sexy’ won the Interactive Award 2009 for releasing their album for free on Mininova.

Erik, co-founder of Mininova said in a response to the new milestone: “Content Distribution enables producers and artists to bring their work to the attention of the public, free of charge. It’s the perfect solution for bands that don’t have the means to bring out a record yet.”

“Through content distribution, we have already had about 5,800 uploads and 15 million downloads,” Erik commented. “That means some 40,000 downloads a day. The amount of data that has been downloaded equals a pile of CDs of about 30 kilometers high.”

Aside from the marketing aspect, sharing files on BitTorrent is also a great cost saver. Terabytes of data can be transferred without having to invest thousands of dollars in server capacity. If only Microsoft had used BitTorrent for its Windows 7 Beta release, they would not have been forced to delay the release and annoy thousands of eager early adopters, and could have even saved thousands of dollars at the same time.

Slowly, more established companies are realizing that BitTorrent is indeed a great way to reach out to a wide audience, for a fraction of the costs usually incurred. Last year, Canada’s public television broadcaster CBC used Mininova’s services to distribute one of its TV-shows, after they ran into distribution problems.

With BitTorrent’s ever growing popularity, Mininova is predicting a boom in the number of premium users in the coming year, as well as a steep growth in regular users. It might be a good idea for the entertainment industry to embrace these sites, rather than attempting to take them out.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Gottfrid, aka Anakata of The Pirate Bay offered to become Mininova’s temporary host, with the site moving again later on to be hosted by Gary Fung of isoHunt. As the site continued to develop, Mininova needed their own servers and in the years to follow its growth has been nothing short of spectacular.

From a standing start in 2005, by mid-2007 Mininova had entered the list of Top 100 most popular sites on the entire Internet with 2 million daily visitors, an amazing achievement.

Then, at the tender age of just three years old, Mininova was breaking more records. By January 2008, the site was serving 3 million daily visitors who were downloading almost 10 million .torrent files every day. In February the site introduced torrent streaming and by the end of that month had served over 4 billion .torrents.

The innovations didn’t stop there. In March last year, Mininova began its Beta testing of BitTorrent powered video streaming. The new streaming feature allowed users to watch videos instantly, streamed from .torrent files. The Open Source “Swarmplayer” was developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam.

In April 2008, the BitTorrent community realized just how big Mininova had become, after technical problems took down the site, resulting in massive traffic surges on other indexers. Although the site quickly returned, May was disappointing, as anti-piracy outfit BREIN flexed its muscles and threatened the site – filter, or else. However, by the end of the month it became clear that Mininova’s popularity was far from on the wane, as it served up its 5 billionth torrent.

Niek, CEO of Mininova, told Torrentfreak: “The growth rate is above every expectation. Mininova’s download numbers almost doubled this year – and the number of visitors grew almost just as hard. We are excited about the coming year and its challenges: stay tuned for some important announcements in the coming months.”

Just a few days ago, Mininova announced it had delivered its 7 billionth torrent, which left everyone wondering where it was all going to end. Today, the BitTorrent behemoth reached its 4th birthday and like someone else with a birthday today, the dream appears to have turned into reality.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Over the past few months, the number of .torrent downloads have also been growing steadily. In September we reported that 10 million torrents were downloaded in a single day, but this figure quickly increased to 12 million just a few weeks later.

To cope with this growing demand, Mininova updated their server park today, and moved all the data to a brand new setup. Initially, only a few hours of downtime were expected, but Mininova co-founder Erik told us that they ran into some problems along the way. “One of the critical machines refused to boot after we transferred the data, because the table with volume information got corrupted,” Erik told us.

Erik further said that the site is coming back slowly. All the data is transferred, and they are currently tweaking the servers to get the site running smoothly again. When everything is back up again, Mininova’s setup will be more easy to scale, and totally prepared for the future – whatever that may hold.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.