TorrentFreak

Mininova, once the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has paid a settlement fee to Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN to end the legal clash between the two parties. In return, BREIN dropped the damages claim they were preparing and Mininova has withdrawn their appeal, making it impossible for the site to return to full swing.

After a lost legal battle, Mininova was forced to take drastic measures a year ago. The site’s founders removed millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In addition, new uploads were restricted to approved publishers only, a choice that expectedly dwarfed the site’s traffic and user base in the year that followed.

In a few months TorrentFreak turns five, and leading up to that milestone we will occasionally look back at how the BitTorrent landscape has changed over the years. Although there is no doubt that BitTorrent has more than quintupled its user base since 2005, there have been only a handful of sites serving a large slice of the masses.

Global Gaming Factory’s planned acquisition of The Pirate Bay last summer surprised BitTorrent’s friends and foes alike. But The Pirate Bay was not the only site the company was after. It also put in a massive 20 million euro offer for fellow BitTorrent site Mininova.

For the first time in five years Mininova is about to disappear from the top 10 of most visited torrent sites. This exit is due to a traffic drop that resulted from the removal of most of the site’s torrents following a lost court battle. Newcomer KickassTorrents is still gaining momentum and has already surpassed Mininova in terms of traffic.

A Californian resident of Irvine has plead guilty to sharing ‘The Love Guru’ through BitTorrent. After getting his hands on a leaked copy of the film, the man decided to share it with a release group, and the copy eventually ended up at Mininova. The 31 year-old man confessed and agreed to a sentence of three years probation.

This decade witnessed the meteoric rise of BitTorrent, but during the last five years associated sites have endured some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legal action ever seen. The top three BitTorrent sites, after fending off threats for years, all lost in a big way during 2009. But the show ain’t over yet.