Mininova was left with little choice, having been forced into these drastic measures by a negative verdict in their court battle with local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

The Dutch court told Mininova that it had to remove all infringing torrent files from its index, while threatening the site with huge fines for non-compliance. That selective task, however, proved technically unfeasible. Instead, the site’s owners took the decision to remove all torrents uploaded by regular users, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Following this decision Mininova started to lose visitors at a rapid pace. A year after the court decision the site lost most of its traffic, as former users looked for alternative torrent sites with a wider variety of content.

Meanwhile, the legal battle between Mininova and BREIN continued in the background. Mininova appealed the verdict at the Court of Amsterdam and BREIN prepared a damages claim on behalf of the entertainment industry.

In addition, both parties began negotiating a mutual agreement that would be acceptable to all parties involved, and they succeeded in finalizing that today.

“Both parties have now reached a settlement. Mininova will abide the verdict of the Court of Utrecht and will withdraw the appeal. In order to settle the matter permanently, Mininova pays Brein an undisclosed amount of money,” the Mininova team announced.

Instead of fighting the decision with all means available to them, Mininova decided that it was for the best to pay a settlement fee instead. The agreement announced today puts an end to the ongoing legal battle between Mininova and BREIN.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he’s happy with the outcome, and relieved that the legal proceedings are finally over. For more than two years Mininova has negotiated with BREIN, both in private and in the court room, and the current outcome was seemingly inevitable.

“Even though Mininova filed pro forma appeal, we strongly felt that giving up on it was a sacrifice BREIN made. After all Dutch case law makes clear appeal of verdict would’ve been decided in favor of rightholders,” BREIN’s head Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak.

“We both agreed settlement was preferable over a long drawn court battle over damages. We carry no grudge and wish the guys from Mininova the very best with their new ventures, including the Mininova site in its present form that it took since 29 November 2009,” Kuik added.

Mininova will continue to operate as a torrent site with authorized uploaders only, as it has been for the past year.

Source: Mininova Pays Settlement to BREIN to End BitTorrent Lawsuit

The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users and restrict new uploads to verified accounts.

This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. As expected, the consequences of this decision for Mininova’s traffic, as well as the number of searches and downloads on the site, were disastrous.

Today, a year later, we take a look at the unprecedented impact the decision had on the website. Right before going ‘legal’, Mininova was believed to be the leading torrent site in terms of traffic, with a massive 5 million visits a day. Today, the site has a few hundred thousand visitors at most.

The decrease in daily downloads is even more pronounced, dropping from more than 10 million a day to just 250,752 yesterday. Similarly, the daily search volume has decreased from 10 million to 694,345 a day. These numbers are of course still higher than hundreds of other torrent sites. But Mininova is no longer part of the top 10 most visited torrent sites, a list it led for two years in a row.

Content wise things have changed quite bit too. Previously, thousands of new torrents were uploaded by users daily, but in recent weeks the average number of newly submitted torrents is stuck at 35 a day. In total, Mininova now indexes just shy of 15,000 torrents, while most other torrent sites have several million active torrents, many of which ironically originated from Mininova.

An interesting conclusion that we can draw from the stats above is that the average number of downloads per torrent has actually increased now the site only features authorized content. 17 downloads per torrent today compared to about 10 last year.

On the other side, the searches compared to downloads also show that many people don’t seem to find what they are looking for on the site. A year ago the daily searches and downloads were both at 10 million, but today the searches are nearly three times as high as the downloads.

Although the unavoidable decision to limit new torrents to authorized publishers has had quite an impact on the site and its users, Mininova as a company still exists. Whatever their plans are for the future, the site’s founders are still owed credit for having inspired dozens of torrent sites that emerged in the last years.

Source: Mininova Dwarfed A Year After Going ‘Legal’

This suggests that the ecosystem is more stable and conservative than most think it is. Up to a certain degree this is true, but it’s not entirely invincible. Four out of the five websites have been dragged to court and two of them have suffered serious damage.

TorrentSpy was closed by its owner in 2008 after it lost a court case where it was ordered to hand over details of US-based users to the MPAA. Last year, Mininova decided to delete over a million torrents and restrict new uploads to pre-approved publishers following a court decision where it was ordered to filter content. Two other sites, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, are still battling in court but continue to operate as of today.

Although only 5 sites have dominated the BitTorrent landscape in the last years, there is still room for new sites to move up. Founded in 2009, the relative newcomer KickassTorrents has already gained a spot in the top 5. If it continues to grow at the same pace as it has in the last few months, it might end up in the top 3 at the end of this year.

Below we’ve listed the top three BitTorrent sites of each year since we started following them. The rankings are based on the number of daily visitors each site had at the end of each year. The Pirate Bay is the only site that appears in all rankings. The 2010 list is reported as of today, and might change before the year is over.

2005

1. TorrentSpy
2. The Pirate Bay
3. Mininova

2006

1. TorrentSpy
2. Mininova
3. The Pirate Bay

2007

1. Mininova
2. isoHunt
3. The Pirate Bay

2008

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Mininova
3. isoHunt

2009

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz.com
3. isoHunt

2010?

1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz.com
3. isoHunt

Source: The Most Popular Torrent Sites Of The Last Five Years

This fall, however, it all turned out too good to be true. After GGF’s shareholders agreed to acquire the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, the company had a month to come up with the proposed $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline passed without an official response from the company.

From the moment it was announced the planned Pirate Bay acquisition had been surrounded by controversy. However, behind the scenes GGF CEO Hans Pandeya was drafting an even bigger deal with BitTorrent’s number one indexer at the time – Mininova.

“We will try to buy as many torrent sites as possible,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak back in August. In common with their plans for The Pirate Bay, GGF hoped to turn these sites into large media stores where users could download content with the full permission of copyright holders.

Little information has been made public about the “other” sites Pandeya was aiming at and how serious this interest was. Unlike all the other plans and deals that leaked out previously, no other torrent site has been publicly connected to GGF, until today where Pandeya’s connection to Mininova was exposed.

TorrentFreak has learned that GGF and Mininova already finalized a contract last summer to sell the torrent index for no less than 20 million Euros. This deal and the amount have been confirmed by several independent sources close to Mininova and GGF. One of the sources who confirmed the Mininova buyout plans was Hans Pandeya himself.

One of our sources further said that the deal had already been signed off by Mininova, and that GGF would wait for the verdict in Mininova’s appeal with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This verdict was due one day before the GGF shareholders were set to give the green light on the Pirate Bay deal.

A positive outcome for Mininova in that case would have certainly made the site a valuable asset, but as we now know Mininova lost in court and was forced to proactively filter titles and remove a great number of infringing, and indeed non-infringing torrents to ensure absolute compliance.

Sources from within Mininova deny that a contract was already signed on their part. Instead, Mininova would have liked to see some proof that GGF could pay the proposed sum before signing.

Although there seems to be some disagreement on the details, there is no doubt that GGF had set course to get the two major BitTorrent sites in possession. In fact, Mininova was brought in during licensing negotiations with several senior executives at one of the major record labels.

During a meeting with the label in London, Pandeya was assisted by his short-lived business partner Wayne Rosso. In the meeting the executives were asking for some traffic metrics and out of the blue and to the surprise of Rosso, Pandeya picked up his mobile phone and rang a Dutch number, claiming that it was a “company of his” close to Amsterdam that could provide some insight into the traffic question.

The person on the other end of the line provided some information to the label execs and plans were made to head over to The Netherlands to do some due diligence. When Rosso later asked Pandeya about this mysterious Dutch company Pandeya revealed that it was in fact Mininova.

“It’s Mininova. I’m going to buy Mininova too and eliminate all the competition,” Pandeya told Rosso explaining the Dutch connection.

At the time of this meeting the contract was already drafted but not signed by both parties. If it would have gone through GGF would have had the option to buy out the two largest BitTorrent sites online. Of course we now know that the deal didn’t go though. GGF didn’t have the money and Mininova might not have been worth it after the negative verdict in their case against BREIN.

In the months that followed Mininova removed over a million torrent files making it a less lucrative asset for Pandeya. On the other hand it also shows that a torrent site with only “authorized” content will quickly lose most of its regular visitors. Despite this knowledge and all the failed attempts to pull investors in, Pandeya said a few days ago that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.

“I have a lot of secret plans I’m working on,” he warned.

Source: Pirate Bay Buyer Offered Millions to Mininova

Compared to a year ago the BitTorrent landscape has changed significantly. The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker last fall and a few weeks later Mininova partly shut down its website. However, with the fall of Mininova many new torrent sites emerged, with KickassTorrents being the most successful one.

It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.

As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.

Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,600,136 - Pageviews: 26,036,770 (5.66 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #101 - Compete Rank: #724 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,756,280 - Pageviews: 13,781,400 (5 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #167 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,285,811 - Pageviews: 15,497,799 (6.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #187 - Compete Rank: #1,187 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,363,883 - Pageviews: 6,423,889 (4.71 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #367 - Compete Rank: #2,055 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 919,552 - Pageviews: 1,783,931 (1.94 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #737 - Compete Rank: #3,035 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 DEMONOID.COM - Daily Visitors: 728,513 - Pageviews: 5,383,711 (7.39 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #626 - Compete Rank: #4,640 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 686,219 - Pageviews: 1,331,265 (1.94 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,050 - Compete Rank: #3,435 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 670,536 - Pageviews: 1,562,349 (2.33 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,004 - Compete Rank: #6,846 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 642,498 - Pageviews: 2,634,242 (4.1 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #859 - Compete Rank: #4,347 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 632,519 - Pageviews: 1,872,256 (2.96 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #987 - Compete Rank: #3,257 Visit Site | Full Report

Source: Top 10 Torrent Sites Soon Without Mininova

Yates was asked by his employer to make a promotional copy for the Jay Leno show, but made an extra copy which he shared with friends and family.

Yates’s actions didn’t go unnoticed by his employer and the FBI, who tracked him down through the company’s surveillance cameras. Yates was later arrested and admitted that he distributed the movie among friends and family. The arrest led to a sentence of six months in a federal prison from which he was released in September last year.

The damage done by the leak didn’t stop there though. A member of the Yates family passed the film on to Mischa Wynhausen, who decided to upload it to Mininova. Following an FBI investigation, Wynhausen, a 31 year-old from Irvine CA, was busted as well.

Wynhausen confessed to uploading the film to Mininova and accepted a sentence of three years probation.

Although Wynhausen’s offense is considered to be more severe than that of Yates, he doesn’t have to serve time in jail. According to Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, this difference is in part because Wynhausen cooperated with the FBI, while Yates initially lied about his actions.

On BitTorrent the movie was never a big hit, despite the fact that it was available online before the theater release. This lack of interest mimics the box office earnings. With a production budget of $62 million, ‘The Love Guru’ was a big flop for Paramount Pictures, bringing in little over $40 million at the box office worldwide.

Source: Mininova Uploader Gets Three Years Probation

Dozens of notable BitTorrent sites have emerged since things really began to take off in 2002/2003, and literally thousands of lesser known private communities have flourished. But in terms of sheer volume of torrents, users and mainstream awareness, a trio of sites have stood head and shoulders above the rest.

By scale and exposure, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt became the three most prominent BitTorrent sites in the latter half of the decade, serving billions of torrents to multiple millions of BitTorrent users.

Due to this massive and unprecedented level of interest, it became increasingly clear – the movie and music industries, just as they did with dozens of sites and services before them, would move to crush or suffocate them into submission. 2009 became a painful year for all three of them.

The Pirate Bay

On April 17th 2009, after being hounded continuously by the combined might of the movie and music industries, the four defendants in The Pirate Bay trial were eventually found guilty.

While the court said that it was the users of The Pirate Bay that committed the first infringements by sharing copyright files, it went on to dismiss most of the technical details, and judged the case on intent. It was declared that the intention of the defendants was to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted works.

Categorizing the infringements as ’severe’, the court said the team of four were well aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy for the users and assisted the infringements. The lack of a ‘notice and takedown’ certainly did not help the defense.

The four defendants were sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The case will be appealed.

The crushing verdict did not close the site, however, despite further legal attacks on its bandwidth infrastructure and bans forbidding the founders from operating the site.

Indeed, with adaptation, the site remains alive and fully operational today, proving that in The Pirate Bay’s case, suffering pain is not a terminal condition.

Mininova

After operating for almost five full years, the BitTorrent giant Mininova also succumbed to relentless entertainment industry in 2009, deleting over a million torrent files and shutting down the majority of its website.

Mininova was left with little choice, being forced into these drastic measures following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN in the summer.

The Dutch court told Mininova that it must remove all infringing torrent files from its index on pain of huge fines, but as this proved technically unfeasible, the site’s owners took the decision to remove all torrents uploaded by regular users, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. This proved disastrous to the site. As a force to be reckoned with, Mininova has been taken back to the stone age.

isoHunt

In 2006, several Hollywood studios filed a complaint about then US-based site, isoHunt. In common with claims against The Pirate Bay and Mininova, the studios stated that the site’s owner was guilty of profiting from, and inducing, copyright infringement.

Just 8 days ago, on December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt was indeed guilty of inducing copyright infringement, stating that the site’s operators had engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

Since the circumstances of the case were so similar to earlier ones involving Napster and Grokster, the judge decided there was no need to have a full trial and instead granted a summary judgment against isoHunt.

No damages awards against the site have yet been announced and isoHunt remains fully operational at the moment, pending an appeal. In common with The Pirate Bay, isoHunt has not yet succumbed to the pain of its court defeat, despite overwhelming odds.

Lessons to be learned and the future of torrent sites

While Mininova is almost certainly out for good, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt remain active, despite their losses. Nevertheless, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the court defeats of all three sites. Although some may believe that the negative verdicts point to the illegality of torrent sites, that is not the full picture.

In all three court defeats – notably in three distinct jurisdictions (Sweden, The Netherlands and United States) – indexed content aside, none of them stated that torrent sites are illegal. However, fingers were pointed firmly at the operators and their conduct when running their sites.

Being prepared to filter out fakes and malware from sites but not having a ‘notice and takedown’ system for copyright holders can prove fatal. But in the cases of Mininova and isoHunt, who both operated such systems and even co-operated with copyright owners, participating in discussions about copyright infringement on their forums can undo all the hard work.

In future, if site owners are to reduce liability, they will have to remain a lot more detached from their operations than they have been previously. The lessons to be learned are many, a few of which are detailed here.

Already TorrentFreak is informed that next-generation torrent sites are in development, meaning that 2010 will prove yet another interesting year.

Source: Top Tier BitTorrent Sites Suffer Pain in 2009

Mininova was forced to take such a drastic measure following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN this summer. The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users.

This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. As expected, the consequences of this decision for Mininova’s traffic, as well as the number of searches and downloads on the site, are disastrous.

In just a few days Mininova’s traffic plummeted by 66%, from well over 5 million visits the day before the torrents were removed, to just 1.8 million yesterday. If the downward trend continues at this rate, the site will have less than a million visits a day a week from now, throwing it out of the top 10 most visited torrent sites that it led for two years in a row.

Even more striking perhaps is the drop in downloads and searches. As can be seen from the graph below, the number of downloads dropped from over 10 million a day to just 371,424. The number of searches went down from 10 to 3 million, a less steep drop than the downloads, probably indicating that not everyone is aware of the reduced number of torrents on the site.

So what’s next?

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. “I didn’t notice any reduction in [torrent] traffic when The Pirate Bay went down. It’s hard to see how there’d be any significant change from Mininova’s withdrawal.”

That said, the ‘end’ of Mininova does leave a scar behind. For years most torrent indexers heavily relied on torrents that were uploaded to Mininova. With over a million user-uploaded torrents, the site was without a doubt the main torrent provider on the Internet. Although most of the torrents are still mirrored on other sites, Mininova’s role as content provider has to be taken over by others.

Source: Mininova Traffic Plummets After Going ‘Legal’

In reality, the truth proved somewhat different.

No one could argue Grokster had been defeated, but the consequences for file-sharing were limited. The real impact was that providers of file-sharing services could now be held liable if it could be shown that they promoted their products for infringing purposes. Careful advertising was all that was required. Furthermore, the decision only affected the United States. Considering the epic scale of the case and the supposed victory, the results were far from devastating.

And now, 4 years later, Mininova, another file-sharing giant that rode on the crest of the BitTorrent wave since the Grokster verdict, has effectively been forced to close down the vast majority of its site, prompting many to feel that BitTorrent is heading for its twilight years.

However, with careful consideration, it may just be possible to create another Mininova that avoids its namesake’s fate, since the court’s decision was not solely related to the existence of links to infringing content, i.e the .torrent files.

The DMCA is widely known in BitTorrent circles. It is the US copyright act (but accepted by many indexers and trackers regardless of location) which many sites quote when offering to take down torrents that link to infringing content. “If you’re the content owner, let us know,” they say, “..and we’ll take down torrents that link to your works.” Complying with so-called ‘DMCA takedown requests’ is widely accepted as a way to stay within the law.

Although Mininova operated such a system, comments by the site’s staff on their forums called their commitment to it into doubt. There are many samples given in the court’s decision, here are just a few. It’s worth noting that many of them date back to 2005, when users, staff and site admins would have been much more relaxed.

“May have been just a take down request (…) i’d say just re upload it (…) thanks for sharing” (posted by site moderator)

“Thanks for reporting, I deleted the fake version and uploaded the correct one” (posted by site admin)

“I made a mistake of downloading a shareware version of Monopoly Jr. only to find out it only allows you to play it for 15 minutes and then it becomes useless,” said a user. “Check the site, it’s there now” (posted by site admin).

Mininova also took pride in their efforts to proactively filter fake files (including in the decision are comments by staff who admit to downloading material to check if it is indeed as labeled), viruses, malware, pornographic and drug-related material, but this seems to have backfired by the corresponding lack of commitment to proactively filter copyright content in the same manner.

The site also carried some very specific categories for its torrents. Not just ‘movies’ or ‘TV’, but also sections such as “CSI” and “Desperate Housewives” which are widely known to be copyright works. One section highlighted in the decision was labeled ‘Disney’. The court decided that since so little Disney material is copyright-free, the section could have little other use than to infringe.

Mininova has never denied making profits (it is a company after all) and the court ruled that the site encouraged and profited “from infringements of copyrights and related rights of the holders represented by Brein.”

To see things from a different perspective, TorrentFreak has been discussing the closure of Mininova with Aldor Nini at digital distribution and anti-piracy solutions company, Easycom, who has been following the case closely.

Interestingly, Aldor informs us that 8 out of 10 torrents on Mininova were not covered by the BREIN lawsuit, which makes us wonder if the site could’ve stayed alive if the other 2 out of 10 were removed before the court’s hand was forced.

“We are very sorry to see a platform like Mininova shut down millions of torrent files,” he told TorrentFreak. “Based on our research we have found out that only 21% of the content was infringing rights of content owners for content used in the proceedings by BREIN. This 21% could probably be the most popular files on the platform, but we cannot confirm this for sure.”

“However, Mininova’s decision to completely remove everything was to 100% conform with what the judge has ruled. A 100% working filter was requested, and the removal of all non moderated user submitted torrents is the only 100% filter available nowadays,” he told us.

In a similar way that file-sharing applications similar to Grokster’s continue to flourish post the ‘big’ 2005 verdict, torrent sites can follow suit, if they are prepared to adapt.

“We do not think that this judgment will directly apply to other torrent portals at all,” Aldor told us, “but rather the way Mininova was operated as a torrent portal.”

Aldor has some interesting thoughts on how torrent sites can continue, without making the same mistakes as Mininova. He argues that torrent sites should behave neutrally, meaning that if they remove fake and spam comments they should filter copyrighted content too.

Based on Aldor’s reasoning, it seems another option is for sites to switch to user-based moderation, where content is automatically removed after a fixed number of downvotes. The bottom line is that the site’s operators (or moderators) should stay neutral.

Further suggestions are to take the takedown procedure seriously and make it easy to use. Sites should notify users that copyrights are to be respected and refrain from using specific categories (such as Disney). Again, based on the basis that site staff should stay neutral, user submitted tags should be fine.

Other more problematic ideas are the increased co-operation with content owners and to “stop thinking in black and white” – surely great advice for both sides and ultimately, the only long term solution.

Not making any profit or donating part of the site’s income to innovative music artists and film makers, and steering clear of scammy advertisers could be further plus points.

Aldor concludes that the lessons are there to be learned from Mininova’s demise.

“The next torrent portals, which will cover the next millions of torrent files, will hopefully learn from this situation. All in all Mininova’s partial shut-down will not influence the worldwide BitTorrent activity, it has just set up the rules for the successors of Mininova.”

Source: Lessons The Next Big Torrent Sites Will Learn From Mininova

Since it is technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents to be submitted by approved uploaders. This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of alternatives for those BitTorrent users who are looking for the latest Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or Fedora release.

Below we provide a random list of public torrent sites that are still open, but there are of course hundreds more sites we could have included. If your personal favorite is missing, feel free to post it in the comments below – preferably with your reasons why it should be included in any upcoming lists.

If you’re looking for high speed downloads, you might also want to check out Usenet.

1. Torrentzap

2. Vertor

3. ExtraTorrent

4. KickassTorrents

5. BTjunkie

5. Monova

7. isoHunt

8. yourBitTorrent

9. The Pirate Bay

10. ShareReactor

Update: The owner of Monova, told TorrentFreak that he has reserved all Mininova usernames for people who want to make the switch to his site. The account names can be claimed here. Also, we replaced some sites in the original top 10 because they went down or started to serve trojans,or viruses.

Source: 10 Alternatives To Mininova

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.

The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.

During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.

In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.

More information on the consequences and background of Mininova’s decision will be addressed in a follow up article.

Source: Mininova Deletes All Infringing Torrents and Goes ‘Legal’

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.

Source: Mininova Breaks 10 Billion Torrent Downloads

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.

Source: Mininova Ordered to Remove All ‘Infringing’ Torrents

However, to the delight of millions of his loyal fans aXXo seemed to have returned today. After nearly five months of absence two new uploads were submitted to Mininova a few hours ago – both were uploaded by the ‘official’ aXXo account and appear to be legit.

The last time aXXo reappeared after taking a long break, the symbolic title “I Am Legend” was the first torrent to be uploaded. This time around aXXo appeared more humble with the release of “Kung Fu Panda” and “Bee Movie.” But these are not the only oddities.

Strangely enough both titles have been uploaded before by aXXo, about a year ago. A quick look at the torrent file reveals that these new aXXo torrents were indeed created months ago. The only thing new about them is that they’ve been re-uploaded to Mininova.

What is even more strange is that aXXo was not the only user to upload these titles yesterday. Dozens of new “Kung Fu Panda” and “Bee Movie” torrents were submitted to Mininova yesterday, some by well known uploaders like FXG, FXM and KLAXXON who have all been inactive for weeks or months.

The issue seems to be specific to Mininova since none of the uploaders have added these old torrents to the other sites they generally upload to, such as Darkside.rg in aXXo’s case. So what happened then?

While we don’t have any conclusive evidence, our best guess is that there was a glitch in Mininova’s system that caused these ‘new’ uploads to appear all of a sudden. This would mean that aXXo fans will have to wait a little longer for his return and that shouting about a comeback is a perhaps a little premature.

Update: The torrents have been removed by Mininova, but torrents for the same movie titles (all uploaded on August 6) are still listed.

Source: Axxo Returns to Mininova, Or Does He?

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.

Source: Mininova Denied Rectification From Dutch Government

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.

Source: Mininova Demands Rectification from Dutch Parliament

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!

Source: Digg and Mininova Team Up to Seed Bruno

BREIN’s lawyer Dirk Visser told the court that Mininova aids in the distribution of copyright infringing works, and demanded that the site implements “preventive measures” to put an end to this. It is important that Mininova covers the costs of these measures, they say.

When we posted our article summarizing the pleas of BREIN and Mininova’s lawyers we didn’t have access to the exact texts. We do now, and there are a few interesting details in the demands made by BREIN’s lawyer that are worth mentioning.

Not only did BREIN demand a filter based on infohashes of ‘copyrighted’ torrents, they also called for a filter based on infringing keywords and possibly fingerprints. Even more worrying though, is BREIN’s suggestion that Mininova should ban torrents from public BitTorrent trackers that mostly link to copyright infringing content, hinting at The Pirate Bay’s tracker.

Banning torrents that use The Pirate Bay’s tracker is of course an absurd suggestion. No public tracker controls who can use it, so BREIN essentially wants to ban public BitTorrent trackers from Mininova altogether.

The second ‘demand’ (or suggestion) not mentioned in our previous coverage is perhaps more realistic. BREIN’s lawyer suggested that Mininova should ban the accounts and IP-addresses of uploaders who frequently upload torrents linking to copyrighted material, referring to the hibernating uploader aXXo as an example.

Demands aside, Visser also told plain lies to the court. In his plea he referred to aXXo telling the court that he was thanked by Mininova for his uploads, and rewarded with ‘VIP uploader’ status. However, VIP uploaders or any kind of special uploader statuses do not exist on Mininova, and they never have either.

The implications of this distortion of truth are unclear. Mininova’s lawyer didn’t come back to it in her plea because of time constraints, so it probably went unnoticed by the judges too. The verdict in the case is due on July 15. There is no doubt that this case will have huge implications for other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands, for better or worse.

Source: Mininova Must Block The Pirate Bay and aXXo, BREIN Demands

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.

Source: Mininova and BREIN Clash in Court

The results were presented earlier this week and they were quite remarkable. A massive 93% of the surveyed respondents said they download music, movies or games from the Internet, while only 5% of this group of downloaders actually uses a paid service like iTunes.

Downloading copyrighted music or movies for personal use is not prohibited in The Netherlands, but uploading is. In most cases this means that using BitTorrent to download copyrighted music is not the best choice, since it generally requires uploading. However, this is not holding any of the Dutch youngsters back, so it seems.

BitTorrent was by far the preferred file-sharing (download) application according to the survey. More than 45% of the downloaders said they use sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay to download the latest music and movies. Usenet came in second with a respectable 15%.

Aside from looking into their download behavior, respondents were also asked to predict the outcome of the Mininova trial. Only 15% thought that BREIN will come out the winner, while 45% thought Mininova would strike up a victory. The remaining 39% knew too little about the case to make a useful assessment.

There are of course many flaws in this type of survey. First off, respondents were recruited through online forums and even highly tech oriented communities such as Tweakers. Among these tech savvy and active Internet users the percentage of P2P-users is undoubtedly higher than average. Secondly, the survey was promoted as a “download” survey, this will of course attract the attention of those who actually download more than those who don’t.

Polls and surveys can be very misleading, especially when they are ill constructed. What we can conclude from the Dutch survey, although carefully, is that The Netherlands has quite a few active BitTorrent users and that they are confident that Mininova will beat BREIN in court. Let’s hope that a similar survey among lawyers would reach a similar conclusion.

Source: Dutch Youth Addicted to BitTorrent

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.

Source: Mininova Court Trial Postponed Until June

Those who try to upload a ‘possibly infringing’ torrent to Mininova get the following message; “Your torrent has been uploaded successfully. It will not appear immediately on the site, as the content will be downloaded first by a third party to check for infringing content. If the content is found to be non-infringing, the torrent will be posted on the site right away.”

Mininova has announced that they are currently testing the removal system with only a few titles, among these are most of the torrents uploaded by the popular scene and release groups. It looks like the removal system checks the info hashes to see if the torrents are on the ban list. If this is indeed the case, the easiest way to get around the filter would be to modify the torrent by adding a small file to the original release and create a new torrent. This new torrent will have an unique info hash and will be accepted by Mininova, until it is blacklisted of course.

This could be the death of scene releases and torrents from popular release groups, since these will be the prime targets of the copyright holders simply because they are downloaded more often than others. This will mean that more exotic and home brewed torrents could remain on Mininova, and will likely be incompatible with the popular releases offered elsewhere, resulting in smaller swarm sizes for Mininova users.

One of the TV release groups that has seen most of its torrents banned from Mininova is EZTV. However, NovaKing, one of the admins at EZTV, is sympathetic towards Mininova, despite the filter. “I can understand why Mininova is going down this path. It is wiser for them to push the initiative and show the content distributors that they are not the bad guys instead of being forced by a judge to more than likely do the same thing in their upcoming court case,” he told us.

“We are not sure how much this affects the TV shows that we release as the filter has only been in effect for a short period of time. But to cater for the users out there that do not know we actually have our own website and only get their shows via Mininova, we have changed how we post our torrents to Mininova,” NovaKing added.

Since Mininova’s content removal tool checks for the info hash of the torrent, they circumvent the system by linking to the ‘infringing’ torrents indirectly. “Now when you see a show from us it will contain a text file which contains a link to a valid torrent file, this will keep us from being filtered as the torrent we post does not contain any copyrighted content.” Of course, the latest torrents and news about EZTV are also posted on Twitter, EZTV’s own website and on many other torrent sites.

Only time will tell how effective the removal system will be, and whether the Mininova team will continue to use it in the future. It is likely that it is a compromise that they were forced to make, as a sign of goodwill towards the copyright holders who they are set to face in court next week. If successful, this test case might be used to pressure other torrent site owners to do the same. We hope, however, that the copyright holders will invest their time and money in serving their customers instead. Opening Hulu up to everyone outside the US might be a good start. Or they perhaps they could license content to Mininova.

Source: Popular Torrents Start to Disappear From Mininova

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that the system will be tested for 12 weeks with only a few titles. With this trial Mininova collaborates with an association representing several TV/movie content owners. Niek couldn’t tell us which one, but our best guess would be that it’s the MPA(A).

The content removal system should be seen as an extension of the existing copyright policy according to Niek, who also said that the current trial will be used to find out whether the content recognition system is a workable and effective solution.

The system was selected by the copyright holders themselves who want an easier way to get torrent files removed than the current notice and takedown policy, and it is operated by an undisclosed third party. Interestingly, this collaboration does not mean that the upcoming court case against BREIN is off the table.

Later this month BREIN 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. Up until now, Mininova refused to interfere with the search results, claiming that the DMCA take-down procedure they have is good enough. This has clearly changed now.

The response from Mininova’s users is mostly negative, with one commenter saying “Shame to see such a nice site decide to go hang itself,” and another adding “Wow, guess you guys are caving under the pressure. Too bad its all over now.”

The effectiveness of this filtering system, and how it will affect mininova’s popularity is yet to be seen, but it sure is a radical development.

Breaking story, more info will be added.

Source: Mininova Filters Copyright Infringing Torrents

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.

Source: Mininova Adds Another Billion Torrent Downloads

The service is mostly used by independent artists, but record labels are also interested. Today, the Dutch record label Beep! Beep! announced a partnership with Mininova, which will see the site distribute the label’s complete discography for free under a Creative Commons license.

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. Up until now, though, there was no easy solution to monetize their releases. A new feature from Mininova changes that, as it allows content publishers to offer their newly born fans the option to buy related products.

In just a few clicks, users of Mininova’s content distribution platform can now add links to CDs, concert tickets, merchandising or other products they want to sell alongside their torrent release. The new feature integrates a link to products in the artist’s myshopify.com store, as the record label Beep! Beep! has done with one of their latest releases.

The label even gives Mininova users a 20% discount for helping out with seeding. According to the label, the reason why they have decided to give all their albums away for free is simple. “Because it’s only fair not to pay for something you haven’t heard yet,” they say.

“In our opinion torrents are an excellent way to present you with our music. That’s why Beep! Beep! and Mininova have teamed up. We like the fact that you’re taking the effort to get to know new music. In fact, we’d like to thank you for downloading and seeding our music by giving you a discount on our hardcopies,” the label announced.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that the shop links will go live for users of the content distribution system some time later today. It’s good to see that Mininova not only helps to distribute content, but also help artists to pitch their gear to interested fans.

Source: Mininova Helps Artists to Monetize Torrents

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.

Source: Mininova Trial Due in Two Months

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.

Source: Behind the Scenes at Mininova

Mininova co-founder Niek confirmed to TorrentFreak that they have been suffering from a DDoS attack over the past few days. The site is currently being pounded by a botnet of hundreds of computers which is slowing the site down significantly and at times making it completely inaccessible.

Niek said that he has no idea who’s behind the attack or why they chose to target Mininova. This is not the first time the site has had to deal with a Denial of Service attack, but they haven’t witnessed one of this magnitude before.

It started on Thursday originating from three different continents, but seemed to wear off in the hours that followed. Today it’s back in full force. Mininova is used to serving millions of visitors a day, but even they are not equipped to handle an attack like this.

Today’s attack originates from Germany and Argentina and is 2 Gbit strong. The DDoS attack is maxing out the entire uplink and is hard to filter since it uses UDP connections.

Niek told TorrentFreak that they are working on a solution at the moment, and he hopes things will be back to normal soon.

Source: Mininova Hit By Massive DDoS Attack

There are more changes at Mininova though. Niek, co-founder of the site told TorrentFreak that they will add two more servers later this week to keep up with the growing number of visitors. Last month they broke another traffic record raking in 734,300,000 page views and more hardware is needed to keep the site running smoothly.

In a blog post the Mininova crew details further improvements to the site, such as a Google’s new button standard, less ads, highlighted search results and the ability to search within a category.

In addition to these new features, Mininova teamed up with VIPeers for a new upload feature. Users with a VIPeers account can upload files straight from their computer, and the VIPeers service will create and seed the torrent before adding it to Mininova.

“The bridge we created enables Mininova users to get a specific VIPeers upload page. After uploading, torrents can be sent to Mininova with one click,” Louis Choquel of VIPeers told TorrentFreak.

With all the drama that’s going on in Sweden at the moment, it’s good to see that it’s still business as usual at Mininova. At least for now.

Source: Mininova Upgrades Layout, Servers and Office

With 734,300,000 page views in January, Mininova yet broke another traffic record, and the number of uploaded torrents has been growing steadily over the years too. Today, for the first time in its history, Mininova has over one million torrent files in its database.

On an average day, 3000 torrents are uploaded to Mininova, either anonymously, by members or premium publishers using Mininova’s content distribution system. Of course, torrents are also removed from the site too. All fake torrents or those linked occasionally to a virus have to go, but also some due to takedown requests from the copyright holder.

So how does Mininova compare to the competition, one might ask. Well the Pirate Bay has 765,000 torrents on their site, although they track twice as many files. IsoHunt currently indexes 1,734,435 torrents, and Torrentz searches through 4,070,699. The latter is a meta-search engine though, and doesn’t host any files of its own.

However, to weigh these sites against each other is really like comparing apples and oranges, since they all have different policies regarding older content. On some sites you’ll find thousands of torrents without any seeds or peers, while the other removes dead files quickly. The overall trend, however, is that more content is added than removed on all BitTorrent sites, and because of this they keep on growing.

Source: Mininova – One Million Torrents Strong

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.

Source: Mininova Welcomes 1000th Premium Publisher

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.

Source: Happy Birthday Mininova, 4 Years Young Today

In 2008 the site passed several milestones, and in December Mininova broke a new record of 44.7 million unique visitors in one month. More users download more torrents, and just about every three to four months the site added another million torrent downloads to its counter. Today, just a few days into 2009, Mininova is close to recording the 7 billionth download, a double up compared to a year ago.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he expects this growth to continue in the new year. “Traffic is still growing according to Quantcast and Google Analytics. Unless something drastically changes, I see no reason why this will be different in 2009,” he commented.

Over the past months we’ve reported on the trend of more artists and publishers taking BitTorrent seriously, and Niek has noticed the same. “That’s definitely true,” he said. “We have almost reached the point of 1000 active CD publishers. We expect that free content distribution will play an increasingly important role in the music and video industry during the coming year.”

While existing Internet users are turning to BitTorrent at an increasing rate, most growth can be expected from rapidly developing countries such as India. With only 5 million broadband Internet subscribers, India is a relatively small player. However, the government plans to increase this number to 50 million by 2012, a 1000% increase, and we expect that many of them will be eager to try BitTorrent.

The exponential growth reported by Mininova and other torrent sites shows us that the BitTorrent hype is far from over. ISPs should brace themselves.

Source: Mininova’s Torrent Downloads Double to 7 Billion in a Year

Source: Christmas is All About Sharing, So is BitTorrent

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that Hyper MP is a great alternative to pre and post-roll ads. If it proves successful, there will be more releases on Mininova with these new ads, and Niek said that these new releases might even include some blockbuster movies.

The new advertising technology is yet another great feature to convince premium content producers to publish their work on Mininova’s content distribution platform, which was launched last year. With Mininova’s distribution platform, the torrent files are seeded by Mininova, all the publisher has to do is upload the files. It is a very simple process.

Earlier this year, CBC used Mininova to distribute one of their TV-shows. Tessa Sproule, head of CBC’s Digital Programming told TorrentFreak at the time: “I believe BitTorrent is a terrific distribution technology and absolutely something we as a public broadcaster should be experimenting with.”

Hundreds of premium publishers have already signed up at Mininova. With the new advertising opportunities, more TV and movie studios might be interested in releasing their shows and movies on BitTorrent, and what better way to get exposure than with Mininova, one of the world’s most popular sites.

Source: Mininova Trials Video Torrent Ads

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.

Source: Mininova Down, to Return Stronger Than Ever Before

We’ve been reporting on Mininova’s download figures for a while now. In June 2007 Mininova saw its 2 billionth download. This figure has since tripled to 6 billion – an impressive figure for a site that has been around for less than four years.

Over the past months, the downloads have been growing steadily, and today, another record was broken. Over 10 million torrents were downloaded in a single day – 117.6 per second – a rate never achieved before. With many TV-shows debuting today, this has been the busiest day ever on Mininova, and probably on other BitTorrent sites as well.

While the movie and music studios are complaining loudly, TV-shows are getting the most downloads on BitTorrent. On average, half of all the BitTorrent downloads at any given point in time are TV-episodes. The availability of free-streams seems to bring this figure down a little, but only in the US.

Meanwhile, the Mininova team is focusing more on premium publishers. Last year the site launched a content distribution platform where publishers can offer their content to the millions of Mininova visitors without any charge. Mininova users can download these premium files at high speeds, and they even have the option to stream music and video.

Perhaps it’s a good idea if some of the TV publishers go talk to the Mininova team, and get an account there. We’re sure that they are welcome at their new office.

Source: Mininova Breaks Download Records

Despite all three sites being involved in lawsuits, they continue to attract more visitors, and thus more searches. Mininova and The Pirate Bay currently process between 7 and 8 million searches per day, roughly 230 million a month. isoHunt isn’t far behind though, as its users perform 6 million searches every day, totaling some 180 million a month.

As Slyck points out today, the larger BitTorrent sites are getting as many searches as eBay and Amazon. When combined, the three BitTorrent sites are good for half a billion searches every month, which equals half of MSN’s total search traffic (and 5% of Google’s searches). The major difference though, is that the BitTorrent sites are still growing, while Microsoft’s search engine traffic is declining.

Even though most people use BitTorrent to download TV-shows, the latest Hollywood blockbusters such as Wall-E and The Dark Knight can also be found among the most popular searches. An interesting trend worth mentioning is that more people are searching for high definition content, as ‘720p‘ is a recurring term in most site search clouds.

Source: BitTorrent Searches Skyrocket as Sites Grow

Here is how it works. First of all, you’ll have to be a registered user at Mininova to use the bookmarking feature. Then, when you come across a torrent you would like to download, simply click on the “Add to bookmarks” button. The torrent will then be added to your personal bookmarks page, which has its own RSS feed.

Next, you will have to add your personal bookmarks feed to your favorite BitTorrent client and then you’re all set. In addition you can customize the process a bit more, depending on the client you use. Some clients, for example, let you choose whether to download the torrent immediately, or start it later manually.

Mininova is not the first BitTorrent site to add bookmarking capabilities. Torrentz.com has had this feature for quite some time now. However, Mininova is the first site to combine it with an RSS feed that has BitTorrent enclosures, which makes it compatible with BitTorrent clients that support RSS downloading.

Mininova has covered their new bookmark feature, with some additional details, in their latest blog post. For those who are interested, we have some more RSS tutorials over here.

Source: Download Torrents Remotely with Mininova Bookmarks

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

Source: Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.

Mininova downloads since 2005.

Source: Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting

Mininova is currently the largest BitTorrent site with over 30 million unique visitors per month. Mininova displays user submitted torrents and carries legitimate premium content from publishers such as CBC. Unlike The Pirate Bay, the site does not have their own BitTorrent tracker.

It transpires that BREIN and Mininova have been secretly trying to reach a mutually beneficial agreement for more than a year now, but when one side believes they are acting within the law and the other side believes the opposite, a legal clash seems inevitable.

Erik Dubbelboer, one of the co-founders of Mininova, told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN. He expects to have more details about the upcoming lawsuit later this week: “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.”

Sites like YouTube operate in a similar manner – if the site receives a demand from a copyright holder that it should take content down, it does so under its DMCA obligations and there is no further action. Mininova doesn’t even host any unauthorized content, only .torrent files, which should make it even less of a target than YouTube. Typically, BREIN doesn’t see it that way.

Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said that Mininova’s business model is based on illegal activity. “A notice and take down procedure is absolutely insufficient for a site that makes use of unauthorized files, structurally and systematically,” he added.

The announced legal action will focus on the question whether Mininova has to filter their search results or not. BREIN wants Mininova to install such a filter, Mininova on the other hand doesn’t want to censor the search results. The outcome of the case is likely to have a huge impact on the future of other BitTorrent sites, and even sites such as Google and YouTube.

Source: Mininova Faces Legal Action: Filter or Else

November last year saw Mininova breaking into Alexa’s list of the 50 most visited websites on the Internet, which is an amazing achievement in just 36 months . Close to 5 billion torrents have been downloaded already, and with the torrents, the numbers of visitors continues to grow.

Here is a comparison between Mininova’s traffic last month, and a year before that.

March 2007

57,605,816 visits
261,460,196 pageviews

March 2008

109,304,822 visits
530,181,594 pageviews

Mininova’s visitors literally come from all over the world, Google analytics even reports 63 visits from the Vatican and 12 from Antarctica. However, most of the visitors come from the United States, followed by the UK, France, Canada and Australia.

Other BitTorrent sites are seeing similar visitor boosts but in terms of traffic, Mininova is definitely leading the pack. TorrentFreak spoke with Niek, one of the founders of the site, and he sees opportunities to grow even further.

“We expect that Mininova will at least sustain its current number of visitors. As BitTorrent and P2P in general become more and more accepted by the general public, new users will find their way to Mininova and other torrent search engines,” says Niek. “What Google has done for the web, we try to accomplish for BitTorrent and P2P.”

As a result of the increased popularity, Mininova had to upgrade their hardware numerous times. Unfortunately the current setup still has some weak spots. Yesterday Mininova went down for over 12 hours due to hardware issues.

“The extensive downtime of the last few days was a result of very unfortunate accidents, namely a crashing hard disk and a failing network card of the load-balancer in combination with two successive holidays in The Netherlands. We will do our utmost to prevent such issues in the future,” Niek said.

We wish them all the best and will keep you informed when their traffic has doubled again.

Source: Mininova’s Traffic Doubles in a Year

The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while – possibly 12 hours – because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.

Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.

Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.

For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.

update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded

Source: Mininova Downtime Puts BitTorrent Sites Under Pressure

Tessa Sproule, head of CBC’s Digital Programming told TorrentFreak: “We had aimed to include a direct link to the torrent files on cbc.ca/nextprimeminister, but ran into a conflict with the CBC server which meant we needed to point to the file elsewhere, and that’s where Mininova came in. Since then, we’ve also submitted the CNGPM BitTorrent to Miro, Vuze, and a number of other torrent sites/services.”

Mininova’s content distribution platform, which currently has over 300 premium publishers, is ideal in this case because the BitTorrent site will also take care of the seeding, making sure the torrents never die. All CBC has to so is upload the file, and the torrent will automatically created and seeded for them.

When asked about the reason why CBC decided to use BitTorrent, Sproule said: “The show started online with a YouTube casting call in which 144 bright young Canada’s created and uploaded their own video pitches for why they would be a great leader of Canada. Making the final show available online, DRM-free, was our way of giving back.”

CBC thinks that BitTorrent is one of the easiest and most effective ways to share their shows. “As Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC is mandated to make its programming available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means. I believe BitTorrent is a terrific distribution technology and absolutely something we as a public broadcaster should be experimenting with,” Sproule added.

Mininova, on the other hand, is happy to welcome CBC to their content distribution platform. We asked Niek, one of the founders of Mininova, for a response and he said: “This is terrific news, it’s great to see that broadcasters start using BitTorrent instead of fighting it. we expect that more (broadcasters) will follow in the near future.”

With torrent files seeded from the Mininova servers, Canadians should be able to download the show in a few minutes. That is, if Canadian ISPs aren’t throttling their traffic.

Update: It turns out that mininova is not seeding the files yet. The files on mininova use the Pirate Bay tracker. Mininova’s Erik told use that the torrents will be updated tomorrow. So, for now the credit goes to The Pirate Bay. Thanks Alan!

Source: Mininova Helps CBC to Distribute TV-Show

The Open Source “swarmplayer” which is used for the video streaming service is developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam. Tribler is also working together with the BBC and several other European broadcasters, and they recently received a $22 million grant for P2P research from the European Union.

The swarmplayer has also been demonstrated for a 100+ audience of media industry insiders in Geneva at the European Broadcaster Union event on Open Internet TV this week. The streaming magic comes from replacing the tit-for-tat algorithm with Give-to-Get. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse stated after his keynote speech at the conference: “the attitude of several key media stakeholders in Europe are shifting and they are now exploring P2P on a serious scale.”

Mininova is still looking for people to test the streaming service, as Erik writes: “We are looking for people who would like to be in the first testing group who test the software, report suggestions and bugs you find. Please reply in this topic if you want to participate in this closed beta.”

Mininova already has a music streaming feature for their content distribution platform, based on the Java applet developed by Bitlet. The site currently has over 300 premium publishers, and Mininova’s CEO Niek told TorrentFreak last month that they will focus on extending and improving their content distribution service.

“Publishers will see more distribution options in the near future, and users will be able to find featured content easier. Our plan is to offer the most sophisticated and scalable distribution service of the future. Functionality of “regular” torrent files will of course be kept as it is now.”

Over the past months we have seen more and more P2P streaming alternatives. One of the main problems seems to be that it is practically impossible to make a high quality video streaming service profitable because of the immense bandwidth costs but P2P streaming solves this problem.

Source: Mininova to Launch BitTorrent Video Streaming

Contrary to the Pirate Bay guys, however, the people behind Mininova prefer to lay low, and don’t speak out in public very often. We had the chance to do a short Q&A with Niek, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Mininova (yes, it’s a company).

TorrentFreak: Recently you have started to focus more on legal content, that is .torrent files uploaded by approved publishers. What are your plans with the Mininova publisher platform for the future, and will this affect the other .torrent files hosted on Mininova?

Niek: We focus on extending and improving our Content Distribution service. Publishers will see more distribution options (e.g. extensive statistics) in the near future, and users will be able to find featured content easier. Our plan is to offer the most sophisticated and scalable distribution service of the future. Functionality of “regular” torrent files will of course be kept as it is now.

TorrentFreak: The Mininova CD launched in December 2007, how many publishers are releasing their content on Mininova now?

Niek: Over 330 premium publishers are now actively using Mininova to share their content. We receive functionality requests from time to time, but overall they’re very pleased with the CD service.

TorrentFreak: Like any other BitTorrent site, Mininova has to deal with a huge number to DMCA takedown requests from copyright holders. How is your relationship with the people who want you to remove .torrent files from your index?

Niek: I would say that in general the relationship with copyright owners is very good. Our copyright policy is being used by many companies and organizations when necessary. Some copyright owners are so satisfied with our service that they send stuff like collectors editions of their products :)

TorrentFreak: Mininova never had it’s own tracker. Why is this? Don’t you think you have a responsibility to help out the BitTorrent community here, especially now there are only a few reliable BitTorrent trackers out there?

Niek: We discussed this matter from the start. We do run a tracker, but only for Content Distribution purposes. Running an open tracker is not a trivial task, it requires major technical and financial backing. Thus, running such a tracker is currently not an option for us.

TorrentFreak: Mininova is a registered company in the Netherlands. Has 2007 been a good year for the company profit wise?

Niek: I would say this was a pretty nice year. We just bought a Palm Tree island in Dubai (we chose the bottom right leaf, for those who’re interested). I also received my second Bugatti Veyron last week (bonus for the increased Q4 numbers). Oh, and don’t forget to watch MTV Cribs next month to see all this stuff. /sarcasm

TorrentFreak: About the future, where do you see Mininova in 10 years from now? do you think people will still download .torrent files by then?

Niek: Predicting the future is probably one of the most dangerous things to do (remember Bill gates and his 640K?). One thing is for sure: P2P won’t go away anytime soon. We will probably share more files than ever in 10 years, either using an improved version of BitTorrent or a different P2P protocol. We hope that Mininova will stay on top of developments.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for taking the time to talk to TorrentFreak, even though you skipped some questions ;) Is there anything you like to add?

Niek: Thanks to all our users! Especially the 4 billion downloads wouldn’t never been possibly without your support and the great help of our moderating team. TorrentFreak, thank you for your time.

Source: Mininova: Serving Billions of Torrents and Buying Bugattis

If you want to stream music torrents that are not listed in the featured section, you’ll need to use the Bitlet website. The service currently supports mp3 and ogg/vorbis files.

BitTorrent streaming is not restricted to music files, and indeed, Erik, one of the founders of Mininova told TorrentFreak that they are currently looking into the possibility of video streaming via BitTorrent as well. He said that Mininova will start a private BETA test of the BitTorrent video streaming integration in a few weeks.

Together with the music streaming capability, Mininova published some other new features including comment tracking, which gives users an overview of all the comments they recently made. Another new feature that might come in handy is the manual refresh of the seeder and leecher statistics that logged in users now have.

Finally, every self respecting BitTorrent sites now has its own toolbar. Isohunt and The Pirate Bay launched one a few weeks ago, so Mininova couldn’t stay behind. Personally I’m not a huge fan of these toobars, but some people seem to like it. The good news is, the toolbars are malware free, and generate some extra revenue via the integrated search box.

It’s good to see that Mininova and other BitTorrent sites continue to add new features, and improve the service to their users.

Source: Mininova Launches Music Torrent Streaming

The first public version of Mininova went public on January 15, 2005 and was hosted at the DSL line of Niek, one of the founders of the site. The name “Mininova” was inspired by SuprNova.org, the popular BitTorrent site that decided to shut its doors in December 2004, a few days before Mininova was launched. Not surprisingly, within a few days Niek’s connection couldn’t handle the bandwidth.

Gottfrid of The PirateBay was so kind to offer them a hosting account until they found a more permanent solution. After a while Mininova temporarily moved to Gary of IsoHunt, but soon after that they got their own servers. Since that time, Mininova continued to extend and upgrade their server park, which consists of 27 servers at the moment.

What are Mininova’s plans for the future, you might wonder. We talked to Niek from Mininova and he told TorrentFreak: “We want to focus on getting more publishers for our recently launched Content Distribution service. Currently we have over 200 publishers and we’re sure this this number will grow tremendously the coming months”

There is no doubt that Mininova will continue to grow throughout 2008, we wish them all the best with their future endeavors.

Source: Mininova Celebrates Its 3rd Anniversary

One of my favorite episodes is the computer chronicles episode about computer piracy in the eighties, featuring Frankie Mouse, the Computer Pirate. In this episode Frankie explains what being a software pirate in 1985 is all about, while showing off with his cracked version of Apple II software.

The famous hacker John T Draper, also known as “Captain Crunch” also makes an appearance in this episode. Draper started hacking telephone lines in the early seventies, something he later taught Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak even before they founded Apple.

The Computer Chronicles collection is available in Mininova’s featured content section. Different formats and direct download links are also available in the Internet archive.

The .torrent file for this episode can be found over here (fixed). Other highlights are:

The Hard Disk (1985)

During the mid eighties applications were getting more complicated and needed more disk space. This episode reviews some of the options, hard disk drives, Bernoulli boxes and tape streamers. (torrent)

Video Game Consoles (1990)

An episode featuring groundbreaking games such as: “Defender of the Crown” on an IBM PC, “SimEarth” on Mac IIci, “Michael Jackson Moonwalker” on a Sega Genesis and “The Legend of Zelda” on a Nintendo.(torrent)

The Internet (1993)

This episode includes a preview of the World Wide Web as used at NASA, an item about the first Internet radio station, and a visit to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) where it all began. (torrent)

The Battle of the Browsers (1997)

An in depth look at some of the most sophisticated browsers in the late nineties: Netscape Communicator 4.0, Internet Explorer 4.0, VRML 2.0 and RealSystem 5.0. We know how this war ended. (torrent)

Programming Languages

An episode showing off Microsoft’s Office 2000 Developer, LEGO Mindstorms RCX Code Developer, Macromedia Flash 3.0, and Metrowerks CodeWarrior. Also a special look inside Electronic Arts to see what they use to program their latest game WWII Fighters. (torrent)

Source: Computer Chronicles, Retro Tech-TV Available on BitTorrent