TorrentFreak

Roughly a week ago, Mininova was still the largest torrent site on the Internet, but this quickly changed after the site’s founders removed of millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In the days that followed, traffic to the site dropped 66%, while the number of daily downloads are less than 4% of what they used to be.

When Mininova announced last week that they would comply with a tough court order, many BitTorrent users feared that this signaled the end of big public torrent sites. In fact, in common with the earlier Grokster decision, the verdict actually lays out clearer ground rules for those running file-sharing services.

After nearly five years of loyal service, Mininova disabled access to over a million torrent files when it partly shut down its website. Starting today, only approved publishers are able to upload files to the site, but luckily there are plenty of alternatives and potential replacements BitTorrent users can flock to.

Mininova, the largest torrent site on the Internet, has removed all torrents except those that were uploaded through its content distribution service. Mininova’s founders took the drastic decision after they lost a civil dispute against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and were ordered to remove all infringing torrents from the site.

Despite negative court verdicts against the two leading torrent sites, the BitTorrent popularity surge is still underway judging from ever increasing download figures. Mininova, the most visited BitTorrent indexer, broke an impressive record today. Since its inception, the site has served a dazzling 10 billion torrent downloads.

Mininova has lost its civil dispute with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringement, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

When the popular DVD ripper aXXo stopped releasing new torrents earlier this year many loyal fans were left disappointed. After nearly five months of absence early indications seemed to indicate that he’s back in business. However, those who look closer will notice that something is amiss.