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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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 M., who decided to share it with a release group. Following an FBI investigation, M, a 31 year-old from Irvine CA, was busted as well.

M. confessed to sharing the movie and accepted a sentence of three years probation.

Although M’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 M 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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.