Mininova

Have you heard of Mininova? It’s only the 52nd largest site in the world according to Alexa, and the largest BitTorrent tracker around. Dutch anti-piracy body BREIN estimates their traffic (Google translation from Dutch) at over 30 million unique visitors per month and a total of 5 billion downloads. Their earnings, according to BREIN, count in the hundreds of thousands of euros per month.

And yet, the Dutch-based site has eluded legal action until now. Partly, it is because of their takedown policy; if a copyright owner asks them to remove a torrent from their database, they will comply.

This is not enough, according to BREIN, because over 90% of files tracked on Mininova are illegal; Mininova should start filtering their search results, or they’ll face legal action. Sound familiar? Yup, it’s pretty much the same thing media giants have been asking YouTube YouTube to do. So, although many associate Mininova with warez and illegal files, this is essentially the same issue; and if Mininova loses this one, it’ll be bad news for YouTube and others, too. (read less)

Have you heard of Mininova? It’s only the 52nd largest site in the world according to Alexa, and the largest BitTorrent tracker around. Dutch anti-piracy body BREIN estimates their traffic (Google translation from Dutch) at over 30 million unique visitors per month and a total of 5 billion downloads. Their earnings, according to BREIN, count in the hundreds of thousands of euros per month.

And yet, the Dutch-based site has eluded legal action until now. Partly, it is because of their takedown... (read more)