Dutch BitTorrent tracker site says this “important day” in its history is when it begins filtering copyrighted material in order to comply with a court order from last August.
Today’s a sad in the BitTorrent community for the Netherlands-based tracker site Mininova has announced that henceforth it’s limiting content to only that which is offered on its legitimate Content Distribution service.
“Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service,” reads the site’s blog.
The decision was made in order to comply with a Dutch court ruling from last August whereby the Utrecht Court ordered the site to remove all torrent trackers that link to copyrighted material or face fines of €1000 euro ($1,422 USD) per link up to a maximum of 5 million euro (7.13m USD).
It said that even though the site doesn’t actually host copyrighted material it nonetheless helps users obtain it and therefore violate copyright laws.
Mininova tried testing out several filtering systems, but “found that it’s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system.”
“Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on,” it adds. “We are still considering an appeal at this moment.”
The Content Distribution service was first launched back in 2007 and allows producers and artists to use Mininova as a free content distribution tool.
“The launch of Content Distribution has proven to be a success,” it says. “Countless content owners have used Content Distribution to distribute their content (e.g. albums and documentaries) for free to millions of users.”
Sadly, however I’m sure this “important day” marks the beginning of a slow decline for the once revered site and makes Demonoid’s return that much more anticipated.
“We would like to thank you for your support,” continues Mininova. “Especially everyone that contributed to Mininova receives a big “thank you!” for the effort! We hope to keep welcoming you on Mininova and our other projects (e.g. Snotr, Dispostable).”
Thanks for all the memories Mininova. It was fun while it lasted.
The game of whac-a-mole continues.
Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
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Hopefully we can get this whole bittorrent thing decentralized and then we can put all this crap behind us once and for all!
Phuk U Mininova – Long Live TPB.
Its strange they are not hitting google!
…just do a google search for whatever it is your looking for add .torrent at the end of the search and you have it…
Oh hang on, that’s right, google have more money than they do to fight a court case… hmm!
Even Mininova comply with the court order and go legit, I dont think the anti-torrent outfit will let them out so easily. Since they can use pretty much any reasons to go to court.
Well, decentralizing won’t help much since even if the tracker is decentralized you still have to have a sign up someplace that the torrent exists. Shutting down mininova was essentially tearing down a signpost so people can’t find the torrent. True there are other signposts elsewhere, but if they all go down, one by one, eventually there won’t be any way to find the files that still remain.
Pretty soon they’re going to hit Twitter. A combo of that, zoink.it, and tr.im can easily replace mininova.