Mininova was a
website offering
BitTorrent downloads. Mininova was once one of the largest sites offering torrents of
copyrighted material, but in November 2009, following legal action in the
Dutch courts, the site operators deleted all torrent files uploaded by regular users including torrents that enabled users to download copyrighted material.
On April 4, 2017, Mininova shut down, saying that it had been running at a loss "for some years".
Site history
The site was based in the
Netherlands and was launched in January 2005 as a successor to
Suprnova.org
Suprnova.org was a Slovenia-based website that distributed BitTorrent trackers for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Started in late 2002 by Andrej Preston (known as Slonček, Slovenian for "little elephant") and for a whi ...
, which went offline at the end of 2004 following legal difficulties. In April 2007, Mininova B.V. (the company running Mininova.org) won a domain dispute about the domain mininova.com, which had been exploited by a
phisher
Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwar ...
.
The word ‘mininova’ ranked 9 on Google's list of most queried terms in 2006. In May 2008, Mininova indicated that there had been over 5 billion downloads via the site. Mininova also ran a video sharing site, called
Snotr.
Legal action
In May 2009, the Dutch copyright enforcement organization
BREIN started a civil procedure against Mininova demanding that Mininova filter torrent files pointing to copyrighted works. During the proceedings, Mininova stated that it was not feasible for the site to identify such files, but said that it would remove torrent files that BREIN identified as infringing copyright. On May 6, 2009, Mininova began a trial of a content recognition system, which was intended to remove any torrents that were flagged as infringing copyright. On August 26, 2009, the court in
Utrecht ruled that Mininova should remove all torrent files pointing to copyrighted material within three months or face damages of up to 5 million
€.
On November 26, 2009, Mininova announced that it could not find a foolproof filtering system against copyrighted content, and limited its platform to
Content Distribution
Digital distribution, also referred to as content delivery, online distribution, or electronic software distribution, among others, is the delivery or distribution of digital media content such as audio, video, e-books, video games, and other so ...
torrents only, in compliance with the ruling of the Utrecht court. This resulted in more than 99.3% of the torrents on the site being removed. As a consequence, the website traffic dropped by 66% in a few days, and daily downloads fell down to 4% of the previous total. According to
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...
, the daily traffic rank in the USA dropped from within the top 100 ranked sites in early November 2009 to below 1000 on January 30, 2010.
Mininova appealed against the court ruling, and in December 2010 reported that a settlement had been reached under which Mininova paid BREIN an undisclosed amount of money, ending the lawsuit.
See also
*
Comparison of BitTorrent sites
*
Copyright infringement
*
LimeWire
References
External links
*
{{BitTorrent
Internet properties established in 2005
Defunct BitTorrent websites
Dutch websites
Internet properties disestablished in 2017