Mininova was a
website
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...
offering
BitTorrent downloads. Mininova was once one of the largest sites offering torrents of
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
ed material, but in November 2009, following legal action in the
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
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
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
and was launched in January 2005 as a successor to
Suprnova.org, 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.
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
The stichting BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland) translates roughly as ''association for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands''. BREIN ( en, Brain or Brains) is an association in ...
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
Utrecht ( , , ) is the fourth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, in the very centre of mainland Net ...
ruled that Mininova should remove all torrent files pointing to copyrighted material within three months or face damages of up to 5 million
€
The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists ...
.
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 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, 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
This is a comparison of BitTorrent websites that includes most of the most popular sites. These sites typically contain multiple torrent files and an index of those files.
Features
* BitTorrent sites may operate a BitTorrent tracker and are ...
*
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...
*
LimeWire
LimeWire was a free peer-to-peer file sharing client for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Solaris. Created by Mark Gorton in 2000, it was most prominently a tool used for the download and distribution of pirated materials, particularly pirated mus ...
References
External links
*
{{BitTorrent
Internet properties established in 2005
Defunct BitTorrent websites
Dutch websites
Internet properties disestablished in 2017