I just found out the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel.
“From now on, only Content Distribution torrents are allowed”
Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August.Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict (Dutch link) we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We’ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we 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. We are still considering an appeal at this moment.
We launched our Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova. The launch of Content Distribution has proven to be a success. Countless content owners have used Content Distribution to distribute their content (e.g. albums and documentaries) for free to millions of users. For example, the Dutch band Silence is Sexy released their complete album on Mininova and received the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so. The Dutch television broadcaster VPRO decided to start using Content Distribution in 2009 in order to distribute documentaries.
We would like to thank you for your support. 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! The Mininova staff
Mininova was one of the largest BitTorrent index sites. It is a directory and search engine for many kinds of torrent files. It does not, however, host its own tracker. So sad to hear this but I guess it happens. Mininova was one of my favorite torrent sites and also my first.
