Everything Digital

November 26 is a sad day for the Bittorent community. After more than four months of court proceedings in a Dutch court and trying a new filtering system to make the site legally compliant, Mininova site owners finally agreed to remove all their links to copyrighted materials. If you happened to visit their site lately, you’ll see a banner on top of the page announcing that only Content Distribution torrents are now allowed in the site. In other words, the site is sort of dead as of Nov. 26.

The “closing down” of Mininova to user uploaded material is another victory for anti-piracy outfits. However, I doubt that the global Bittorrent community will be stopped anytime soon. While Mininova is down this time, there are still dozens of sites out there that offer similar services to torrent users. My guess is that it will just be a matter of time before another torrent indexing site will rise and take over the gaping hole Mininova has now left in the Bittorent community worldwide. It might be a little disorienting for some but the change will be temporary. Soon, another torrent site will rise to prominence and be the target of another anti-piracy organization and this vicious cycle of cracking down errant websites will be repeated over again.

The “sort of closing down” of Mininova is the second most successful crackdown this year. A few months back, Pizzatorrent, one of the largest torrent meta search engines there is, closed down for good. The site that used to house other major indexing sites simply announced that the site is now dead. TorrentFreak reported that the site owner didn’t really receive any legal threats but admitted that there were other forms of attacks.