Mininova Removes All Unauthorized BitTorrent Links

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on November 30, 2009 - 12:51pm.

Utrecht, the Netherlands - Mininova, a BitTorrent file-sharing hub that has counted over 30 million monthly unique visitors, has opted to remove nearly all of its torrents, according to a post on the company's blog. The site was sued by Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN earlier this year, but to this point had maintained that its service complied with applicable laws -- as it did not itself host any infringing content, and complied with requests from copyright holders to remove torrent links.

In May, however, in the face of the lawsuit from BREIN, Mininova began proactively filtering torrents that linked to copyrighted media.

The majority of torrent links on Mininova are now gone, with just the relatively few torrents linking to authorized content through the company's Content Distribution service remaining.

"Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service," Mininova said in the blog post, adding that it is considering an appeal of the Dutch court's ruling.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/thv75 (Mininova blog)

http://snipurl.com/thqzj (TorrentFreak)

http://snipurl.com/thqz2 (NewTeeVee)

http://www.mininova.org