Mininova Surpasses 8 Billion Downloads as Court Date Looms
Earlier in the month popular torrent site Mininova recorded their eight billionth download. The site was founded in January of 2005 and is one of the world’s most successful torrent sites. According to Torrentfreak the site is one of the top 100 most visited websites on the entire internet. Mininova reached the 8 billion point thanks to visitors downloading over 10 million torrents a day.
Although the majority of headlines recently have revolved around the legal troubles of fellow torrent site The Pirate Bay, Mininova has not been spared from its own legal troubles. Anti-piracy organization BREIN will be taking Mininova to court this May. BREIN is a Dutch based organization conducting activities similar to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) or the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association). BREIN is demanding Mininova implement a filtering mechanism to weed out torrents that link to items that infringe on copyrights.
In an exclusive interview with Torrent Freak the founders of Mininova stated, “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we don’t think Mininova will cease to exist,” Mininova is continuing operations as normal in the lead up to the May court date. Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer believes the case is not meant to determine the legality of torrent sites but to determine what sort of filters torrent sites should be forced to implement. Dubbelboer stated, “The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content, In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not.”.
An important distinction between the recent Pirate Bay case and the Mininova case is who is being targeted. In the Mininova case the company is being targeted while in the Pirate Bay case it was a criminal trial for the individuals involved with the site.
:source: Source: Zeropaid
