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Mininova Starts Filtering Torrents

Posted by timothy on from the afterthought-beforetrial dept.

Dreen writes with this snippet from TorrentFreak: "Just a few days before their court appearance, Mininova, the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has started to filter content. The site is using a third-party content recognition system that will detect and remove torrent files that link to copyright-infringing files."

5 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. It makes them useless by g253 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I saw the headline, and just immediately deleted my bookmark. I hardly ever used it anyway, but that makes them completely irrelevant to me.

  2. Re:Why Bother by Animaether · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes they are - but now they can more-or-less show 'good faith' to the judge.

    Currently mininova - knowing full well the reason why people use their site - simply go by the strict laws.. if a copyright holder / representative tells them they're hosting particular copyrighted content, they'll take it down.

    Of course it will be back up there 5 minutes later. This is pissing the Dutch interest groups off who are trying to slap the mininova people around a bit with other laws / more loose interpretations.

    But now they can say "ahh, but look.. we installed a filter.. it's not our fault that them sneaky pirates find ways around those filters.. it would be *impossible* for us to manually go over each and every upload!".. then hope to exit the court grinning while their main page continues to display top 10 lists of every popular category with scarce 'legal' torrents (I think the Windows 7 Release Candidate was the only one when I checked yesterday and yes, I know there's nothing illegal about a torrent file itself.. splitting hairs over technical details is what they'll be doing in court).

  3. Featured torrents: by skzo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I went to mininova just now, and on the front page I found:
    Featured torrents:
    "How to bypass mininovas copyright filter"

  4. It seems to me... by theJML · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...that this is yet another opportunity to come up with a way of making a distributed lookup system part of the bit torrent spec. Sure, it wouldn't be as quick, but if your client can listen for other nearby clients and query them for a list of files that they've accessed (not just ones being seeded by them, but ones they've connected to recently or are currently connected to). I'm sure this would greatly limit the number of seeds you find, but with a proper system of distributed "well, I've heard this guy has this" and "I'm seeding this right now and I've transfered it to this guy who might also be seeding" and such would give you a fairly decent list of seeds that you can probably get a good speed to (since they're somewhat 'local'). This would have the benefit of not needing a search site, nor needing any centralized repository.

    On the other hand if this worked and was really successful, the RIAA would just try to ban the protocol from ISP's.

    --
    -=JML=-
  5. Indexted DHT URI's only legit? by Danathar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've often wondered if a list of indexed DHT URI hashes would be any stronger in court.

    I figure at some point we will have sites that don't link to or have torrents but just indexed and categorized DHT URI links.