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Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents
Pabugs writes with news that popular torrent site Mininova has abandoned their attempts at filtering and simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service. According to their blog post, they were left "no other option than to take [their] platform offline" after a court ruling from August. "The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros."
Farewell.
And a huge FUCK YOU to the MPAA/RIAA.
...if they're working with a white or black list?
Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?
There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic. We need to educate people to enable a wider debate. That is the only thing that will lead to fair change. Piracy is not the answer. There is a place for copyright that is not todays distorted parameters. Boycotting in the mean time is the answer, however, unless boycotting is whipped into shape it is also not the answer. Debate! Educate your friends and family it is a small start but it is the only way.
Shh.
Mininova replaced Suprnova, and Mininova will be replaced by another site. It's like playing whack-a-mole, except there are 1000 moles and 1 hammer.
Most of the success from the CDN service relied on the fact that millions of users visiting Mininova for general torrents would also be exposed to the CDN torrents. With Mininova's general torrent index deep-sixed, traffic will plummet to a tiny fraction of what it was before, and activity on CDN torrents will drop correspondingly.
While this means that users of the CDN won't get any extra exposure, it's still a useful service for pure distribution (they handle the tracking and seeding). Unfortunately, with no revenue stream, mininova won't be able to support that for long.
So Mininova is gone. The King is dead. Long live the King!
The media industries have been playing Whack-A-Mole with the internet since Napster and nothing has changed.
As long as they don't get any ISP level laws passed, let them have their minor victories.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's always annoying to have loads of stolen software music and films come up when I am searching for a torrent.
Having mininova get rid of all the illigal stuff will make it much easier and more pleasant to use. Legitimate stuff gets buried as there is so much more stolen stuff.
I hope other torrent sites follow suit, even just for the ease of use reasons.
The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements
After seeing the Google/Italy article, it's nice to see that sanity holds elsewhere.
My webcomic
maybe gnutella can save us like it did after napster went down the drain. this really bites, though. how many major indexers are left?
Mininova included far too many torrents on private trackers. Sort of defeating the purpose of BitTorrent, actually.
No great loss, all things considered.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
How they knew which torrents were illegal?
And with Demonoid being down, I'm finding myself pressed for some new sites.
Rest in peace Mininova, thanks for the great times, you will be greatly missed. :(
Apparently a mininova does collapse into a black hole...
Blank until
The MPAA/RIAA are not the ones to blame for this..
It was BREIN, the dutch RIAA... bastards.
Same droppings, different pile. The nine members of the MAFIAA (Sony, GE, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, National Amusements, Vivendi, WMG, and EMI) are the same no matter which country they operate in.
in a related story newsgroup users increase....
So mininova turns into www.legaltorrents.com. What they could do though it just de-reference the links, but keep the torrent names in the list. That way people could simply do a websearch on them. That way the only way to take them down would be to outlaw web searches :)
The situation is getting out of control!! It is getting harder and harder to steal movies!! Something must be done!!
kickasstorrents.com
Mininova is gone!
If only there'd be some kind of alternative! I guess I'll just have to rely on sumotorrent, btjunkie, eztv, fenopy, isohunt, seedpeer, torrentz, torrentbox, torrentdownloads.net, torrent portal, torrentreactor.net, torrentreactor.to, alivetorrents, demonoid, boxtorrent, animelab, animesuki, kickasstorrents, torrentplaza, movietorrents, torrentomega, flixflux, overget, superfundo and all the other sites I can easily find on google by doing a simple search.
I hope I'll be able to survive!
> Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents
Mininova Removes All Torrents ...Here, fixed that for ya
Here in Canada we pay a huge levy on blank CD media, MP3 players, and virtually any other media capable of holding music. This "goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. ", as per the Cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html
Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.
Meh, there's always ISOhunt, or like everyone else has already said, plenty of other choices.
[A record label lawyer] approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.
By "copies", do you include homebrew games that implement the same rules as a non-free commercial game? Would Lockjaw, for instance, be considered a "copy" of Tetris DS?
ObTopic: I've seen torrents of just homebrew. I imagine they'd go away too because Nintendo would object to including them in "Content Distribution" on patent grounds.
Let's have a moment of silence, or as it goes on the internet a sad smiley, for all our old friends lost to MPAA, and alike, lawsuits all the way from Napster to this. :(
...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links? If they're not liable for that content, then they shouldn't have to remove anything.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
And as happens so often, a judge basically says "Well, technically what you're doing isn't illegal, but I still don't like what you're doing, and people are breathing down my neck to do something about you, so stoppit or we're going to bring the legal system down on you anyway. We may not be able to make it stick, but we certainly can make your life hell in the attempt." Surrender your rights and we'll leave you alone - persist and we'll make you regret it. Wonderful legal system we have here.
Judges that make rulings like that need to either be re-educated, or removed. Their job isn't to make the law, but to judge whether or not you've broken a law. (except in trial by jury, and then they don't even get that) Whether or not they like what you're doing, or whether or not they think what you did should be illegal isn't supposed to have anything to do with it. If they're more interested in writing the law, they need to give up their bench and run for senator.
Senators make laws and place restrictions on police and judges. Citizens break laws. Police arrest citizens that appear to have broken laws. Juries (/judges) interpret law and decide if citizens have broken a law. Judges insure a fair trial. Problem here is everyone wants a piece of everyone else's action. Oh if it only weren't for that pesky "separation of powers" thing...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
How they knew which torrents were illegal?
Some of these trackers have "LegitTorrent" services designed for publishers of quality works that aren't blatant copyright infringements. Mininova just deleted every torrent that wasn't in its LegitTorrent section.
Piracy IS the answer, same as sipping an alcoholic drink was the answer during Prohibition.
The trick is, we need mobsters to facilitate piracy, same as the mobsters helped restore freedom during Prohibition by trafficking in stuff the majority of people wanted.
Now, I didn't really know Mininova before this. I had heard of it, but that's about it.
I did visit the site just now, and I saw lots of items about music that I'd never heard of.
Maybe it can become a good site to find new music from non-RIAA signed artists, who generally don't have much of a marketing/distribution platform? RIAA, meet foot, gun.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Alas, poor MiniNova, I knew him well...
Oh well, that's life in the big city. *shrug*
That no-one even started talking about tor or even freenet..
...and bittorrent users remove all bookmarks to mininova. NEXT!
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
> But, collectively, we have to have room for compromise or we will all get nothing.
I can think of a lot of futures where this is not true.
For example, the future where copyright law is unchanged, infringement is rampant and unenforceable, and the content industry merely has to scale down because of lowered profits.
Or the future where the content industry pushes copyright law so out of whack that no one infringes, but their profits are just as lowered because many people are so afraid of the possible penalties they totally avoid buying their products and instead go for the safe indie products which have CC/alternative licensing and/or viewing the content only in ephemeral ways (like on television or a movie screen).
BTW, when I finished school I was a model "responsible citizen" in that I would never have thought to break any laws. Now that I am an adult, I see that the simplistic "law == morality" equivalence is far from being correct. So you might have a big problem in your plans, there, eh?
LOL websense is filtering slashdot now!
I liked this comment from TFA:
=============
Here is an idea, since these great websites are taken away from us one by one and our freedom along with it.
Maybe we need a more "legal" approach to file sharing.
I propose to have a site that would have deals with distributors to have their tvshow/movies/music etc. in torrent form on the site. In exchange for a percentage of the money made by ads. And also the idea that if someone really likes a product they will probably buy it. I think there is alot of people who buy the cd/dvd after they download it if they like it.
That way end users keep getting great content for free, and artists/distributors keep getting paid.
Distributors, instead of looking at file sharing like an enemy, you could look at it as an advertising opportunity.
=============
Obviously works for me....
[eyeing wall of DVDs I've bought]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Quoted from the TorrentFreak website..
Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.
This is what got them into trouble, besides, "Aiding and Abetting", (spare me the jurisdictional nonsense please) since even companies that don't seriously object to their software ending up on torrent sites start looking at the bottom line and looking at all the money someone else is making from their product and they are not getting a cut of it.
Greed on all of the parties sides is the problem. If the torrent sites, pointers, indices's, maps, sources, call them what you will because the notion of a site pointing to the place to get illegal copies of software and the actual place the binary resides is a very very blurry legal line indeed, would start cutting checks to the people who actively sell their software which cost them real money to produce, this then might be something that simply goes on with no one complaining.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
So why don't they just auto-prune torrents older than 3 months from their index? One of the benefits of being a part of the Content Distribution service could be unlimited time in the index. Problem solved, at least for now.
Freenet is where the next generation of filesharing will happen. It's working very well at the moment, Speeds are pretty good and there is a lot of content. Files of 1GB can be easily downloaded in a day, just queue them up. And of course there is a lot of chat on the forums, just like Usenet used to be.
It is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, although the Slashdot crowd are the kind of people who will be the early adopters.
Your idea is retarded and will never work.
LeTS JuST GIvE iT aWAY FoR FREE!!! LOLOLOLO!!! THATS THE ANSWER!!
I will wait for nanonova now :)
You've made a good start, but forgotten all the rest of the bad things of copyright law.
The problem here is not piracy but that most of the music that is easy to buy is worthless drivel. I have to pirate in order to know what is good before I order it. I listen to mainly soundtracks, heavy metal, and Japanese Pop. Now the problem is that most good heavy metal is NOT originally from the US (few exceptions like Fool's Game and Future's End but they are the minority). Imports for game soundtracks are usually at least $30 and up to $50 after the conversion from Yen to Dollars. This isn't so bad because most $40 soundtracks from Japanese games are also 2-4 discs and each disc is actually a full 80 minutes unlike US releases with 40 minute discs. Anime soundtracks though are usually $25-30 and are single disc releases. Thus because of the price of buying this stuff I have to know for sure this is something good before I buy it. The only way to do that is to either pirate everything first and buy the good stuff or to buy everything and find out that half of it sucks and I doubt very many people have the money to do that. It is somewhat easier when you are aware of the good composers out there because then you can be a little more sure that the album you order is good but that isn't very reliable either. This leaves me with a choice between buying nothing and having nothing to listen to or pirating everything and buying something. I would think the businesses would rather get my money after I have educated myself the only way I can than not get my money at all. Sure I could play every single game, watch every single movie, and watch every single series of anime in existence to determine the quality of a soundtrack but that is completely impractical and often times the soundtracks that are the best are also for movies/anime/games that are not so good. Until there is a change in the way things work I don't see how I have any other option here.
See the concept of contributory infringement, or aiding and abetting. Please be careful, constructing your thinking on not understanding such basic things can result in a pathologically nonsensical tin-foil-hat world view. You appear to be pretty far down on that road already.
I can't imagine any decent human being simply standing there and watching while another human has a heart attack, no matter who they work for.
You called that one, I sure couldn't just stand there and watch. I mean, how often do you get a chance to kick a RIAA person WHILE they are having a heart attack?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Noooo! I had like 2TB of media I wanted to download off Mininova! The world as we know it is coming to an end! :(
Demonoid, tick.
The Pirate Bay, tick.
Mininova, tick.
RIP.
Yes! And they will finally be BIG MEN! No more feelings of inadequacy! Plus all Japanese women think Westerners are, like, rock stars or something!
Just let me know when he arrives, so I can see the look of bitter disappointment on his face when he discovers that he is STILL small, and that Japanese women read tentacle porn because they would rather sleep with a squid than the western men who move to Japan to "teach English".
How easily foolish delusions are shattered...
L.O.L.
Mininova removes YOU
Their ad revenue drops to near zero, and they go dark in a month or two. They had better have a good back-up business plan.
The heady days of 90's info-anarchism are over. Great powers are turning the Internet to their own purposes. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done. There are many things we can do to limit the great powers.
One: We need server to server encryption to stop passive eavesdropping and logging by governments. If this could be accomplished in the BSD and Linux communities, the amount of encrypted traffic would overload all governments, making data retention and (passive) surveillance laws pointless.
Two: We need encrypted anonymous file sharing / communications for the masses. This is to counteract active surveillance by hostile parties.
TOR has proven that it isn't required to be 100% safe to be 100% effective. As an anti-censorship platform, 0% reported busts for illegal material. The best we have seen so far is sniffing exit nodes and throttling attacks via deep packet inspection. The intelligence community may have broken TOR, but their power is not shared by police or corporate entities. We need to break their will to control the Internet by implementing at the deepest levels the most powerful tools available, making the mass-use, and therefore a formidable against state and corporate power. When TOR and related systems are installed as a default, government and corporate power will be considerably diminished.
But it will not happen as long as the masses think they are not in danger. That is why harsh laws against file sharing is such great news. File sharers in France are now populating an Rshare derivative in order to circumvent the 3 strikes you're out laws governing the country. Now their efforts are helping encrypted anonymous communications, not the great powers, by adding one more undecipherable stream to the mix.
Well, I've maintained for decades now that "piracy" is actually a "normal" condition, and expected behavior, given the circumstances. There is so much intellectual property out there (with more being creating CONSTANTLY), it's simply a case where the creator of any one work just can't expect or demand ALL people who make use of their content to go through legal channels and purchase it at the asking price.
It seems to me that the desire to "maximize profits" (greed, essentially) is the only reason they keep trying to strike at anyone deemed to be a "key player" in redistributing copyrighted works illegally. But even if they succeeded in taking down ALL of the torrent sites that offered any copyrighted material and all of the web sites offering direct downloads of same, and even every ftp site they could locate .... it wouldn't change the individual's belief that it's "ok" to make a free copy of a piece of intellectual property here or there, as he/she wants one and has ready access to copy it.
I'm not so sure there's that much "educating" that still needs to be done here? Sure, SOME people probably don't really understand the issues at all .. but they're probably not the ones at the heart of the problem either, right?
It seems to me that most people have a pretty good (if only basic) understanding of what's going on. We all "get" that authors of works wish to be compensated fairly for them. The thing is though? We generally believe they already ARE getting fair compensation, DESPITE all the "rampant piracy" going on. Everyone I know who one could accuse of "pirating a lot of material" is also BUYING a lot of material. The people interested enough in music to download albums off Usenet or P2P sharing networks and build up a library ALSO tend to own hundreds of purchased CDs and go to concerts. The big "software pirates" often spend FAR more than the typical consumer on computer-related goods and often even have jobs in the industry where they make key decisions of purchasing of corporate software licenses. And I think as time goes on, you're going to find the same thing with the e-books.... People managing to pirate book content for their Kindles or other readers tend to be avid book readers who own a huge collection of dead-tree publications.
Personally? I tend to think the answer lies not in trying to leverage the legal system to "strong arm" more people into paying, but by offering quality content at a good price - and ACCEPTING the fact that it's "ok and normal" for there to be "one illegal copy in use for each one someone buys from you". Most of us have to put in 8 hours of work each and every day to keep bringing in a paycheck. Content creators have it better than most of us, because once they put in X amount of time on a work and complete it, it keeps generating money for them for a period of time far longer than the time-frame they actually spent creating it.
Just not their tracker indexing it.
The problem is how for people to find the Next Tracker Site. Google or other search engines would do it for now.
What should be created is a floating DNS run over a DHT type scheme so that it is possible to find an IP, or search for a file, and if desired both at the same time, from within popular browsers. Create a .dyn dynamic tld and create a crypto enabled way to keep people from hijacking domains ... I would say the hell with domains just make a domain query the result of a search including a reserved keyword like "domain", but that might be too slow unless you create a large local cache (not hard though, just use bittorrent to download updates - anyone can make a "dot in dot com").
If enough traffic is generated or it can be used to solve media distribution issues in general, like a soft-coded multicasting infrastructure, it may be possible to get ISPs to pick it up and for mainstream browsers to introduce it. Then there would be no difference between dynamic and old tlds except better throughput for .dyn ones.
There are already problems with titles disappearing after a short period of interest, we need an alternative floating, dynamically self configuring infrastructure that will also be supported by high bandwidth data centers.
Unless even more money is spent on infrastructure, frankly this is the only way to keep the net from exploding due to high bandwidth demand. Copyright issues are secondary and can be resolved via sanity. More distribution will be via the net, and new models will make it easier to find titles reliably and yes even bill for them. I myself would pay $1000 / yr for unlimited media at high speed with no hassles and freedom to fully leverage technology. I'd contribute another $1000 to making this happen with software or business development services.
IndexMe
you talk like a fag and your shit's all retarded !
GPL (and all related FOSS licenses) is the best shit in the world. For everything else I'll pay the artist their dues. Simple. Don't be a Cheap-skate.
If the judge has ruled that Mininova did not violate any laws, how does he have the legal foundation to order them to enforce a law that they have not broken?
In your haste to sell out, you also removed my copyrighted material that I posted myself. Thanks for "helping" an aspiring independent artist like me!
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
The sort of services that orgs like the RIAA provided were useful in an era where piracy was for profit and centralized. Today this sort of piracy is itself threatened by file sharing, which is not piracy. It's copyright infringement but it's not piracy. Pirates don't give things away for free.
The RIAA's business model is obsolete. The terminology they employ is wrong and the laws they're forced to ask for are insane, as they must be given the obsolescence and futility of controlling contemporary distribution channels.
Eventually, no matter what happens to the file sharing movement, the RIAA and et al will still go away. Their actual competitor in the market are the content producers, and this has always been the case. Piracy was just how they engendered fear of the open market and created a business for themselves.
As the actual content producers slowly but steadily wriggle free from the RIAA, MPAA and their counterparts they will find more money waiting out of their shadow through digital distribution then they ever knew under it. The RIAA is losing money for it's artists, and more and more are grasping that.
The legacy of the file sharing movement will not be that places like mininova replace central distribution with open and transparent peer networks. Who knows if that will ever happen in the mainstream. It's that we have set a bar for low cost, open access and free use of content at the user end point. That is the genie that has escaped, not the technology, it's the expectations of what is possible. How that is done, through bittorent, usenet, hulu or new technologies, will change but the expectations for whatever method is current, that is our victory. And we did it with out the corporations and for the most part, in spite of them. Mininova was part of this, as were and are all the past and present file sharing sites.
There will always be money in the production of new content. Right now we're simply in the middle of the change. We have a lot of past era content but new content will have to, more and more, adapt to new distribution methods and expectations. Expectations thankfully higher because of what file sharing as proven to be possible.