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Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

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."

27 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Well, dang. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?

  2. Debate! by headkase · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Debate! by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The whole thing smells more and more like the old P&P RPG Paranoia. Everyone hates secret societies, everyone hates mutants, yet everyone is a mutant in a secret society.

      I worked for our version of the RIAA for a while (I didn't mean to, they were part of the bundle of companies I had to support). My moment of "wtf" came when one of their lawyers approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.

      My answer was "since you're suing people who know aynthing about flashing Nintendos or even do it, my answer has to be no". This is when he offered money...

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Debate! by ivoras · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      I'd rather look at the cause of this "issue" - i.e. *why* does it exist. And I'll offer an answer - because it is harder and harder to get rich quickly while staying legal. The fact that I download movies all the time didn't influence my moviegoing one bit - I still go out to the movies every week or two because of the experience and the company of friends - both of which suck over DIVX. My problem is that there usually isn't anything good out there to see. Some nights, we don't remember what we watched around 5 minutes after leaving the cinema! I doubt the problem is with a lack of quality writers or actors or directors - I think most of it comes from producers and other financiers trying to cram in special effects, political correctness and crowd-pleasing stories (especially endings) to try to maximize the profits, like art can be expressed by equations. I don't feel one bit bad about downloading "2012" but I watched Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen twice (just a recent example) and I have a hefty collection of (legal, bought) DVDs of good films and TV shows. My point is that that a significant part of the piracy issue (not all of it!) is the direct result of the fall in quality and resorting to formulaic "this script equals this much $$$" thinking on the part of producers.

      I'm sure the same thing goes for music.

      One other large thing is convenience - sometimes people just don't feel like going to the movies and it's easier to download the film right now and watch it than waiting months for it to come on DVDs, etc. It is human nature - the baby wants what it wants. There are surely more problems, but I have a feeling these two combined are the cause of over 50% of the piracy issues. Heck, solve the distribution issue (make it cheap and easy and at the same time worldwide as the cinema releases) and I'd bet that 40% of all piracy would simply disappear over night.

      --
      -- Sig down
    3. Re:Debate! by headkase · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I am doing something. See my signature. And I actually don't have anything to lose so I'm choosing to stick it to the man because I can. People can force change through virtue all that is needed is the appropriate vehicle. Slashdot almost gets there, see my signature for a vehicle-in-progress that would allow you to say fuck you in as neutral a setting as possible. Organization is the key. Individually we are relatively intelligent, collectively we are a juggernaut. All we need is the mechanism to arrive at fair truth. What policy maker will risk flying in the face of that? They'd be taken to the nearest tree and hanged. Figuratively of course, we are a democracy.

      --
      Shh.
    4. Re:Debate! by headkase · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You have hit the nail right on the head. Industry in the form of the RIAA and MPAA is not meeting the needs of their customers. I want to download all my movies with none of that idiotic DRM, I want a public domain so that others can pick up the ball and continue where the current holder doesn't, I want many more things as well. But RIAA and MPAA members only want one thing: money. How they get it is control and they are playing a maximization game. What they fail to realize is that there are other agents out there and they have pissed some of us off. They shouldn't have pissed me off because I have nothing better to do than snipe at them all day all over the web wherever appropriate.

      --
      Shh.
    5. Re:Debate! by MachDelta · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Q:Could you call 911 since I am about to go into cardiac arrest?
      A:No

      Depending on where you live, that answer may technically be illegal. Plenty of countries and a few states (oh and Quebec too) have a "Duty to rescue" law which, in a nutshell, states that you must attempt to assist an individual in peril provided that it doesn't also put your life at risk. At the very least, you would be expected to call for help.

      It's all semantics though. 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.

    6. Re:Debate! by Znork · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There is a place for copyright

      I used to think that, but I don't any more. Any monopolies handed out by the government and whose cost is borne by the public and the distributed economy will be treated as of interest for the receiving stakeholders only, and thus will permanently expand as the paying parties will not be represented in discussions around the issue. See the claims about IP jobs 'lost' to piracy, yet where are the discussions about jobs among plumbers, pizzamakers or other branches of the economy when copyright shifts money and resources from one part of the economy to the other? Are those branches represented when it's arbitrarily decided that they should be deprived of resources in favour of media industries? Copyright creates no resources, it merely redistributes them.

      So no, there is no place for copyright. Any honest industry or creators support scheme requires that it be managed within the normal budget of governments and, like any other redistribution scheme, have its benefits weighed against its costs, and accounted for to the public. No other government scheme has anywhere close to as bad efficiency of copyright; if any other program had less than 5% of funding going to the actual intended beneficiaries there'd be an uproar.

      That's not to say there can't be reasonable schemes for encouraging creativity; the easiest would simply be mandatory licensing which dispenses of any contracts no matter what outlet or reproduction, and simply requires a percentage (50-75%, for example) of any revenue derived from the copying to be paid to the creators (via a public agency, such as the IRS, not through private entities like in radio, and modulated by policy). Then it would also be easy to manage reasonable cost/benefit levels (should there be a ceiling on payouts and the rest spread along the long tail to encourage more production, for example, how many years of payout is the optimum to keep creative material flowing, etc).

      Boycotting is not enough, the corrosive effect of corruption on politics is too strong, and politically it's only used to claim that anyone boycotting is pirating anyway. But it's certainly a right thing to do; paying for anything from the RIAA/MPAA corps means supporting the type of corruption going on as ACTA and other back-room deals, which I find utterly unacceptable by now.

    7. Re:Debate! by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Let's see.

      Imagine that other human being destroyed your life and put you in prison for five years.

      How about, your children were sexually abused while in child protective services and one committed suicide.

      Of course, if the law requires that I go get help, I'd have

      to

      go
      .
      .
      .
      get
      .
      .
      .
      help
      .
      .
      .
      as
      .
      .
      fast
      .
      .
      .
      .
      as
      .
      .
      .
      .
      possible.

      I've done the non-vengeance thing and I've done the vengeance thing and let me tell you, vengeance was damn sweet and I have no regrets. It's the only thing that made me smile now and then for a couple years while I recovered back to human.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    8. Re:Debate! by headkase · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'll give you some background. Where I live, Newfoundland, Canada, there is a province wide radio station: same broadcast for everyone. They have a 1-800 number you can call into. It is a debating forum at heart, it is called Open Line. It has a very balanced and intelligent moderator running the show for people to engage with. It is insanely popular here. Everyone listens to it and enough people call into it that it has built its own momentum for issues of the day. People call in and address what pisses them off. Politicians also call in all the time when they get sniped to refute or otherwise manage the issue. When a politician, or policy maker, calls they are put right through to address the issue. Everyone else gets in a queue but eventually does get their say (1-800 number..). This program enables a feedback mechanism that works extremely well here. Perhaps our history and culture explains how it came to be established. In the 1990's our primary industry, fishing, collapsed as the stocks were not properly managed from a government and citizen perspective. This sowed the seeds of doubt and lead people to question authority. As the inertia grew more people jumped on the band-wagon. As a result now that this singular institution is established in our culture our government functions better because of it. This is a lesson that can be drawn from us. It deserves to be shamelessly copied, my signature proposes implementing it on the web. I'm not a good mechanic however so I am asking for your help - please add your opinion to it.

      --
      Shh.
    9. Re:Debate! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I'm sure a multipronged effort forcing ISPs to log packets and rat out people going to certain sites, chips on computers to force "trusted computing" down everyone's throats, prison terms that are longer than violent crimes for noncommercial infringement, more DMCA restrictions to clamp down on cracks, and more Draconian DRM would put a stop to piracy.

      Gee, isn't all this in the leaked ACTA law?

      As of now, piracy may be an issue on PCs, but remember: The pirates are losing. HD satellite has yet to be cracked. Same with HDCP. Blu-Ray is an arms race between Slysoft, cracking title by title, and the CSS wonks. The PS3 is has shown to be hackproof going on three years. The XBox 360 might have been cracked, but cracked boxes get tossed off of XBL fast. Even on the PC, StarForce games have yet to be cracked. Splinter Cell made almost 4 years ago still requires you to physically yank out IDE controller cables in order to get the "patch" to run.

      Even with torrents, there are very few solid sites to go and find clean torrents, unless you are lucky enough to be in the zero day scene already and have private tracker access. A number of "torrent" sites just point you to some site that asks for your name and credit card, just like the old days of "Insta-DDL here" where the only thing available by "DDL" was drive-by malware.

      It may not be tomorrow that it will only be a select few (the same people who would have +o on a constant basis #warez on efnet in bygone times) that have the ability to use a pirated version of the next Adobe CS15 suite, but that day is coming up. Of course, once piracy is pushed to the fringes, don't expect price drops anytime soon. I'm sure Microsoft Office will go back to the pricing levels it was at in the early versions ($2000 a copy).

    10. Re:Debate! by bzipitidoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      We should replace copyrights and patents with some other system. Reforming it by measures such as reducing monopoly lengths to sane amounts, reducing the scope of the monopolies, and spelling out what can be copyrighted doesn't go far enough. The entire notion of owning an idea is fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a legal foundation that supports this inherently ridiculous notion, vested interests will continually seek to expand it, and engage in rent seeking, and destructive actions such as threats, actual lawsuits, gaming of the justice system, lobbying against the public interest, blackmail, barratry, suppression, deliberate crippling of devices, and censorship. And insincere advertising and publicity campaigns that play us for suckers over "fairness" for the poor starving inventors and artists. Such arguments are like debating health care for slaves, without getting to the meat of that issue, that slavery should not exist. "If you don't buy enough cotton, our slaves will go hungry!" Do note that I favor the continued existence of trademarks, and oppose plagiarism.

      The existence of intellectual property laws distorts more than markets, it warps how society thinks. Ideas are incredibly overvalued, and people behave idiotically over the matter, keeping "valuable" info secret, and engaging in mad scrambles to stake out territory, as if clear lines can be drawn around an idea, as if any idea could be independent of all other ideas, and for fear of somehow losing out. It's an ongoing land rush like Oklahoma had when it was first opened, only there is no land to be grabbed, and no turf to defend but for the artificial turf created by the legal system, and no possible way to stop trespassing whether deliberate or accidental, or even know where the lines are, and so whether a trespass has occurred. When it must be figured out, has to be done on a case by case basis with long, expensive court battles, and even that process often gets it wrong. And it's tough to debate when some people refuse even to be civil about it and instantly scream "socialism" or "communism" as if copyrights and patents were the only possible way to handle art and science in a capitalist system. Removing all basis would, I feel, be the only way to really resolve things once and for all. An example of warped thinking was an experience I had with a collectible card game. At a tournament, I attempted to use proxies. I did indeed have the actual cards, but the other players still objected. Why? I wish I'd buttonholed a few of them and pinned them against the wall until they could elucidate just exactly why, but the most coherent objection I heard was that if they allowed the proxies it would somehow made their collection of real cards less valuable. I suspect some didn't really object in principle, they were simply seizing upon it as a pretext to cause me difficulties in hopes of improving their changes against me, perhaps by forcing me to play without the proxies. No one would object to home made chess pieces on such grounds, why the fuss over the collectible cards?

      The details of the replacement system would have to be worked out, but the basic idea is, in a word, Patronage. Centuries ago there were no intellectual property laws, and we nevertheless advanced. We might not want to return to that state of affairs, we might wish to encourage art and science more than they are already inherently encouraged-- an useful invention is its own reward, in proportion to its usefulness-- and so want some system to achieve that, but in a more inclusive, open way that cannot be so easily turned against its purpose or misused for entirely unrelated purposes, as has happened with the current messy system. Remember that the patent system at the least is intended to be a bargain in which the inventor goes public in exchange for compensation, which, unfortunately, takes the form of protection from competition. A deal that gives inventors incentive to publish is good, but it is not so valuable that we should cripple ourselves to secure it. Patents are like offering to sell your left foot to buy a shoe.

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
  3. Re:Another site will replace it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Agreed. The only reason why it is so difficult is because the process takes so long. You can get a new site up in 2 hours, and after 2 days have the word spread around the world. Until the law can match that speed of taking the sites down, they will always be ahead. Conventional methods of *any sort* really haven't proven useful when applied to the Internet. Music and movie industries have to adapt, and so will countries, laws, and their law enforcement branches. Luckily for the pirates they are slow to act.

  4. well this sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    maybe gnutella can save us like it did after napster went down the drain. this really bites, though. how many major indexers are left?

  5. Not too sorry to see Mininova die by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
  6. Re:Another site will replace it. by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't know, quality of (public) torrent sites has been on the decline for a while. Now with demonoid still down, mininova dead and the piratebay in limbo what will replace them ? This feels like after Napster when the last of the replacements like audiogalaxy were running out of steam.

    --
    If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
  7. Penalizing legal uses? by Oshawapilot · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  8. I'm curious... by naasking · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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.
  9. Not necessarily by Mathinker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > 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?

  10. Re:i wonder... by click2005 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1,320,433 according to Google's cache.

    --
    I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
  11. Time to move to Freenet... by FreenetFan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Time to move to Freenet... by FlyingGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It will work, for a while.

      Then it will suffer that same fate as usenet did with massive amounts of spam and drive the coasts of keeping it up and running until it collapses under it's own weight, much like usenet did.

      Distributed systems work well when they are controlled or at least carefully health monitored.

      Bandwidth isn't free and never will be and so someone or some group of people must bear the costs and at some point it will be like usenet and become prohibitively expensive because you are not just moving text ( as was initially envisioned by usenet ( with some minor binary file movement ) you are moving massive amounts of data in the form of large binaries..

      As long as Freenet stays in the background noise it will survive, after that it will be shutdown, not by any central authority, but by the users themselves.

      If TPB had been quiet, under the radar ( picked a different name ) and not been thumbing their noses at the rest of the world they might still be there.

      --
      Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
    2. Re:Time to move to Freenet... by FreenetFan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Freenet has already thought of those problems you describe!

      Usenet was fairly centralized, but Freenet works in a similar way to Bittorrents in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes. And it is totally decentralized so there are no costs other than your computer and internet connection, which you have already. You can configure how much bandwidth to allocate to Freenet, and it doesn't require excessive amounts.

      And there are spam-resistant forums on Freenet. Instead of messages going to a central place, users publish their own messages to their own place, and other users pick them up from there. So if someone spams, you just don't bother picking up their messages. There is also a web of trust so spammers can be identified collaboratively rather than each person having to flag spammers separately. There are some extra tricks to speed it up and enable it to scale, but it seems to work pretty well in practice.

      Freenet's old message forum (Frost) is spammable, but the new ones are called Freenet Message System (FMS) and Freetalk, and they are highly spam resistant.

      Freenet is designed from the ground up to assume a minority of its users will be malicious, and takes steps to allow for that. Data flows around in encrypted chunks of 32kB and these could be small messages or large binaries. You really should try out Freenet, it covers all the objections you made.

      The only real threat to Freenet is a legal one, of governments making it illegal or blocking its traffic. But even then it has a Darknet mode, where you only connect to trusted friends, and the UDP traffic is designed to be difficult to fingerprint. If it comes to it, the next step would be steganography, where Freenet traffic is disguised as some other form of traffic.

  12. Tip of the iceberg by Mathinker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You've made a good start, but forgotten all the rest of the bad things of copyright law.

    • Ridiculous statutory damages.
    • Fair use is relatively useless because its boundaries are only prescribed by the courts, not by copyright law itself. The law itself should clearly define a "safe" area for fair use of various types of works (but not limit fair use to that definition, only).
    • It is impossible to check if what you think is an original creation is actually just a derived work, since there are no registration requirements for copyrighted works. If your creation turns out to be a derived work, you shouldn't be liable for unreasonable damages.
    • Currently accepted usage of most copyrighted works requires copying them (to various players/devices, between locations within your house, to offsite backup) yet this copying is actually illegal (since copyright law was designed in an era when copying was difficult and blatantly infringing).
    • Copyright law varies widely from country to country but the net is international in nature.
    • Copyright law has expanded to restrict and criminalize behavior which only enables others to infringe on copyright, and the extent of this expansion is only defined by the courts, enabling litigation-happy companies to effectively extort money from a section of the public which they would struggle to actually prove guilty. But lack of due diligence in pursuing copyright claims is not effectively punished.
  13. Re:i wonder... by Mr2001 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Pirates already have an entitlement complex.

    No, you've got it backwards.

    Copyright holders have an entitlement complex: they expect to get paid over and over in the future for work they did decades in the past. They think one big hit entitles them to a free ride for the rest of their lives, and they think they're entitled to tell everyone else what they can or can't do with their own property.

    Pirates only want to be able to freely exchange information. The only "entitlement" a pirate feels is the right to communicate. Pirates don't expect other people to change their behavior to benefit pirates; copyright holders do expect other people to change their behavior to benefit copyright holders.

    --
    Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
  14. Re:Hard to find good music by Sirusjr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thats the problem, they don't have any good way to try before you buy. Best thing I get is 20 second samples in TERRIBLE quality on amazon. That isn't going to give me a very good idea what I want. Plus I don't even get samples when importing from Japan but of course you didn't even bother to address my main points.

  15. Did I miss something? by firesyde424 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?