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A Dutch court ruled in August 2009 that Mininova must remove all torrents that could lead a user to infringing material. The order was carried out in November, when all torrents, save for those associated with the Content Distribution Network, were removed. It was little surprise that Mininova’s traffic plummeted. The question was how far Mininova would fall, and if the Dutch based company would ever be heard from again.
But Mininova is a special breed of BitTorrent site. Not nearly as belligerent as The Pirate Bay, the entertainment industry never sought to annihilate this BitTorrent search engine. MiniNova, unlike its brethren, is seen as a moderate in the online copyright wars; a website that if given the chance, could succeed as a legitimate enterprise. Although BREIN was Mininova’s adversary in court, their web server was never raided, nor was there any demand to shut the website down – the only demand that BREIN had was to prevent the distribution of torrents that pointed to copyrighted material.
A BitTorrent website that doesn’t point to copyrighted material is unworthy, so we’re often lead to believe. After all, BitTorrent is only used for unauthorized distribution, with little value for anything else, right? Well here we are, nearly 3 months since the radical change took place over at Mininova. But so far Mininova.org still works and it seems the doom and gloom scenario never played out. What’s happening here – after all, how can a non-infringing BitTorrent site last so long?
A quick glance at Alexa.com, for what it’s worth, indicates two very important pieces of information and got our curiosity going: 1) traffic took a nosedive after November, and 2) the drop appears to have been arrested. All Mininova.org had going for it after November 2009 was the CDN, its lively forum, and its name. Was this enough to carry the BitTorrent search engine through the most turbulent era of Mininova’s life?
To answer that question, we spoke with Erik Dubbelboer, President of Mininova. We started with the obvious – what happened to Mininova’s traffic after the index was removed. Indeed Alexa was telling the truth, and Mininova’s traffic sunk – but it wasn't tragic.
“Mininova’s traffic dropped quite a bit…somewhere around 75%,” Erik told Slyck.com. “This was something we expected with the huge decrease of torrents in our index.”
Date: 2010-02-15 |