Legendary Mininova Torrent Portal Is Shutting Down For Good
Mininova, which was once one of the largest sites offering torrents of copyrighted material, announced yesterday that it was shutting down after 13 years of existence. The site’s forum will close next week followed by the rest of the site a month later.
“On April 4th, 2017 Mininova.org will be shutting down,” the message on the Mininova homepage reads. “After this date, content distribution torrents will no longer be seeded. Uploaders are advised to make copies of their content.”
The site was founded in 2004 in the Netherlands and was launched in January 2005 as a successor to Suprnova.org torrent portal, which went offline at the end of 2004 following legal difficulties.
Mininova soon became the most successful torrent portal that fulfilled the public’s increasing demands for torrents and later became the undisputed leader among all torrenting sites.
However, in May 2009, the Dutch copyright enforcement organization BREIN started a civil procedure against Mininova demanding that Mininova filter torrent files pointing to copyrighted works. In December 2009, Mininova lost a trial with copyright owners and it was compelled to remove all infringing torrents, leaving the site barren of any content.
The site remained online but instead of allowing everyone to upload content, Mininova became one of the first fully legal torrent portals that permitted only pre-approved publishers to submit files.
Mininova appealed against the court ruling, and in December 2010 reported that a settlement had been reached under which Mininova paid BREIN an undisclosed amount of money, ending the lawsuit.
Following Mininova’s demise, The Pirate Bay rose to prominence, followed by new players such as KickassTorrents, and now by RARBG and ExtraTorrent.
Many filmmakers, documentarians, music artists, and software makers used the site to launch products to a large user base, even if the site had slowly fallen in Alexa’s traffic rankings from the Top 100 to the Top 50K.
Now, the site will shut down for good even after “going legal” for more than seven years.
“All goods things come to an end, and after more than 12 years we think it’s a good time to shut down the site which has been running at a loss for some years,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.
For instance, the site’s users have always been very grateful, and there were also several artists who thanked the site’s operators for providing them a great promotional tool.
“The support from our users was especially amazing to experience, millions of people used the site on a daily basis and we got many emails each day – ranging from a simple ‘thank you’ to some extensive story how a specific upload made their day,” Niek says.
“The feedback from artists was great to see as well, many thanked us for promoting their content, as some of them broke through and signed with labels as a result,” he adds.
“Overall we’re happy that we have been a part of the history of the Internet,” Niek concludes. “We want to thank everybody who has been around and supported us through the times! Without our users, there would have been no Mininova. So THANK YOU!”
