Shocker: Mininova shuts down!

It looks like torrent crazy geeks across the world will have to look to another site to 'pirate' movies, software, games and songs, because Mininova has closed down as of today.

Mininova was the world's biggest torrent website, all torrents from the site have been removed except those that were uploaded through its content distribution service. The founders of the site were forced to pull the plug after they lost a civil dispute against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and were ordered to remove all infringing torrents from the site.

The shutdown of Mininova is more or less an end of an era that began five years ago. In the founders' blogpost announcing the termination of the site thousands of comments poured in from posters all over the world, expressing shock and sentiment. Back in December 2004 another site, named Supernova, which catered to BitTorrent freaks was shut down. It gave birth to a number of sister sites like Piratebay and Mininova, and the latter became the most successful of them all. Just a month after Supernova was killed, Mininova was founded in January 2005 by five Dutch students. The tech savvy students began the project as a hobby, but later turned it into a successful business that made millions of dollars.

As the copyright issues poured in, so did the lawsuits from the entertainment industries. Earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material. The court case began in June, and the verdict was in favor of Mininova. However, it was ordered that all torrents linking to copyrighted material be removed, or the founders would face 5 million euros as penalty.

The founders have complied with the court ruling, and as a result only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek stated in his blog. Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict.