Author Archive for Niek

Lawsuit + 5 billion downloads

Hi everyone!

We would like to update you about the following matters.

Lawsuit

First of all, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN has announced to begin a full proceedings lawsuit (Dutch terminology: ‘bodemprocedure’) against Mininova. BREIN demands that we implement a filter on Mininova and take responsibility to prevent possible copyright infringements being taken place by our users. We discussed this matter with BREIN for a long time, but we couldn’t agree as their demands are both disproportionate and invalid.

The lawsuit will likely take several years and will take place in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Our case will be defended by Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm of KaZaA fame and VIta Zwaan. We will proceed to court with full confidence, and defend our unique position in the BitTorrent world and our current copyright policy. The court decision will be important for many other community-driven websites, like Google and YouTube.

As a side note: please know that we do not provide user information to third parties. For you as a Mininova user, nothing will change for now. More press coverage: English or Dutch.

5 billion downloads

Mininova LOLcatIn other news: we passed the mark of 5 billion (5,000,000,000) torrent downloads yesterday. The previous mark, 4 billion downloads, was reached in February this year. TorrentFreak has full coverage on this story.

Stay up-to-date

Do you like Mininova and want to stay up-to-date with the latest news and development? Besides checking out this blog, you can now get your latest news from our Facebook group and Twitter page. See you there and till the next time!

CBC joins Mininova, distributing TV show for free

Hi all!

Good news: Canada’s public broadcaster CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) joined Mininova’s recently launched Content Distribution service in order to distribute the new TV Show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.

The show, which premiered last Sunday, will be published annualy on Mininova one day after the TV airtime. The copies are of high quality (720×486 XViD) and come without any DRM restrictions. The choice for BitTorrent as distribution protocol is obvious: the distribution costs are practically zero.

Interested in the show? Check out CBC’s user page or subscribe to their RSS feed. Make sure to download an episode and leave your comments.

For more information, check the coverage of TorrentFreak on this story.

We’re very much looking forward to other broadcasters following CBC’s example. Stay tuned for updates!

4 billion downloads!

We’ve got great and exciting news! Mininova passed the 4 billion (4.000.000.000) torrent downloads mark today :)

It’s nice to see that the download counter continues to speed up: after reaching 3 billion downloads back in November 2007, we expected to reach the current number only in March or April.

For the sake of clarity: our download counter represents the number of times a .torrent file is downloaded from Mininova, this is not identical to the number of times a peer completes the download.

Some additional statistics for those who’re interested: our Alexa rank is currently 54, and Google Analytics shows that more than 32 million unique visitors used Mininova last month. These people together generate more than 510 million pageviews per month, which causes quite some pressure on our servers. We do whatever we can to minimize downtime and add extra servers when necessary.

Thanks to everyone who helped us to accomplish this! Special thanks go to our moderating team, who did and do a marvelous job.

As always: stay tuned, more big news is coming up very soon.

Press coverage: Slyck, ZeroPaid, AfterDawn, TechRadar, TechDigest, ITavisen (Norwegian), TorrentFreak, DSLreports

Cool new features + toolbar

Hi all,

We’re excited to announce several new (and in our opinion, very cool) features! Let’s kick off:

Streaming of distributed music torrents

Screenshot of music streaming

In close cooperation with the guys from BitLet, we added a “stream this music” button to torrents containing music (MP3/OGG Vorbis) files (example). This feature allows you to play the music right in your browser, without the need to download the content with a BitTorrent client. Note that this feature is only enabled on distributed (featured) torrents. Artists who’re interested in this feature: sign up for our free Content Distribution service.

Updating seeds/leechers statistics

Screenshot of statistics updating
This one was on top of the list of requested features. Our scraper system updates all torrent statistics several time a day. Many people think this is not enough, so we added an “update” button. With just one click, the statistics are up-to-date again. Note that this feature is only available for registered users, and there’s a time constraint per user and per torrent.

Tracking your comments

This is a nice feature for our active commenters. We already had the my torrents page, and now there’s also my comments. Did you forget where you left a comment? Just check out this page to find it back.

Mininova toolbar

Screenshot of the Mininova Toolbar
Last, but absolutely not least, we’re happy to announce the Mininova Toolbar. This toolbar (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, Windows/Linux/Mac) is the perfect way to stay in touch with Mininova. The toolbar features integrated RSS feeds, category browsing, quick shortcuts and of course torrent searching in your browser. Give it a try: the toolbar is absolutely spyware/adware free!

Do you miss some features? Or have you got an awesome idea? Please let us know, and we’ll look into it :)

Thanks!

Mininova’s third birthday!

Hi there!

It’s January 14, and that means the anniversary of Mininova! Today we celebrate that Mininova is 3 years old. :)

It’s been a very interesting time, especially the past year. Mininova showed a tremendous growth, we’re happy to see that we’re nowadays the most visited torrent site.

In April last year we won the domain dispute regarding www.mininova.com. This domain was used by a scammer and showed a fake website, but fortunately the judge agreed with us and the .com domain is now ours.

We’re very glad that we reached the 2 billion downloads milestone in June, followed by the 3 billion downloads one in November. It shouldn’t be too long before we reach the 4 billion downloads.

And that’s not all: we also launched a new video website last summer, called Snotr. This site is doing pretty well, and has already gained quite some regular visitors.

And last but not least, a few weeks ago we launched our new Content Distribution (CD) service, a.k.a featured torrents. The CD service is doing very well, more than 200 publishers are now actively using Mininova to share their content for free. We’re very excited to expand this service in the near future, please stay tuned for announcements.

As described above, the past year was a very interesting one, but we’re sure the year ahead will be even more exciting.

Thanks a lot for all your continued visits (as users), the excellent support of our moderating team, the cooperation from our hosters and everyone else who made this possible!

See you around!

– Niek, on behalf of the Mininova staff

Content Distribution + site enhancements

Hi there,

We’re very excited to announce the immediate availability of a new service on Mininova: Content Distribution (CD). In the past months, we developed a distribution service which we think will rock the world :D

The reason we developed this service is that we’re used getting quite some emails from (mainly indie) content producers. Many of those are interested in publishing their content on Mininova, but that’s not an easy job. Most content producers have no technical knowledge of P2P and BitTorrent at all. We’re changing this with the introduction of CD.

Using Mininova CD, producers can upload their content once to Mininova with literally a single click. We convert their uploads to dot-torrent files and seed the content from our seed servers. This content will be shown as “Featured torrents” on the front-page. The best part: the service is 100% free :)

To give you a better idea of the process, here are some screenshots showing the service:

Step 1: select the files and enter informationStep 2: upload the files

Finished: Mininova distributes the content

Quite some content producers already applied for CD, among others Red Band, Wil Deynes and Cruxy. BitTorrent Inc. also joined the party, they will distribute free games (and later movies) on Mininova.

Content producers reading this are invited to apply for an account at http://www.mininova.org/distribution.

But CD is not the only thing we worked on the past months. We’re also introducing some new features and enhancements on the website:

  • For uploaders, it’s now possible to edit their torrents up to 24 hours after the upload time.
  • We added a “thanks” button to the comment page, along of a country flag. Please use this button instead of posting a “thank you” comment.

The new

  • Personalized front-page. Under My settings, there’s now the option to shuffle (and disable) the categories at the front-page.

Personalized front-page

  • Also several layout changes in order to make the site more usable.

And last but not least: we gave our logo some nice Christmas attributes. Merry Christmas everyone and a happy new year!

More than 3 billion downloads!

We are pleased to announce that Mininova reached the milestone of 3 billion (3.000.000.000) torrent downloads today!

In January this year, Mininova reached 1 billion downloads and in June 2 billion downloads. This means we probably won’t reach the 4 billion downloads before the end of this year (as we hoped), but more likely in 4 or 5 months from now. The news-site TorrentFreak has more detailed info.

To avoid some confusion: we’re counting the number of times a .torrent file is downloaded from our website, not how often the data described in the .torrent file is completely downloaded by a peer.

We also reached new heights in the Alexa statistics, Mininova currently ranks as one of the 60 biggest websites in the world.

To cope with this growth, we added some server-power the past weeks. Tomorrow another new server will be installed. More statistics of our servers can be found on the Mininova graphs page.

This all is great news, which wouldn’t have happened without the support of you (the users) and our moderating team. Thanks a lot!

There’s some more great news coming up the next couple of days, so please stay tuned :)

About the MediaDefender leaked emails

Most people probably already read the news on TorrentFreak or another website: yesterday, someone published a torrent consisting of roughly 6.6 thousand leaked internal emails from MediaDefender.

For those who don’t know MediaDefender, it’s part of the company ARTISTdirect (OTC: ARTD) and their sole purpose is to disrupt P2P traffic. They try to achieve this ‘noble’ goal by creating fake (decoy) torrent files and spreading these on BitTorrent websites. Their server farm consists of thousands of servers they use to seed and track these fake files. These guys like to refer to their work as “content protection”.

Now that these internal MediaDefender mails are leaked, I want to share my thoughts on the whole thing. What’s interesting to see is that Mininova is more than once referred to as a difficult site to post fake files. Let’s see some quotes:

NEGATIVES: Attempted to upload to Mininova using 15 different IPs across various ranges. Was banned on every single attempt.

– Benny Mao, on uploading fakes to Mininova

These are very disappointing results given that people were here over the weekend. I understand that Mininova is moderating heavily, …

– Ben Ebert, on attempts to upload fake “Fantastic 4″ torrents

And I know Mininova is our toughest site to get onto.but we gotta think of something.

– Ben Ebert, on failing attempts to upload fakes

Somewhere in between collecting real torrents and posting decoys, post comments for these files on Piratebay, Mininova and Torrentspy.

– Pedro Cortez, in meeting notes

REMINDER: Next Fox High Priority project - Release July 27th: “The Simpson’s Movie”
Try to post to Mininova and Torrentspy by any means possible.

– Pedro Cortez, in other meeting notes

We can only be grateful for the many nice words from our friends at MediaDefender :) All thanks go to our great moderating team, who did (and do) great work.

Oh, and one last quote:

It’s slow. I would say on average 15-20 seconds to load a page.

– Benny Mao, on Mininova load time. We took this remark very serious and decided to take immediate action and added a new slave database server. Graphs of the new setup can be seen at our statistics page.

Stay tuned for updates!

Received mails and problem reports (NSFW language)

We did a few blog posts on mails and problem reports almost 2 years ago, so I thought it was time for an update :D

On an average day, our mail server receives ~650 incoming email messages. A large part of this is spam, the rest are regular messages (ranging from site suggestions to takedown notices).

As a regular visitor, you probably know that email is not the best way to contact us about torrent problems. That’s why we have the “problem reports” system: every torrent page features a “Report a problem” tab, where visitors can submit the issues they notice related to a torrent. Moderators watch the problem reports queue, and take action if necessary.

Most of the times the mails and reports we receive are useful, but sometimes you see the strangest messages. Here’s a compilation of the best (warning: NSFW language):

your website is very gay and will not let me hav my password as i put it when i created my account WHY NOT????

where is the pin nubmer to unzip the rar file?

Why is the creator of the Bill Maher torrent file so STUPID that they start the name of the file with a period?! Dammit! Get this clue: Files that start with a period are INVISIBLE on UNIX OSs!!! I am on Mac OS X and am sick of this moronic file naming. I am going to complain until this bozo problem is stopped.

hello please help me, i farted on the disc and it became rotten so i cleaned it with piss, then i shoved it into the ps2 but then my ps2 laser broke, what do i do, fart on it again?

pls view the contents of this movie. ther are 3 shadowlike people in a theater making commentaries while the movie is playing. i expected a good movie, but the sound of godzilola is drowned out by the commentaries who are watching the movie

oijioijojjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjiklpoiumnphnupn
hello 65895665 65rfui I 2387uthjds Am fdwuirhgsfjds encoding this akijhithjiorhigorjh data foihdgndj so plase read it kgjhidosskgsfdogljfd ok ediohgjhdfoighe it fuck up my computer oidhgodshgdsihgs because of corrupt data issuls

huge codec problem!

this down load is shit! it fucked my £2000 computer. i want to sue your cheap piece of fat jelly looking arse! thank you

Fuck this shit. The menus are in Spanish and everything else in english. Whoever uploaded this really fucked up. Whoever’s gonna download this is going to get fucked

dont download only trial versions. why put this shit on there.put real version not trials asshole!!!!!!!

NO HAVE SOUND!! NAO TEM AUDIOOOO

CD 1 is unburnable!

torrent says english, the language is japanese with english sub titles. tha anyway to the u/l ers but japanese is for the japanese. if you are going to put out a torrent and call it english then put it out in english

ASSHOLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hello i have found a realy big problem which will end up shuttingdown your web site and possibbly getting you arrested for a long time .Some reason people are putting torrents of movies on the web site that are not whot thay seem .My son downloaded the movie the simpsons movie but when it finished downloading it was not the simpsons but a xxx rated movie that has the rong movie title as the torrent name this is not the first time this has happend i will be reporting this to the ploice as the copywrite laws and rateings laws of this country are being broken in a revry sinicter way. I hope you are not sent to jail over this as xx movies are against the law here in Australia .I would not be so pissed of if the names of the movies where correct but this i believe is done deliberatly to get people to download xxrated movies without the user knowing what he has downloaded . I suggest you fix this peoblem quickly before you end up in jail

You take that album Roine Stolt -Wall Street Voodoo
off the site TODAY or I’ll use ALL my legal
connections to shut you down FOREVER !!!
I assure you I DO have connections to shut you down and get you in JAIL !!!
Sincerely
Roine Stolt -author .

Sometimes you have NO idea what people are talking about:

you guys obviously aren’t too clever because on some of the subscriptions you’ve set me up for contain YOUR IP ADDRESS. You guys must be as thick as you fucking look you bunch of cunts. (by the way all i have to do is ignore the messages so im not technically subscribed)

Some users aren’t too happy with our banners:

GET RID OF THE FUCKING BANNER AD FOR FUCKING TALKING SMILYS
I have faithfully used mininova for a year now downloading at least 15 things a day…
But i will never use it again nor will my group (another 30ish people with 8mbit connections same as me) if you dont get rid of this annoying shit
every fucking time i change tab my mouse goes over the stupid banner and it shouts out oh my god go away

If you do not promptly get rid of it we will stop downloading and start 24/7 DoS attacks on your host server

Fucking cheap bastards

And the same guy, after we tracked down and banned the ad (which accidently slipped through):

Hi Niek,
Thank you so very much for getting rid of those seriously annoying banner ads.
The new look site is awesome too.

Just wanted to say thanks and Happy Christmas dude
Peace
DsC

2 Billion Downloads!

Just 5 months ago we blogged about the 1 billion download milestone, and I’m very happy and excited to announce that we broke the 2 billion (2,000,000,000) torrent downloads mark today!

This is very good news, it means our site is growing exponential: the amount of total torrent downloads roughly doubles every half year. And more downloads means more exposure, so more content available on our website. There is also a story on TorrentFreak about this milestone.

I thought it would be nice to show a breakdown of the download numbers per category, so here is a graph:

Torrents category Percentage of total downloads
Anime 3.61%
Books 3.04%
Games 6.59%
Movies 17.89%
Music 21.21%
Pictures 0.53%
Software 5.61%
TV Shows 40.11%
Other 1.42%

This clearly shows that TV Shows content is more popular than ever, followed by Music and Movies.

Of course this is not the end, if the growth keeps continuing we might be able to reach the 4 billion mark by the end of this year! Watch out, Apple iTunes