In January 2008, a working group was installed with the goal to evaluate copyright laws. The working group consists of four members of the Dutch parliament. Two weeks ago, the working group published a report with the name Auteursrechten. Een rapport (’Copyright – a report’). The report includes several recommendations related to reforming copyright laws.

Unfortunately the report includes several factually incorrect assumptions related to Mininova, among which:

• That Mininova refuses to remove torrent files after a complaint has been filed
• That Mininova adds ‘reviews’ to torrent files uploaded by users
• That Mininova pro-actively removes torrents that refer to ‘incorrect content (e.g. porn)’

Besides these factual errors, the report also implies that all torrents on Mininova refer to copyrighted material, that Mininova hosts the content itself, and that Mininova profits from distributing these torrents.

We are very displeased with the fact that the working group didn’t contact us prior to releasing this report, or even took a look at mininova.org. If they had done so, they would’ve seen that we offer a copyright policy service for content owners for years and that we work closely with the content industry.

We demand that the spreading of false information related to Mininova will be stopped. In addition, we demand that the working group removes the name Mininova from the report and places a rectification on the website of the Dutch parliament and in several national newspapers. If these demands are not met, we’ll consider legal steps. To our surprise and nuisance the working group refuses to respond to the essence of the claim, being the factual errors about us and our services.

That’s it for now, stay tuned for updates!

- The Mininova staff

More and more more artists are discovering the benefits of our free Content Distribution (CD) service. Silence is Sexy is the first Dutch rock band to release their complete new album this way. ‘This Ain’t Hollywood’ is a must-download if you are into bands like Radiohead, Editors, Coldplay and Interpol.

An increasing number of music producers see that giving away their content for free is the right way to build a fan-base. These producers are often using Mininova CD to distribute their content to a broad audience. Nowadays more than 750 publishers are actively using Mininova CD to publish content.

By the way, the Silence is Sexy’s first album is also available at our Content Distribution service. We hope a lot more artists will follow this example!

Till next time – the Mininova staff

Even though some of us are on holiday we are still working to improve our websites. Here are some features that we have just put live.

Updates for Snotr:

Timelinks

It is now possible to link to a specific time within a movie using the simple minutes:seconds format.

Quotes

You can now quote other comments using the #number format.

Flash 9
The Snotr player has been rewritten to Flash 9 so we can support full screen (currently available through right clicking) and HD content.

Improved seeking
It is now possible to seek to a point in the file that isn’t loaded yet.
 

Updates for Mininova:

My Bookmarks
http://www.mininova.org/my/bookmarks is now sortable.

Torrents per tracker
You can now view all torrents from a specific tracker, for example: http://www.mininova.org/tracker/17188. Links to trackers can be found on the torrent details pages.

Improved searching
Searching using quotes (”") and excluding words (-) has now been improved.

On another note, Sphinx, used for Mininova search, is awarded for the SourceForge 2008 Community Choice Awards.

FTP Uploads

Content Distribution users are now able to use FTP to upload their content. This way they can upload files bigger then 1GB.

Automatic Extracting
CD uploads using .zip or .rar archives are now automatically extracted.
 

As always, we would like to hear your suggestions and ideas for both sites. Please comment on this blog post to share your thoughts.

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!

Nowadays, there are quite some projects and extensions to add BitTorrent capabilities to browsers, so I figured it’s time for a round-up:

Opera
Opera was the first browser to support the BitTorrent protocol. Their BT support is quite solid, but not very advanced and doesn’t support some well-known BT extensions. In short: nice for new users, but not for regular downloaders.
Pros: Nicely integrated, multi-platform.
Cons: No advanced features (missing DHT, peer exchange, encrypted transfers), not open source.

BitFox
BitFox is a quite new extension for Firefox, made by the student Joshua Hendo. The backend of the extension is based on Rasterbar’s libtorrent, so it supports quite some advanced BT features. The project is in a VERY early stage of development, and can only be obtained from SVN, so I haven’t tested it yet.
Pros: Open source, using libtorrent, so a quite solid backend (including DHT).
Cons: Not usable yet, early stage of development, seems to run only on Windows & Linux.

FireStorm
FireStorm is quite similar to BitFox, it’s an extension for Firefox and still in pre-alpha development stage. They use the Mainline client as a basis, so they will probably support most BT extensions/features.
Pros: Open source, using the Mainline reference client as a backend.
Cons: In pre-alpha development stage, not usable yet, interface is quite ugly.

FoxTorrent
FoxTorrent is a project of the company Red Swoosh/Akamai, these guys have the funding and expertise to build a nice Firefox extension. This extension isn’t that well integrated in Firefox, clicking a torrent basically opens a webpage to the webinterface of an external application. The advantage is that closing your browser doesn’t stop the torrents from downloading.
Pros: Open source, torrent streaming/progressive downloading support, continue downloading even when browser is closed.
Cons: Not very well integrated in Firefox, no advanced features (missing port mapping, DHT, peer exchange, encrypted transfers).

AllPeers
AllPeers is also funded by a company, so you would expect a nice client. The whole interface looks very nice and clean, but they’re more focussed towards sharing URL’s/images/etc than downloading torrents. In the current stable version (0.60), there is not an option to download a regular torrent. They do have a My Torrents tab in the beta version though.
Pros: Clean and professional interface, also available as a bundle with FireFox
Cons: Not open source, no regular torrent support (yet), no advanced features (missing port mapping, DHT, peer exchance, encrypted transfers)

Wyzo/FireTorrent
Wyzo/FireTorrent is very new, they released their first public version a week ago. The difference between the two is that FireTorrent is a BitTorrent extension for Firefox, while Wyzo is a full-featured customized Firefox browser including the FireTorrent extension. These guys managed to integrate BitTorrent support seamlessly in the Firefox download manager. FireTorrent also has the most advanced BT features of all the projects mentioned here. The Wyzo browser has some cool advantages over Firefox, like direct searching on social sharing networks (including Mininova) and Alexa/Pagerank integration.
Pros: Seamless Firefox integration, available as a bundle with Firefox (Wyzo), has all advanced features (including port mapping, DHT, encryption, peer exchange, STUNT).
Cons: Not open source, Mac/Linux version not out yet – will be released in a few weeks

Conclusion
Of all the projects reviewed above, I think Wyzo has the most potential. This browser supports all the nice BT features/extensions and makes downloading via BitTorrent as easy as a regular HTTP download. Does Wyzo beat the “good old” µTorrent and Azureus? Probably not, but I will definitely recommend new BitTorrent users to install this browser.

References
Our friends at TorrentFreak have more background information on some of these projects: BitFox, FireStorm, FoxTorrent, AllPeers, Wyzo/FireTorrent.

And here is a graph containing searches on mininova for specific languages:

(languages not in the graph got even less searches)

The conclusion I take from these graphs is that French people only want to watch/play things which are french. Is this because they don’t understand English?

I really don’t understand this. I always hate it to see stuff which has voice-over in my own language. Especially comedies, it almost always ruins the jokes.

(oh and could someone translate this to French so they can also read this

Edit: Eriks intention was not to offend French people, the post above is simply an observation of the search queries with his own opinion. Of course we do not dislike you, French people, at all Thanks for understanding – Niek

Edit: As Niek said, it was not my intention to offend the french (I don’t get why some people got offended).
I don’t know why people think this but I’m not from america and yes I have learned french at my school (long time ago so I’m not that good at it anymore).

Karine: I don’t download french movies because I can’t fully understand them if they speak to fast. I always download english stuff even though that is not my native language.

Barraka: I counted the searches which contained the word “french” and the other languages.

- Erik