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

On July 10, 2009 the movie Brüno will be released in cinemas worldwide. Actor Sacha Baron Cohen (of Ali G and Borat fame) will play yet another funny character - if you liked his previous appearances, you’ll love this one!

Digg Dialogg is doing an interview with Brüno next week, and we will post the interview on June 30 here on Mininova. That’s not all: you can submit your questions to Bruno, and the top rated questions will be asked!

That’s it for now - keep watching Mininova on June 30!

–update–
The interview with Brüno has been published.

Cheers, The Mininova staff

Today was the courtroom seating of our trial with BREIN. It was a very interesting day. The verdict is scheduled for the 15th of July.

Regards,

The Mininova staff

The upcoming court trial with BREIN, which was planned on Wednesday May 20th, has been postponed until Tuesday June 2nd, at 13:00 hours. The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case.

We would like to thank the parties involved for their cooperation in this postponement.

Regards,

The Mininova staff

Here at Mininova we are working continuously on ways to improve our platform. One example is our content distribution service, where we offer producers and artists a way to expose and share their work with BitTorrent users.

Today, we decided to extend our platform and run a trial with content recognition. This basically means that likely infringing video files referred to by torrents are checked by a third party content recognition system. If the system finds that the file corresponds to unauthorized content, we remove and block the torrent that refers to this file on Mininova.

We hope that this system will make it easier for copyright owners to remove torrents that refer to infringing content from Mininova, while still offering the best platform to our users.

Cheers!

The Mininova staff

As you might have noticed there haven’t been any new Content Distribution torrents on the frontpage for a week. This was due to a problem in the storage backend of our service. The problem has been fixed today, so Content Distribution users should be able to distribute all their new release again.

Sorry for the inconvenience this problem might have caused,

The Mininova Staff

It has been a while since Mininova has undergone some changes, but today we’re releasing some new features, including:

• A layout update, the top advertisement banner is gone.
• An improved search field with the possibility to restrict your search to a specific category.
• The search results are also improved, including the highlighting of the results (example).
• New buttons on several pages (thanks to a technique described by Google developer Douglas Bowman).
• Instead of creating a torrent file and seeding your data, you can now use VIPeers for uploading. VIPeers is a free service that will create a torrent file, seed your content and send you back to the Mininova upload page, where you can fill in the details.
• “Remember me” checkbox on the login page, the possibility to remain logged in, even when you quit your browser and connect via another Internet network. Although this may be very useful, do not use this option on a public computer (in a library or so).
• New servers to keep up with the growing number of visitors. These servers will be installed in a few days.
• Some bug fixes.
• We moved to a new office location in downtown Utrecht, The Netherlands. We used to rent a small office space at Regus, but we had a very bad experience (note to startups: do NOT rent at Regus! They will try to nail you with the agreement). We are happy with our new office inside a classical building alongside the city canal. See our contact page for more information. We’ll put up some more pictures on Picasa.

We hope you will enjoy these changes! Let us know if you experience any problems.

Free distribution channel for producers and artists successful

Mininova Content Distribution welcomes 1000th participant

Today, BitTorrent platform Mininova welcomes the 1000th professional user of its Content Distribution service. This service enables producers and artists to distribute their work in a simple way and free of charge through the website www.mininova.org.

Erik Dubbelboer, co-founder of Mininova: “Content Distribution enables producers and artists to bring their work to the attention of the public, free of charge. It’s the perfect solution for bands that don’t have the means to bring out a record yet. Since the launch in 2007, an average of three participants a day have registered.” Mininova offers a platform on the Internet for the exchange of information by users through BitTorrent technology.

Success in the Netherlands and abroad
In 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided to offer a television series for free by using Content Distribution. The popular Dutch band ‘Silence is Sexy’ also decided to use this system in 2008, and distributed an entire album for free. The band recently won the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so.

Thirty kilometers of CDs
Dubbelboer: “Through Content Distribution, we have already had about 5.800 uploads and 15 million downloads. That means some 40.000 downloads a day. The amount of data that has been downloaded equals a pile of CDs of about 30 kilometers high!” For 2009, Mininova is expecting an explosive growth in the number of professional users of its Content Distribution service.

For access to Mininova Content Distribution: www.mininova.org/apply

It’s January 14, and that means we’re celebrating Mininova’s fourth birthday today!

The past year was a very interesting year: we saw the number of Content Distribution users/producers grow to more than 1000. The total number of downloads nearly doubled this year and reached 7 billion last week. We’re now serving 10+ million (unique) downloads a day, and handling over 8 million daily search queries. Some more stats: in December we counted 44.7 million unique users who generated 683.7 million pageviews on Mininova.

Of course we made a bunch of improvements to Mininova on our other website, Snotr. We moved our server, got sued, and counted billions of downloads. Overall, a very busy year, which would have never been possible without our dedicated team of moderators: thank you!

We are excited about the coming year and its challenges: please stay tuned for some important announcements in the coming months.

Cheers! The Mininova team

Almost 4 months ago, we wrote that the Dutch indie band Silence is Sexy joined Mininova to distribute their full album for free. Their album This Ain’t Hollywood has been downloaded by almost 15 thousand users using the Mininova Content Distribution service.

Due to this success, the band has been nominated for the Interactive Award 2009. We think that every band that uses torrents as a promotion tool deserves an award, so please hit 5 stars and vote for them on the website.

That’s it for now, please stay tuned for more updates soon!

Update: Silence is Sexy won the award! More info on their blog.