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

In 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!

As many of you noticed, Mininova experienced a massive blackout this week. The problems begun when the hard disk of our load-balancer (running LVS) started having issues (random freezes and crashes). When attempting to fix these issues, our hosting company found some other problems and were unable to start the server up again. Combined with the fact that we’re now in the midst of two successive holidays in The Netherlands, this all resulted in an extensive downtime of Mininova.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience you might have experienced. We are still investigating the problems, and will do our utmost to prevent similar issues in the future.

Thank you for your continued support!

– The Mininova staff

Update: news coverage by TorrentFreak.

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!

Here’s a small blog post to keep you all up to date on our latest developments:

Video streaming

The coming weeks Mininova together with The Tribler team will be starting a closed beta for Tribler’s new video streaming software. The software is developed by the The Tribler team at the Technical University of Delft/Netherlands.

The first beta release of this software will be invitation-only for a small group of Mininova members. Because of various reasons it will only work with Featured torrents. Some statistics will be gathered by the application, but no personal information will be included in these reports. In addition, the application is open source so everybody can exactly see what is going on.

We are looking for people who would like to be in the first testing group who test the software, report suggestions and bugs you find. Please reply in this topic if you want to participate in this closed beta.

Upcoming changes

For people who are wondering what else we have been working on and what the future might hold. We are…

• …still improving our funny-videos website Snotr
• …working on some changes of the front-page to allow for better promotion of the featured torrents
• …making Mininova faster by optimizing things like he source code, database and hardware
• …thinking about improving the design of Mininova. This is actually a point were everyone can help by suggesting your improvements in this new sub-forum: Feature requests & Design suggestions

Thanks for your attention, and as always: stay tuned for updates!

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

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

Streaming of distributed music torrents

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

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

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!

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

At the start of this new year we would like to bring something to everyones attention. Steal This Film 2 has finally been released. This part has some very interesting views on file sharing and is much more from a neutral point of view. On the website you can check the League of Noble Peers’s Next Project and even help them by donating.

The movie can be downloaded in a couple of different formats:

StealThisFilmII Xvid
StealThisFilmII 720p
StealThisFilmII DVD
StealThisFilmII iPod

We at Mininova are also seeding the torrents with our new servers which are also used for Mininova Content Distribution. The following image clearly shows at which point we started seeding (around 15:00) and how popular this movie is so far.

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

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:

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.

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

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