The once Mighty bitorrent giant Mininova, which was a favorite website of millions, the successor of another fallen hero Supernova which was also a torrent distribution website based on Slovenia. For many days it was considered the best Bittorrent search engine. However it had to close down after getting severe legal threats in late 2004. On August 2, 2007, the domain name was donated to The Pirate Bay, who relaunched the site on August 21, 2007. However now it contains only an invitation to join their cause, which I personally think is pretty good.
However the biggest fallen hero, the Mininova.org site is based in the Netherlands and started in January 2005 as a successor to the Suprnova. It was a really wonderful website which did not log its visitors Ip address and allowed to upload torrent anonymously tracked by any tracker. In April 2007, Mininova B.V. (the company running Mininova.org) won a domain dispute about the domain mininova.com, which had been exploited by a phisher.
For the statistics you would certainly like to know that the word ‘mininova’ ranked 9 on Google’s list of most queried terms in 2006. And on May 28, 2008, Mininova indicated that there have been over 5 billion downloads. But since it had been receiving legal threats as of May 6, 2009, the Mininova team began trial of a content recognition system, which will result in the removal of any torrents that are flagged as infringing upon copyright laws.
However in May 2009 the Dutch copyright organization BREIN started legal advancements against Mininova and demanded that they start performing filtration in their platform. But during the trial Mininova stated that it was not feasible for them to identify such files by itself, but indicated that they would remove torrent files in case BREIN identified those files it considered to be pointing to copyright protected material.
As of the last nail to its coffin On August 26 the Utrecht court ruled[] that Mininova should remove all torrent files pointing to copyright protected material from the platform within 3 months or face damages of up to €5 million.
The Mininova team announced As of November 26, 2009, that they could not find a foolproof filtering system against copyrighted content, and limited its platform to Content Distribution torrents only. Which lead to its great fall.
