One of my favorite torrents site mininova.org came close to being shut down but now it has compromised due to a court ruling and has decided to remove all the illegal torrents from its trackers/servers. The website is largely known as the second biggest public torrent tracker in the world, second to The Pirate Bay, which recently disabled their tracker, but remains operational using DHT and PEX.
Mininova will no longer support copyrighted material to its website, which would have used specific filters to block uploaded content, but says it was impossible to filter 100% of copyright material. Mininova later scraped that project and decided to go with their limited content distribution method, only allowing specific materials on their website and removing most of their material.
Mininova was billed as the largest BitTorrent search engine and directory on the Internet, lost a legal battle with Dutch anti-piracy unit – BREIN and was given three months to comply with an order to removed torrents that infringed copyright. Mininova was formed in 2005 by five Dutch college students, and has been providing free content worldwide ever since its inception.
How will it effect me?
If you were among those torrents users who downloaded applications/softwares illegally then this simply means you wont have Mininova.org by your side now. So, no more Windows 7 torrents and you’ll have to be content with Office 2010 Beta Public release only. Though, this does not mean you can not use other websites to download torrents.
Mininova is one of the cleanest and safest torrent websites and its a bit sad to see this happening to them.
Are there any good alternatives?
Yes. As of now there are still plenty of them. Here is a list taken from TorrentFreak and TechnicallyPersonal.
1. Vertor
2. SeedPeer
3. Torrentreactor
4. Alive Torrents
5. KickassTorrents
6. BTjunkie
7. isoHunt
8. yourBitTorrent
9. The Pirate Bay
10. Fulldls
11. H33t
12. Torrentleech
13. Torrentz
14. Legaltorrents
15. BitSnoop
Last Words on My favorite torrent sites
I really like IsoHunt.com & Demonoid.com , these are my personal favorites. Demonoid is a private tracker and since the last 3 months is down due to some technical problems although its trackers are working. The Swarm ratio happens to be the best of Demonoid. Hope Demonoid gets back soon.
