14 DAY TRIAL // Although Mininova is the most popular BitTorrent service on the web, this doesn't stop the copyright organization to go after the website and force it to remove copyright infringement torrent files. For those of you who don't know, Mininova is way more popular than The Pirate Bay, being placed on position number 52 in the Alexa traffic ranking. According to TorrentFreak, BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy group, said it would file a lawsuit against the BitTorrent service in order to force it to remove torrent files linking to pirated content.
However, the Mininova administrators are prepared to go to the judge, pointing to the internal guidelines which promptly explain that downloading from the website is not illegal as the content published on it is not protected by copyright. Moreover, in case some anti-piracy groups suspect Mininova of copyright infringement, the service has always been opened to talks and infringing content could be removed without the need for a lawsuit.
"Is downloading torrent files from Mininova illegal? No, torrent files are not copyrighted, so this is allowed," is mentioned in the official Mininova FAQ. "Please note that we do not host any copyrighted content on this website. The torrent (metadata) files that we host do not contain data that might be copyrighted in any way. However, we offer a service to remove torrents from our website if the copyright holder of the content requests so. We remove postings as soon as we can, usually within 24 hours."
Mininova joins a large group of BitTorrent service which got sued by anti-piracy organizations and were forced to remove certain material or even to shut down their servers. For instance, TorrentSpy, an already-closed BitTorrent website, was fined a few weeks ago no less than $110 million due to the fact that it provided access to pirated content through torrent files.