Traffic Plummets After Mininova Goes Legit

One of the more common arguments against torrenting from the media industry is of course piracy. But those groups who attempt to prove these companies wrong exhaust all possible angles in order to prove that torrents don’t entirely amount to “illegal”, and in many cases, there are completely common legal uses for the technology. Personally, whenever I download the latest version of a Linux distribution, I usually take advantage of torrenting so that I can help make up for what I download by helping to upload.

It can’t be argued that torrenting has no legal purpose, because it does, but it’s become unbelievably clear that torrenting used for piracy completely dwarfs its legal use. Most often, though, when a big-time torrent tracking site goes down, it’s hard to see what the shutdown caused, because we’re rarely given statistics of any sort. But Mininova has been a lot more open about things, and the findings are incredible.

Due to a court ruling, Mininova was forced to remove all of the torrents listed on the site that breached any sort of copyright. Because the site tracked well over a million individual torrents, sorting through them all would have been impossible, so instead, the site decided to delete torrents en masse by targeting those uploaded by regular users. Torrents that were uploaded through its content distribution platform remained, as it has an approved members list and wouldn’t see copywritten material uploaded.

Prior to Minonova’s closing, it wasn’t uncommon for the site to receive upwards of 5 million visits per day, but just one week later, that number has dwindled to 1.8 million. If the trend continues, the site will see less than 1 million visitors per day by next week, and ultimately, things could get much worse. Likewise, while before, the site handled over 10 million downloads a day, it now sits at 371,424, and searches also went from 10 to 3 million.

Not so surprisingly, despite the massive decline of Mininova, it doesn’t look as though the site’s dropping of illegal material has had much effect on bandwidth usage. A worker at an Australian ISP noted that when the Pirate Bay shut down, there was no noticeable effect on bandwidth usage. As they say, as soon as a torrent site goes down, a dozen more pop up. The courts may have won against Mininova, but the problem certainly isn’t going away anytime soon.

Mininova was forced to take such a drastic measure following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN this summer. The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users.