Mininova gone, who’s left and where are they located?

In August of this year a Dutch court ordered Mininova to remove all infringing torrents within three months. Yesterday, Mininova complied with the court’s order and disabled all torrents, except those in the licensed “content distribution” part of the service.

Mininova was the world’s second most popular unauthorized BitTorrent site. It facilitated infringement on a massive scale, with more than 10 billion downloads. Its demise follows Pirate Bay which was also ordered shut down following a decision by a Swedish court this past April which found Pirate Bay’s operators criminally responsible for copyright infringement.

After Pirate Bay was ordered shut down and following the introduction of new anti-piracy legislation in Sweden, there was a spike in sales of music from legitimate sources in Sweden. In the first nine months of 2009 digital music sales in Sweden increased by 80% and there was a nine per cent increase in physical sales. A market research firm also found that 60% of users aged 15-74 had reduced the amount of file sharing they did since the Pirate Bay ruling. We should expect a similar decline in online file sharing and increases in legal sales of music, movies and other digital content with Mininova’s end. Sweden sees legal music sales boost following Pirate Bay case.

The successful litigation against the two most popular worldwide unauthorized BitTorrent sites already has the blogosphere speculating on where the (illegal) alternatives are. Canada has a dubious distinction in this regard. Barrie McKenna pointed this out in an article in the Globe and Mail this fall, The (legal) music fades our for Canadians, saying “Canada has earned a dubious distinction as a world hub for illegitimate file-sharing websites and a leader in Internet piracy.” He concluded, “That hurts Canadians, and most people don’t even know it’s happening.”

The table below shows the 2008 traffic statistics for the top 10 BitTorrent websites. With Pirate Bay and Mininova now both legally prohibited from operating, as shown below, Canada is in the embarrassing position of harbouring 5 of the top 8 remaining unauthorized BitTorrent sites including the new number 1 ranked site, Isohunt.

(Data obtained from Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, or, when unavailable, Compete, http://siteanalytics.compete.com. Hosting/registration data obtained from Domain Tools http://www.domaintools.com/)