Erictric

Back in August, we learned that Mininova, a popular torrent tracker, was ordered by a Dutch court to remove any and all copyright-infringing torrents. Today, we learn that the tracker site has done just that, going completely legal. If Mininova had not complied with the orders of the court, the site and its owners could have faced fines of roughly $1,500 USD per infringing torrent, with the maximum penalty of approximately $7.1 million USD.

As of current, only approved uploaders are allowed to share content, so as to prevent any uploading of copyright-infringing material. The decision to allow uploaded content only from approved individuals was a tough one, but necessary. Mininova has attempted to test various techniques to prevent the uploading of copyright-infringing torrents, but none have proved themselves 100% effective.

Many are now concerned that the tracker site will simply die. While a grim outlook, the fact of the matter is that a majority of Mininova users and abusers were their to download illegally.

The site is currently the 90th most popular site in the world, and 108th in the United States, according to Alexa. It certainly will be interesting to see if these figures change in the coming months.

So what do you think? Is Mininova dead?