Mininova Torrent Site Goes Legal

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The days when one could simply download all the illegal content one wanted to one’s computers have long gone. With The Pirate Bay going under, other sites thought they could profit from the extra traffic coming their way. Lots of Pirate Bay fans have had to revert to other means of downloading their favorite, but also very illegal, TV shows, games and music.

After The Pirate Bay went down, it looks like another giant torrent site is following. Mininova, a well known “brand” in the business is going to go legal. Due to a Dutch court ruling Mininova will have to remove all the links to copyright content.

Mininova is considering appealing the August ruling but until then we can safely say that hardcore torrent downloaders will have to look elsewhere for a fix. The question is what will Mininova have to offer now that its pirated content is off limits? After all, the site had plenty of visitors thanks to those popular TV shows and movies available for download. Lots of music from popular artists was also available to download, not to mention games and pirated software.

No less than 5 million people visited Mininova every day which means the owners of the website must have cashed in on all that traffic.

Now that Mininova has been hit hard, can we expect other sites in the torrent business to go down? It looks like that’s a possibility considering the current state of the economy. The recession brought a decline in sales to every business and especially to the music and movie businesses. In other words more people than usual decided to download illegal copies of their favorite titles instead of buying them like they used to do before the economy tumbled.

With sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay going down we can expect their competitors to become more and more popular until someone takes them down too. I see a pattern emerging here but I don’t believe that illegal torrents will be completely stopped anytime soon. Naturally, I am not advising you to look for illegal content elsewhere. What you do with your computer and bandwidth is your own business but don’t disregard the clear warning. Illegal content will not be tolerated the way it used to.