The idea of a "legal" torrent website sounds ridiculous. There, I said it. I mean, WHAT would be the point. Forcing a torrent website to go legal is a teeny little stab at the internet and all of its bounty, but let's face it: tackling one downloading service is like a particuarly hellish game of Whack-a-Mole. Or like plucking gray hairs. Or... you get the idea. But yes, you heard it right here: Dutch torrent provider Mininova has removed all of its torrents save for the few that had been uploaded through its content distribution service, making them officially a legal service.
Mininova's drastic decision resulted in their legal battle with Dutch anti-piracy program BREIN, who needless to say, won. Up until this point, Mininova was the web's largest torrent website, but in court BREIN made it more than clear that they wanted Mininova to start filtering their torrents to protect artists' copyrighted material. After the case went to court in June, the judge ruled in BREIN's favor, stating that the owners of Mininova were not themselves guilty of copyright infringement, but that they should remove torrents containing copyrighted material within three months or be fined five million Euros.
But like Wilco's digital strategist Ken Waagner says in Greg Kot's book Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, "The record industry suing file sharers is like the railroad industry trying to shoot down airplanes." And I think it's time for a resounding chorus of "enough said."
