Torrent site Mininova breaks the 5 billion downloads barrier

Written on 27th May 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

In January 2005, three young Dutch guys started a new torrent site as an alternative to SuprNova, the former popular torrent service that couldn’t cope with the legal pressure. Yesterday, these guys celebrated the fifth billion download.

Mininova has been growing with an incredible speed. Last November they reached the third billion download, 78 days later they counted four billion downloads and now another billion milestone has been reached. TorrentFreak reported that when Mininova went offline due to hardware problems a couple of weeks ago, its competitors Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent almost went down as well. They couldn’t handle the traffic of the Mininova refugees. Impressive stuff..

But it isn’t all party hearty at Mininova’s HQ, as Eric, Matthijs, and Niek face a lawsuit by the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN. This organization wants Mininova to be history, since they think 90 percent of the files on Mininova are illegal. Mininova’s counter plead? We’re not afraid as we’re just like Google, only referring to other sites. This isn’t just youthful recklessness, since Bright reports Mininova has hired lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, the same guy who won the Dutch lawsuit against Kazaa. Exactly the track record Eric, Matthijs and Niek need.