Largest Torrent Site Mininova Shuts Down

Mininova was previously known as the largest BitTorrent website, but now it decided to cease its operations for good. Its forum will shut down next week, and the rest of the site will close its doors a month later. The site operators are proud of the role they played in the file-sharing history, but their legal distribution platform appeared unsustainable.
A dozen years ago, the mighty Suprnova went offline, damaging the BitTorrent landscape of that time. The vacant space was soon filled by new sites trying to fulfill the public’s increasing demands for torrents, of which Mininova became the most successful. 5 Dutch students set up this BitTorrent site a month after Suprnova went offline. Started as a hobby project, the platform managed to turn into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue. Of course, legal pressure also came along, even despite the site operators complying with takedown requests.

Eventually, BREIN filed a case against Mininova in 2009 and won it, forcing the tracker to remove all infringing torrents, which effectively ended its popularity. Although Mininova remained online, it now permitted only pre-approved publishers to upload files. Finally, it decided to shut down for good on April 4, 2017. Despite more than 950 million legal torrents having been downloaded from the site in recent years, its income couldn’t make up for the costs. Mininova founders have moved on over these years – they are no longer students and have parted ways, engaging in different projects and ventures.

Mininova’s users have been very grateful, as well as several artists who also thanked the platform for providing them with a great promotional tool.

New Privacy-Oriented advanced Browser with Built-in Torrenting

Welcome Brave – a brand new security-oriented web browser, which also has built-in support for torrent downloading and streaming.

It is not a secret that old-fashioned BitTorrent clients have lost most of their appeal, as they become outdated with the rise of video streaming websites and services. This is why the solution is to enjoy both torrent downloading and streaming without having to install any separate apps.


Brave was first launched in early 2016, intended for privacy conscious people willing to browse the web securely. The web browser also supports torrent downloads out of the box, along with instant torrent streaming. Its developers explain that their new, open source browser was designed for both speed and security, featuring a built-in adblocker, which ensures an ad-free and seamless browsing experience. As such, the browser claims to significantly improve browsing speeds while shielding you from malicious ads and offering lots of other privacy features like HTTPS Everywhere, script blocking, and third-party cookie blocking.

The most interesting part is the recently introduced built-in support for BitTorrent transfers, powered by WebTorrent technology. Brave is able to download torrents via magnet links directly from the browser. This feature is not exclusive (Opera also supports it, for instance), but Brave also supports torrent streaming, which allows you to view videos instantly as you would do on streaming websites.

The browser received support from WebTorrent founder, who continues to lend a hand. Right now Brave is compatible with all traditional torrent clients, and support for web peers is also expected. WebTorrent uses TCP connections and is going to add WebRTC support to allow Brave users to connect to web peers.

However, Brave has its shortcomings – its user interface is quite limited, and basic features such as canceling or pausing a torrent are not available yet, so you need to close the tab to cancel a download.

However, you should understand that even despite Brave’s focus on privacy, torrent transfers are not anonymous – if you don’t use VPN or other anonymizer, tracking outfits will be able to track your downloads or streams

Hosting a Pirate Site Is not a Crime : US Court

The US Federal Court ruled that the Chicago-based hosting provider Steadfast is not liable for copyright infringement, as it merely hosted an alleged pirate website. The judge didn’t see sufficient evidence to support a secondary liability claim.

Back in 2016, porn publisher ALS Scan sued several third-party intermediaries, including CloudFlare, one advertising network and several hosting providers, one of them being Steadfast. The latter asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that it was protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. Steadfast indicated that it didn’t operate or manage the pirate website and didn’t in any way communicate with or interact with its individual users, but simply provided computer storage.

The District Court agreed that the allegations were not sufficient to hold Steadfast liable. It also noted that the porn studio failed to allege that Steadfast had the goal to promote copyright infringement or directly encouraged the hosted site to publish pirated content.

The vicarious liability allegation was also ruled insufficient, as it required the copyright holder to demonstrate that the hosting company had control over the infringing actions and that it financially benefited from them.

As a result, the Court tentatively granted Steadfast’s motion to dismiss, due to the absence of evidence and allegations to support a secondary liability claim. However, this court decision keeps the door open for the adult entertainment publisher to file an improved complaint. Still, so far, the hosting provider is winning the copyright battle.

All Oscars 2017 Winners Movies Are Available on ExtraTorrent

The cast and crew of "Moonlight" accept the best picture Oscar during the Academy Awards 2017. The winner was initially announced as "La La Land", but moments later it was revealed that there was a mistake and "Moonlight" had actually won. See full list of Oscar 2017 winners.

All 2017 Oscar Winners are available on EXTRATORRENT:

Best picture
La La Land Moonlight

Best actor
Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

Best actress
Emma Stone (La La Land)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Mahershala Ali (Moonlight)

Best supporting actress
Viola Davis (Fences)

Best cinematography, Best production design, Best score, Best song
La La Land

Best director
Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea)

Best original screenplay
Manchester by the Sea

Best adapted screenplay
Moonlight

Best visual effects
The Jungle Book

Best film editing
WINNER: Hacksaw Ridge

Best makeup and hairstyling
Suicide Squad

Best costume design
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Best documentary
OJ: Made in America

Best sound editing
Arrival

Best sound mixing
Hacksaw Ridge

Best animated feature
Zootopia

Best foreign language film
The Salesman

Best animated short
Piper

What's your choice? What's the best picture?

Only 0.05% of Recent DMCA Notices Were Correct : Google

Google has recently submitted comments to a US Copyright Office consultation, giving the DMCA a vote of support, although stressing widespread abuse. The company had to admit that DMCA allows for innovation and agreements with copyright owners, but 99.95% of links Google was asked to take down in January didn't even exist in its search index.

According to DMCA, American ISPs don’t have to proactively police infringing user content, but have to remove it following the content creator’s complaint. However, now the copyright holders complain that the law is failing them in terms of the so-called “safe harbor” provision that protects ISPs. This is why the US Copyright Office is now running an extended public consultation, with all stakeholders expected to submit their comments.

Google argued with the entertainment industry which believes that the DMCA is “failing”: the company pointed out that rogue sites have been driven out of the US by an effective DMCA and suggested leaving the law intact. At the same time, Google recommended to encourage voluntary mechanisms between content owners and service providers.

Google brought its YouTube-based Content ID as an example of such collaboration. This system allows copyright holders to take down or monetize infringing content. Besides, Google offers takedown tools to rights holders in respect of Google search.

However, the company experiences some problems with takedown provisions, as lots of DMCA notices are duplicate, unnecessary, or bogus – in particular, most of takedown requests submitted to Google are for URLs that have never been in its search index or search results. For instance, the company received 16,457,433 URLs from one of the most prolific submitters last months, 99.97% of which appeared never existing in Google’s search index in the first place. And this is not an outstanding incident – the search giant admits that 99.95% of all submitted URLs in January were not in its index.

In all other respects, Google seems comfortable with the current DMCA law, taking some voluntary measures that go beyond the requirements of Section 512 of the DMCA. In other words, the company sees the DMCA as a law it can work with. Unfortunately, the copyright holders see things differently.