Mininova, the go to site for any software or media you needed has cleaned its slate. Abiding to the court verdict in August 2009, Mininova has removed all copyright infringing torrents and now hosts only the stuff it gets through its Content Distribution service.
Mininova has been a reliable source for the most popular torrent indexing sites on the web including www.torrentz.com. This cleanup will affect all these sites plus innumerable other users for whom it was the one stop shop for whatever they needed.
Now I completely agree with all copyright police in different parts of the world that illegal content should be removed from the web. However, I strongly feel that they should also work closely with the content distributers to make legal content easily available for cheap. This is extremely important in order to stop new sites from popping up.
Lets take an example:
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India does not have HD TV transmission yet
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Blu ray players cost 5 times as much in the US (the cheapest one is the PS3)
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Limited Blu Ray library at high prices. Very few bollywood movies available in HD
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No iTunes (or any other) online media store
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Popular US/UK TV shows are broadcast usually after 1 or 2 years
Where do you expect people to go when they want to watch HD movies or TV shows that are not yet available in India? There are no official legal channels. They have to go sites like mininova. Hence there will always be an audience for such sites to tap into.
So don’t worry. There are alternate sources. And they will always remain pain in the ass for these copyright policing morons.
