RIP Mininova

News : On August 26th 2009, Dutch court of Utrecht ruled that BitTorrent platform Mininova acts unlawful and so, on November 26th 2009, Mininova limited itself to its Content Distribution Service which effectively means that it can host only legal content.
This news does not have big implications practically as such services will continue albeit with a different tag but it is a significant blow metaphorically. In the books of law, sites like this are illegal and should be shut down immediately and in fact corporations go to the lengths of demanding compensation but if this corps demand compensation for infringement of copyright, will they pay to these sites when a fan base is created due to them?
CASE IN POINT: Jal – the band.
Its a quite popular band though its charisma has fallen away fast in recent times but that’s not the point here. The debut album of Jal was a great hit all over and in fact more so in India. This meant that the band, in its heyday, did live performances almost every week and got paid huge sums. But the fact is, at the initial peak of the band popularity in India, its album had not even been released here. No points for guessing how the Indian music lovers got their dose of Jal. Had it not been for this free flowing content over the internet, this band would have probably been a bunch of wannabes trying out their luck.
CASE IN POINT: Slumdog Millionaire
Now we all know about this, but what we don’t realise is that the hype that this movie created in India was primarily at a time when it had not even been officially released here. Had it not been for circulation of those rips, who knows, the movie would not have had the same success. And if you care about it, the movie did pathetic business in theatres.
CASE IN POINT: Microsoft and its bunch of software
Windows in its present form came into existence in 1995. That was when Windows ’95 was launched. Now think of a 26 year old whiz kid (!) setting the spreadsheets of Microsoft, Google and other of Silicon Valley giants on fire. He would have been around 12 year old in 1995 and first introduced to computers probably at school. Again, one can be pretty certain on the status of the operating system on that machine, let alone various softwares he learnt in the following years such as MS Office, FoxPro, and Visual Studio etc. Had it been for those stringent anti-piracy laws, many such kids would have never learnt such wonderful things which would have translated in to absence of Indians in the USA. Now these companies, they do lose a few dollars thanks to the rampant piracy but then their future CEOs are actually learning this way.


So it’s a situation where this free flowing content is actually helping doing some good. Of course, this does not justify the acts but it’s just that side of the coin which often never comes to the light. Sites like Mininova will continue serving their fanbase in one form or the other and will continue doing their bit in popularising music bands, softwares, movies while the books of law and corporations will continue baying for their blood.