It calls itself “the ultimate BitTorrent source”, but P2P tracker Mininova has now removed almost all links to copyrighted content after complying with a cease-and-desist court ruling in August from Dutch entertainment rightsholder group Brein.

As the site’s staff write in a blog post, only content uploaded via the site’s legal P2P distribution service will be available, meaning Battletar Galactica episodes and Lady Gaga tracks have been replaced by more obscure music artists…

The ruling, from a court in Utrecht, claims that the site used to receive 3,500 new torrents a day and was regularly visited by five million daily users. But Friday’s most popular torrents page simply read: “0 torrents added today”. Mininova is considering appealing, but in a week when Swedish rightsholders claimed anti-piracy laws caused an 80 percent reduction in file-sharing, it’s “advantage: big content businesses”.

As in the Pirate Bay case in April, the ruling (Google translation here) said that, while Mininova had no control over what its users downloaded, it was encouraging them to upload and share copyrighted material and making copyright abuse possible.

The site says: “Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service,” adding that it had been working on a filtering system to remove unlawful files, but it was “neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system.” The court ruling threatened Mininova with a fine of €1,000 (£911) for each copyrighted torrent file uploaded, to a maximum of €5 million (£4.55 million).

Mininova launched in 2004, in the aftermath of the demise of the Supernova P2P, and became one of the most popular torrent trackers on the web. Still, this is only one of hundreds of sites where entertainment content can be downloaded or streamed for nothing and P2P sites tend to spring up when others are shut down—often more creative and elusive than their predecessors.

The Pirate Bay recently ditched its P2P tracker in favour of a decentralised “distributed hash table” system, in a move to make the site even harder to shut down—it’s that kind of pirate adaptation record labels and film studios will be facing for years to come, no matter how many big-name P2P sites they shut down.

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