Mininova goes legit and piracy as a loss leader
At the end of March of this year I wrote a post about Mininova’s interesting attempt at providing musicians with a storefront on the site for their music. This was a part of their move to try and legitimize torrents as a way to download legal music files. Now it would seem that they are going even further down that road by instituting a content recognition filter system for all torrent file uploads in order to reduce the number of torrents pointing to illegal media files.
One of the interesting things about this is that system being used isn’t one that the team behind Mininova selected themselves. Instead it was one selected by the media companies that currently have a lawsuit pending against the torrent search site. Up until this point Mininova has always been trying to use the “we’re just a search engine” defense and are protected by the DMCA Safe Harbor exemption. As Ernesto at TorrentFreaks points out this has obviously changed.
Additionally Ernesto reports on the negative reaction from the users of the torrent site
The response from Mininova’s users is mostly negative, with one commenter saying “Shame to see such a nice site decide to go hang itself,” and another adding “Wow, guess you guys are caving under the pressure. Too bad its all over now.”
This raises a rather interesting thought. Piracy is going nowhere, no matter how hard the entertainment industry tries, and for sites like Mininova; as well as other popular torrent sites, these ‘illegal’ torrents are what bring people in. Take away those files and you are endanger of losing the biggest reason for people to use your search engine over some other one. They are in fact what is called in the real world of marketing – loss leaders.
So rather than doing everything they can to remove those files and lose users in the process why not use them to your advantage. The idea here being that you clearly label them as pirated files but at the same time provide links to legal versions that are of better quality and faster download. Pull the users in with the lure of easy to find pirate torrents and then convert them into legal owners of those self-same files. It’s not that hard to do and the benefits far outweigh treating everyone as a criminal before giving them an options to be customers.
Where on one hand Mininova look so much like a forward thinking web business it now looks like nothing more than a lackey for the very people that the majority of their users hate. I wouldn’t be at all surprise to see Mininova pay dearly for this move as users begin looking elsewhere. It is another case where everyone loses.
