Popular torrent website and archive, Kickass Torrents was shut down on Wednesday, 20th of July, after Unites States authorities charged and arrested the owner of the website in Poland. Here’s the official statement from the U.S Justice Department:
Artem Vaulin, 30, of Kharkiv, Ukraine, was arrested today in Poland and is charged by criminal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. The United States will seek to extradite Vaulin to the United States.
“Vaulin is charged with running today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell. “In an effort to evade law enforcement, Vaulin allegedly relied on servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits. His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice.”
The report then goes on to say that Kickass Torrents or KAT.cr has caused a loss of over $1 billion to artists, and creators worldwide. The website has over 50 million unique visitors every month, and is the 69th most frequently visited website on the internet.
KickAss Torrents is not the first of such website to be targeted for copyright infringement and piracy. Piratebay, another highly popular torrent site had faced similar charges and eventually shut down, though they still exist in some form and to some extent, regardless of not being as popular.
However, merely hours after the website was taken down, clones and mirror sites have resurfaced. While many of them are riddles with viruses and malicious intent, one of them is indeed the real deal. Kickass Torrent is currently available in the form of DxTorrent. It seems to be safe and functioning exactly as Kickass Torrents did. However, do proceed with caution, as no torrent site has ever been without some risks.
We ourselves have only ever visited torrenting websites to download Linux distros.
Source: US Dept Of Justice
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