After years of fighting against the “Pirates” of the copyright world the US government was finally able to track down the alleged owner of the t
orrent website kat.cr, otherwise known as the infamous kickass torrents.
It was April of last year when the website was moved to a new domain the KickassTorrents.im, an Isle of Man TLD, but the site was taken down quickly after following the “zero tolerance” policy towards copyright infringement of the Isle of Man authorities.
The site quickly moved to a new domain kat.cr, and thus began a year long battle against piracy that ended pretty abruptly, must say, a few days ago, when US officials apprehended Artem Vaulin.
The irony of this situation was Vaulin was caught after his purchase on iTunes.
Artem Vaulin a Ukranian native, recently purchased some stuff off of iTunes, and using the same IP went on to the Kickass Torrent Page on facebook, facebook released his details at US’s request, and what followed through was a little strange, Apple too released his iTunes account details which he also allegedly used to manage Kickass Torrent as the Administrator, it is strange because it wasn’t months ago that Apple withheld information from the government over a terrorist’s iPhone, I’ll leave it upto your imagination as to what went through the mind of people at Apple Inc.
One of the mistakes that is being pointed out now is that KAT decided to have servers in the US, which inturn got the US authorities involved, “[Since 2008], KAT has relied on a network of computer servers around the world to operate, including computer servers located in Chicago, Illinois,” the complaint against the site reads.
As of now, Petitions are being signed online to free Vaulin, and the cases made are “there are bigger scarier problems to focus on, then just copyrighted materials, that doesn’t even put much of a dent on the already multi—million dollar empires”.
But that’s just one side of the story, with millions of unique visitors per day KAT was considered the “God Father” of torrent sites, and was just as much a game of risk and reward as Game of Thrones. With the risk being, that now Vaulin faces nearly 20 years of jail time, and the reward being millions of dollars, for a man, that may even make the devil blush.
The KAT team is back, not with the torrents but with a forum.
The disruption of the site, has resulted for many being rendered as “virtually homeless”, who are finding shelter at places like the “pirates bay”, “torrentz”. Which has resulted in higher traffic then usual for these sites, aside from these many mirror sites have been created, “kat.am”, “kat.al”.
The KAT team has warned that none of these are connected to the old team, urging people to proceed with caution.
“Please be aware that there is no legitimate fully-working KAT site available so be cautious and never attempt to login to any fake sites that may appear online,” The KAT team warns.
Meanwhile, the alleged operator of KickassTorrents faces extradition to the United States. But as of now he still remains in Poland, but the authorities haven’t announced any new information since last week, while the court case remains sealed.
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