Kickass Torrents Live Again?

Pirate website Kickass Torrents, has been brought to life again. The website has reportedly been reincarnated by the website's original staff. As everyone may know the website was seized earlier this year after its alleged ringleader Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland and the domains of the website were seized. The website however never died entirely thanks to its clone websites.

Kickass Torrents is now fully operational and maintains the original look, reports Torrent Freak. The website currently has a clean user database and appears to include original staff members. I could only access the new website after a couple attempts which indicates that the website is now under tremendous traffic.

"The majority of our original Staff, Admins and Moderation team joined us after Kat.cr went down - which is something we're very proud of. This shows the loyalty, dedication and real love for KAT that we all share," the Kickass Torrents team told TorrentFreak. The team added that they faced several issues in putting the website again in working condition.

"We have all our major uploaders on board and they continued to share tirelessly even before the torrent engines returned. The torrent community can continue to expect to see uploads from all the names they know and trust," added the team.

"In order to keep our members safe we chose to rebuild and keep only safe elements. Despite the fact that a rebuild took longer, the safety of our community comes first," the team said.

The team pointed that they now come under a similar takedown procedure as YouTube which means that Kickass Torrents won't store copyrighted material on the website.

Update: The site appears to have some technical issues, as it went down after a short while.

Source: Torrent Freak

Has Torrentz.eu permanently shutdown?

Popular torrent meta-search engine, Torrentz.eu has apparently shutdown without much fanfare, as it refuses to throw any search results. The homepage displays a welcome message reading "Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines". Clicking on any other links or inserting a search query redirects to a page displaying another message that reads "Torrentz will always love you. Farewell."

Torrentz was launched back in July 2003 and was used to index torrents from other popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, ExtraTorrent etc. You could enter your search query and have the results show up covering numerous torrent sites. The advantage here was that you got access to more trackers for a particular torrent so that if few of them went down, you could still have the torrent working.

According to Softpedia, the other Torrentz domains including .ME, .CH, and .IN display the same messages, along with the HTTPS site. This mysterious shutdown comes after a couple of weeks from the arrest of the alleged owner of Kickass Torrents (KAT), one of the most popular among the torrent sites. After the arrest, the website was closed down as well, although clone sites emerged later. Last year, we also saw Yify (YTS) shutdown and the The Pirate Bay continuing its on and off battle to stay online.

It won't be a surprise to see more torrent search engines take the Torrentz way and shut operations on their own to avoid any form of legal action against them. With no news whether there was an arrest or a takedown in this case, it would be fair to wait for an official notice from the owners (if we get any), something more than just the two messages.

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Kickass Torrents' Popular Clone Site KAT.am Gets Taken Down

Last month, pirate website Kickass Torrents' alleged ringleader Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland and the domains of his website were seized. However, within hours of this news, there were several clone sites for Kickass Torrents that emerged, and proved what everybody already anticipated: pirate sites cannot be fully shut down.

However, one such clone site, KAT.am - probably the most popular out of all the clone sites, has now been taken down as a result of a notice issued by Motion Picture Association (MPA). Yes, you read it right; Hollywood is going after the clone pirate sites to curb the copyright infringement that causes millions of dollars' worth of damage to the industry every single year.

The operator of KAT.am has said, "We are not worried, because if it's not us, someone else will keep the game running. If not the alleged owner, it can be us. If we are not there, still there will surely be someone else. This never ends," quotes TorrentFreak.

The warning to KAT.am's owner from Motion Picture Association reads, "This Notice requires you to immediately (within 24 hours) take effective measures to end and prevent further copyright infringement. All opportunities provided by the Website to download, stream or otherwise obtain access to the Entertainment Content should be disabled permanently."

TorrentFreak also points out that even though KAT.am is now offline due to deletion of the domain from the Armenian registry, two new domains, kickass.cd and kickass.mx, have already been launched, from where it can continue to operate.

To note, Motion Picture Association (MPA) represents six major film-studios including 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

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U.S. authorities seize Kickass Torrents domains

Earlier this morning, news broke of Artem Vaulim, the founder of KickAss Torrents, being arrested in Poland and the domain name being seized, making the website unoperational.

In short, the most beloved Torrent Site for those with piracy close to their hearts has gone dark, and in all likelihood for good. Additionally, alternate popular proxies have also been swiftly taken down. As of writing this article, the five most popular KAT proxy sites, along with the main website are no longer accessible due to the fact that KAT servers across the globe are being taken down, instead of just having the domain names seized.

A federal court in Chicago also ordered that a bank account and seven domain names believed to be associated with KAT be seized.

According to the criminal complaint filed with the Chicago court, Kickass Torrents is estimated to be the 69th most commonly visited website on the internet, and has an estimated net worth of over $54 million. Between all of the movies, TV shows, music, video games, and other media it hosts for download, Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell says KAT is "responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials."

Kickass Torrents domain names have been blocked before in various countries across the globe, and its main site appears to still remain functional. But if Poland cooperates with the U.S. in the extradition process, Vaulin will be tried in American courts on counts of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

In a statement Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said, "[Vaulin's] arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice."

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