Kickass torrents
 |
|
|---|---|
| BitTorrent indexer | |
| languages | Available in more than 35 languages |
| operator | Artem Vaulin |
| editorial staff | Artem Vaulin |
| Registration | optional |
| Annual income | > € 28 million |
| On-line | November 2008 (currently online) |
| http://www.kastatus.com/ | |
KickassTorrents , also known as KAT , was a web directory for BitTorrent and magnet links , where users could download and add torrent files to enable peer-to-peer data exchange. The site was the world's most popular BitTorrent indexer from November 2014, when it overtook Swedish website The Pirate Bay , and one of the most visited websites in the world, until it was blocked in July 2016.
history
The site was founded in November 2008. Users could download torrents from films, songs, TV series, computer programs or eBooks, or report new torrents.
In June 2013, following a motion by the Motion Picture Association of America, all results on KickassTorrents were removed from the Google search engine . Several countries blocked access to the site one by one, including Belgium , Denmark , Great Britain , Italy , Ireland , Malaysia and Portugal . Additionally, Kickass content was inaccessible from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome for a while due to concerns about phishing and malware from Mozilla and Google . However, after these problems were resolved, the site was available again.
Over time, Kickass torrents became more and more popular and in November 2014 even overtook the Swedish website The Pirate Bay , which until then was always number one in torrenting. In June 2016 kat.cr, the main domain of KickassTorrents, was the 69th most visited website worldwide and had more than 50 million unique visits per month .
Blocking and arrest of the operator
On July 20, 2016, the United States Department of Justice announced that the kat.cr domain had been taken offline and that 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin, who worked under the pseudonym “tirm”, was arrested in Poland . In cooperation with the United States Department of Homeland Security , he was identified as the mastermind and owner of the website.
With the support of Apple and Facebook Inc. , the authorities were able to prove that Vaulin had logged on to the Apple iTunes Store with an IP address that was used to operate the KickassTorrents Facebook page . In this way his identity could finally be determined. The entire investigation was led by homeland security agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan, who also played a leading role in the 2013 arrest of Ross Ulbricht , the operator of the illicit drug marketplace Silk Road .
After the KickassTorrents pages were blocked, several imitators quickly appeared on the Internet who stated that they were the official successor of the page.
Proxy sites still online
The arrest of the operator and the shutdown of almost all known websites dealt a severe blow to the KAT community. After a few months, however, numerous crew members got together and founded a new offshoot of KickassTorrents. You use an old backup of the site for this. After internal disputes, the camps continued to split, so that today there are more than a dozen different KickassTorrents websites.
The website kastatus.com keeps interested parties informed about current events regarding Kickass torrents. It refers to currently functioning proxy pages. Kastatus.com is the only original website of the former KAT network that was not confiscated by Homeland Security. This is probably due to the fact that the site itself does not offer any files from the Bittorrent network , but was only viewed as a source of information.
legality
According to its own statement, KickassTorrents acted in agreement with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and deleted torrents reported by rights holders.
Used domains
In order to avoid blocking, the operators regularly changed their domain . The following domains were used until the blocking:
- kat.cr ( Costa Rica )
- kickass.cr (Costa Rica)
- kickasstorrents.com ( .com )
- kastatic.com (.com)
- thekat.tv ( Tuvalu )
- kickass.to ( Tonga )
- kat.ph ( Philippines )
Individual evidence
- ↑ kat.cr retrieval statistics on alexa.com, accessed on June 20, 2016.
- ^ "KickassTorrents": Suspected operator arrested in Poland on spiegel.de, accessed on August 11, 2016.
- ^ Court document "United States of America v. Artem Vaulin" (English) on justice.gov, accessed on July 22, 2016.