KickassTorrents

KickassTorrents (commonly abbreviated KAT) was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking.[1] KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time.[2]

KickassTorrents
Type of site
Torrent directory, magnet links provider
Available inMultilingual (30+ languages, English primary language)
URLkatcr.co (revival)
RegistrationOptional
UsersOver 1 million per day (August 2015)
LaunchedNovember 2008 (2008-11)
Current statusOffline
Part of a series on
File sharing
Technologies
Video sharing sites
BitTorrent sites
Academic/scholarly
File sharing networks
P2P clients
Streaming programs
Anonymous file sharing
Development and societal aspects
By country or region
Comparisons

In December 2016, former KAT staff members revived the KAT community by creating a website with its predecessor's features and appearance.[3]

History

KAT was initially launched in November 2008 at the domain name kickasstorrents.com. In April 2011, it moved to a Philippinian domain kat.ph after a series of domain name seizures by the US Department of Justice against Demonoid and Torrentz.[4] The site later moved across several different domains, which the operators planned to do every six months, including ka.tt, kickass.to, kickass.so, kickasstorrents.im and kat.cr.[5]

In June 2016, KAT added an official Tor network .onion address.[6]

Blocking and censorship

KickassTorrents on its website claimed that it complied with the DMCA and it removed infringing torrents reported by content owners.[7]

On February 28, 2013, Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom were ordered by the High Court in London to block access to KickassTorrents, along with two other torrent sites. Judge Richard Arnold ruled that the site's design contributed to copyright infringement.[8][9] On 14 June, the domain name was changed to Tonga domain name kickass.to as a part of the site's regular domain change.[10]

Later on 23 June, KAT was delisted from Google at the request of the MPAA.[11] In late August 2013, KAT was blocked by Belgian ISPs.[12] In January 2014, several Irish ISPs started blocking KAT,[13] and in February, Twitter started blocking links to KAT, although this was stopped after a few days.[14] In June 2014, KAT was blocked in Malaysia by the Communications and Multimedia Commission for violating copyright law.[15]

In December 2014, the site moved to the Somalia domain name kickass.so, reportedly as a result of site's regular domain change.[16][17] On 9 February 2015, kickass.so was listed as "banned" on Whois, causing the site to go offline. Later that day, the site reverted to its former domain name kickass.to.[18] On 14 February 2015, it was found that messages mentioning "kickass.to" were blocked on Steam chat, but "kickass.so" and other popular torrent websites were not blocked, only flagged as "potentially malicious".[19]

On 23 April 2015, the site moved to the Isle of Man based domain name kickasstorrents.im[20] but was quickly taken down later that day and on 24 April it was moved to the Costa Rica based domain name kat.cr.[21] By July 2015, the kat.cr address had been removed from Google Search's results. After the removal, the top Google search result for KAT in many locations pointed to a fake KAT site that prompted visitors to download malware.[22]

In October 2015, Portugal bypassed its courts by making a voluntary agreement between ISPs, rightsholders and the Ministry of Culture to block access to KAT and most of the other popular BitTorrent websites.[23] At the same time, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox blocked access to KAT because of security concerns with some of the ads pointing to malware.[24] In April 2016, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox blocked KAT due to phishing concerns.[25] Both blocks were later removed after KAT dealt with the concerns.

One of the main domains of the site went up for sale in August 2016.[26][27]

Arrest of the alleged owner
Notice displayed on KickassTorrents sites after its seizure.

On 20 July 2016, the United States Department of Justice announced that it had seized the KAT.cr domain and had identified its alleged owner. Artem Vaulin (Ukrainian: Артем Ваулін), a 30-year-old Ukrainian man known online as "tirm", was detained in Poland after being charged with a four-count U.S. criminal indictment.[28] The remaining domains were taken offline voluntarily after the KAT.cr domain name was seized.[29] Following the seizure of the original KAT domain multiple unofficial mirrors have been put online. These have no connection to the original team who have been urging users to exercise caution.[30][31] A number of these mirrors have since been taken down.[32]

Vaulin was arrested after investigators cross-referenced an IP address he used for an iTunes transaction with an IP address used to log into KAT's Facebook page. The FBI also posed as an advertiser and obtained details of a bank account associated with the site.[29] The investigation was led by special agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan, who also tracked down Ross Ulbricht, the operator of the online black market Silk Road.[33]

The criminal complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by Homeland Security Investigations, said that it was in possession of full copies of KAT's hard drives, including its email server. The investigation suggested that KAT made over $12 million per year in advertising revenue.[34]

In late August 2016, the Department of Justice followed the complaint with a full grand jury indictment of Vaulin and two other defendants, Ievgen Kutsenko and Oleksandr Radostin; while Vaulin was still being held in Polish prison.[35] Vaulin has both a Polish and US legal representation Ira Rothken as his lawyers to handle the allegations.[36][37] In November 2016, a Polish appeals court refused to allow bail for Vaulin, stating the evidence provided by the US is sufficient to keep him in prison.[38]

Revival

In mid-December 2016, some of the former KAT staff and moderators launched a website with a similar appearance as the original under the domain katcr.co.[3]

gollark: Anyway, potatOS is running on at least two servers.
gollark: You can still install it, you know.
gollark: Infected?
gollark: Fortunately the fusion reactors, when they do work, produce so much power that they can charge giant batteries, so we mostly just use those.
gollark: At the Unicode Consortium, which is better than heavpoot's W3C, we continuously run into fusion reactor failures, so I made more fusion reactors with a simpler system as a backup, but they failed too.

References
  1. "Alexa Top 500 Global Sites". Retrieved 14 November 2014.
  2. Nick Statt (20 July 2016). "KickassTorrents domains seized after alleged owner is arrested in Poland". Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  3. "KickassTorrents Brought Back to Life by Original Staffers (Updated) - TorrentFreak". 16 December 2016.
  4. Ernesto (22 April 2011). "KickassTorrents Moves to Kat.ph". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
  5. Ernesto (23 April 2015). "KickassTorrents Moves to Isle of Man Domain Name". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 23 April 2015.
  6. "KickassTorrents enters the dark webs, adds official Tor address". Torrentfreak. 7 June 2016. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  7. "KAT DMCA". Archived from the original on 25 February 2015.
  8. O'Carroll, Lisa (28 February 2013). "Online piracy: ISPs ordered to block access to three file-sharing websites". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  9. EMI Records Limited, Infectious Limited, Liberation Music Pty Limited, Polydor Limited, Simco Limited, Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited, Universal Music Operations Limited, Virgin Records Limited, Warner Music UK Limited, Weainternational Inc v British Sky Broadcasting Limited, British Telecommunications Plc, Everything Everywhere Limited, TalktalkTelecom Group Plc, Telefónica UK Limited, Virgin Media Limited [2013] EWHC 379 (Ch) (28 February 2013), High Court (England and Wales)
  10. "Moving to Kickass.To — Blog — KickassTorrents". Kickass.to. Archived from the original on 14 March 2014. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
  11. Ernesto (23 June 2013). "MPAA Kicks KickassTorrents Off Google With 'Precision' Takedown". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  12. "Belgische providers blokkeren meer torrentsites" (in Dutch).
  13. "Irish Internet Providers Roll Out KickassTorrents Blockade". TorrentFreak. 19 January 2014. Retrieved 19 January 2014.
  14. "Twitter Blocks Kickass.to Links, Says They're Unsafe". TorrentFreak. 21 February 2014. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
  15. "Kickass.to has been officially blocked in Malaysia". 25 June 2014. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  16. "KickassTorrent Moves Domain to Somalia". Softpedia News. 18 November 2015. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  17. "KickassTorrents Moves to Kickass.so Domain Name". TorrentFreak. 17 November 2015. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  18. Ernesto (9 February 2015). "Kickass Torrents taken down by domain name seizure". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  19. Ernesto (14 February 2015). "Steam Censors Kickass.to Mentions in Chat Client". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 25 February 2015.
  20. "KickassTorrents Moves to Isle of Man Domain Name". 23 April 2015. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  21. "KickassTorrents is moving to kat.cr domain". kat.cr. 25 April 2015. Archived from the original on 6 June 2015. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  22. Ernesto (18 July 2015). "KickassTorrents Disappears From Google After Penalty". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
  23. Ernesto (26 October 2015). "Portugal Blocks Popular Torrent and Streaming Sites". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  24. Ernesto (27 October 2015). "KickassTorrents Blocked Again Over "Harmful Programs"". Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  25. "Chrome and Firefox Block KickassTorrents as "Phishing" Site". TorrentFreak. 12 April 2016. Retrieved 12 April 2016.
  26. "KickassTorrents Domain for Sale at just $230". Archived from the original on 10 August 2016. Retrieved 9 August 2016.
  27. "KickassTorrents Domain Goes Up For Sale For A Minimum Bid of $230". Retrieved 9 August 2016.
  28. "Kickass Torrents targeted by DOJ, feds say website distributed $1 billion in copyrighted works". Washington Times. 20 July 2016. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  29. Van der Sar, Ernesto (20 July 2016). "Feds Seize KickassTorrents Domains, Arrest Owner". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 21 July 2016. At the time of writing the main domain name Kat.cr has trouble loading, but various proxies still appear to work. KAT’s status page doesn’t list any issues, but this will be updated shortly.
  30. Van Der Sar, Ernesto. "KickassTorrents Mirrors and Imposters Spring into Action". Torrent Freak. Retrieved 2 August 2016.
  31. Van der Sar, Ernesto. "KickassTorrents Community Resurrects, Without Torrents". Torrent Freak. Retrieved 2 August 2016.
  32. Protalinski, Emil. "KickassTorrents mirrors go down, but new KAT sites quickly spring up". Vebture Beat. VentureBeat. Retrieved 2 August 2016.
  33. Ockenden, Will (22 July 2016). "Kickass Torrents: How did the US Government bring down the file-sharing site?". news.com.au. Retrieved 24 July 2016.
  34. "Can KickassTorrents Make a Comeback?". TorrentFreak. 21 July 2016. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
  35. Van der Sar, Ernesto (25 August 2016). "U.S. Government Indicts Three Alleged KickassTorrents Operators". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 25 August 2016.
  36. Van der Sar, Ernesto (28 July 2016). "KickassTorrents' Alleged Owner Retains Kim Dotcom's Lawyer". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 26 September 2016.
  37. "Extradition proceedings underway in Kickass case". Complete Music Update. 4 October 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2016.
  38. Alleged KickassTorrents Owner Stays in Prison, Court Rules 2 November 2016
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