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. (Photo : YouTube/BNO News)
Bad news for pirates as the Kickass Torrents websites have been taken down after the alleged owner of the torrent hosting site was arrested in Poland with several criminal charges from the United States.
Kickass Torrents is one of the largest torrent sites since The Pirate Bay which has recently just moved from their previous Sweden address. Now, officials have managed to get the Kickass Torrent site down including all of its servers and domain names associated with them.
As of this writing, all of the websites of KAT are offline. These include kat.cr, thekat.tv, kickass.so, kastatic.com, kickass.to, kat.ph and kickasstorrents.com.
The federal officials have arrested the alleged owner of Kickass Torrents named Artem Vaulin in Poland, Variety has learned. There are several evidences that the U.S. authorities have against Vaulin who hails from Ukraine.
Kickass Torrents has recently boomed in popularity after The Pirate Bay has been offline for several months and weeks at a time. The site became an alternative for those who were not able to download from TPB and it quickly became one of the largest torrent sites of all time.
Unfortnunately, their future seems to be short-lived as the site has already been taken down. There are no news as to when it will be online again or if it will still have the chance to resurface from being taken offline.
The formal complaint against KAT states that KickAss Torrents is currently valued at over $54 million thanks to their advertising revenue which can reach up to $22.3 million annually, NDTV reported. Vaulin is being blamed for the several hundred million dollars-worth of damage that the site has done to the music and film industry
Besides KAT and The Pirate Bay, there are still other alternatives available. Kim Dotcom is even planning to resurrect the highly controversial Megaupload website that has been taken down several years ago for hosting illegally obtained files such as movies, music and video games.
Vaulin will be given until August 29 to prepare his extradition appeal against the U.S. government. For now, people who are used to KAT or Kickass Torrents would have to use The Pirate Bay again for their pirating needs.
