A ray of hope for the millions of KickassTorrents and torrents fans alike, that KAT could be coming back online soon as the site's alleged owner, Artem Vaulin, is likely to get out of jail soon with the help of the same legal expert behind MegaUpload's Kim Dotcom.
Ars Technica reported that California-based lawyer Ira Rothken will be the lead defense counsel for Vaulin, who is currently detained in Poland and faces extradition to the United States. The Ukrainian-born Vaulin was tagged by the U.S. government as owner and operator of file-sharing site KickassTorrents, which allegedly facilitated the piracy of digital contents amounting to $1 billion.
Vaulin is charged with allegations of copyright infringement and money laundering and both are criminal charges that the U.S. government hopes will speed up the process of his extradition.
However, Rothken's new mission is to expedite not the extradition but Vaulin's release from jail. As indicated by Ars Technica on its report, the lawyer's resume include the high-profile case of MegaUpload founder Dotcom.
In 2012, Dotcom was arrested in New Zealand and U.S. worked for his extradition to face a criminal court in America. To date, such effort has been frustrated mostly thanks to Rothken, Ars Technica said.
"Rothken serves as Dotcom's lead global counsel-his client still faces criminal charges over alleged massive copyright infringement on his now-shuttered site, MegaUpload. American prosecutors have failed to get Dotcom extradited to the US," the report said.
But setting aside the extradition issue for now, it appears that the first order of the day for Rothken is to win even a temporary freedom for Vaulin. "We are working with local Polish counsel to try to get Artem out of the Warsaw jail so he can assist with his defense," the lawyer was reported by TorrentFreak as saying.
Rothken is convinced that the case against Vaulin is weak, explaining that infringements involving torrents and trackers "happen off sites ... (and) KickassTorrents is devoid of any content files."
"This type of copyright theory is known as secondary copyright infringement and there is no United States criminal statute for secondary copyright infringement - that type of theory is at most a civil liability issue," Rothken told TorrentFreak.
The report said that Vaulin's defense will largely have the same approach as that of Dotcom's case. Dotcom has so far avoided the threat of extradition and has recently announced the relaunch of MegaUpload in 2017.
With the same legal mind helping him out, it remains possible that Vaulin will be released from jail soon, allowing him to resume his work and foremost of which is to bring KickassTorrents back online. In its absence meanwhile, KAT mirrors, clones and alternatives are filling in the void led by The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent and YTS.ag.