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Kickass Torrents lawsuit heading jury trial, torrent sites guilty of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement; KAT owner facing a year in federal prison?

| Nov 17, 2016 12:21 AM EST

Kickass Torrents owner arrested in Poland on U.S. charges.

Kickass Torrents lawsuit has been highly talked about in the past months, especially with KAT's legal defense claim of no case by the US government. However, with the respond of the prosecution regarding evidence sufficiency, a jury trial might happen if the defense would be challenging the evidence.

For a period of time, individuals seeking for torrent files have long exhausted the voluminous indexes of Kickass Torrents without qualms for copyright infringement. However, such thing changed when the US government took notice of the said popular site specializing in indexing torrent files.

With the copyright infringement case being filed against KAT and its owner Artem Vaulin, legal defense cited the lack of merit of the case for any secondary copyright infringement claims would fail as these are non-existent under U.S. criminal law and that KAT is just a  mere search engine, similar to Google other popular website search engines.

However, it seems like the U.S.  Attorney Zachary Fardon is not convinced with the defense presented by the torrent site. TorrentFreak reports that the federal prosecutor sees the defense of KAT and its legal counsel as downplaying the significance of torrent sites, for such sites are flea markets for infringing movies, TV shows, games, music, and software.

The prosecution also mentioned that if the KAT defense would like to challenge the evidence they have, they should be doing it on a jury trial. The prosecution is well convinced that there is no distinction between direct and secondary copyright infringement, which means that if fully established the defendants would be guilty of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

Now there is still no telling on how the case will proceed and how the court would rule on the particular lawsuit against a torrent site. However, if one would be looking back to an almost similar case, a year and a day sentence was declared by the court for conspiring to commit felony copyright infringement against Megaupload.com and its owner, according to The United States Department of Justice of Public Affairs.

But still, there is no telling how the defense and the prosecution would outsmart one another to arrive at a favorable conclusion. With all the legal drama and exchange of legal doctrines and principles lurking in the background, it would be best to wait and see how thing will unfold for Kickass Torrents and perhaps other torrent sites that are still online.

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