KickAss Torrents (Photo : Facebook)
It's been over a month since KickassTorrents went down and not even a faint sign is seen so far that will indicate KAT will resume operations soon. Is the file-sharing site, once the largest and most popular torrenting site on the planet, really gone for good?
While KAT clones, mirrors and proxy sites are aplenty and are freely passing themselves as the best alternatives or replacements for KickassTorrents, torrent fans are still looking forward for KAT's return, which is a possibility that might be remote for now but not entirely impossible.
Consider the scenarios below:
Artem Vaulin's partners will take over and relaunch KAT
In the past days, the U.S. government has formally indicted Vaulin as operator and founder of KickassTorrents, alleging that the Ukrainian national committed copyright infringements and money laundering. Through KAT, Vaulin facilitated the theft of more than $1 billion worth of copyrighted digital contents, U.S. authorities.
But the same move revealed that Vaulin closely worked with two Ukrainians that provided the technical backbone of KickassTorrents through firm called Cryptoneat. TorrentFreak identified Vaulin's partners as Oleksandr Radostin and Ievgen Kutsenko.
The report said that remain free and in Ukraine. And the two are likely to remain free as the U.S. has no extradition treaty with Ukraine, somehow raising the hope that they have access to the original KickassTorrents code and will somehow find a way to rebuild the site.
Vaulin will resurrect KAT
Or if Radostin and Kutsenko will prove unwilling, Vaulin himself will bring back KickassTorrents and that is if lawyer Ira Rothken will find success in getting the alleged KAT owner out of jail. According to a separate report by TorrentFreak, Rothken is using the same legal arguments that allowed MegaUpload's to walk out of prison - that as KAT operator Vaulin is not responsible for the piracy activities committed by the site's users. Dotcom's defender also maintained that the case against Vaulin is not backed by any existing U.S. laws.
Provided the court will buy the Rothken defense, Vaulin could soon be free, head back to his motherland and do what he does best - resume operation of KickassTorrents.
Or someone else will run KAT
Vaulin recently declared that torrenting or the likes of KickassTorrents will not die as there will always be someone to fill in for every seat that is vacated. TorrentFreak said that KAT domains, Kat.cr and Kickas.cr, are now up for sale and the chance is there that they will be snatched and re-upped as the new KickassTorrents.
However, this could prove as the less desirable KickassTorrents comeback path as the two domains could end up controlled by scammers, which is the case now of early KAT mirror KAT.am. The site has been taken down by the MPA but the domain was grabbed and came back as an operation that steals credit card information.
