Kickass Torrents' KAT.ph Domain Seized By Philippine Authorities

hypnosec writes "Kickass Torrents hasn't been accessible since sometime yesterday, and now it has been confirmed that the domain name of the torrent website has been seized by Philippine authorities. Local record labels and the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry said that the torrent site was doing 'irreparable damages' to the music industry and following a formal complaint the authorities resorted to seizure of the main domain name. The site hasn't given up, and is operating as usual under a new domain name. The government of the Philippines has confirmed that the domain name has been seized based on formal complaints and copyright grounds."

Comments

Re:You know

[girlintraining]

The editors should have linked to it in the summary. They should fix the oversight and link to it now.

The editors are now owned an operated by a corporation. As a corporation they can be sued. As they can be sued, they aren't going to partake of legal action that might jeopardize their profits. This isn't like Digg or a dozen other sites that, upon hearing from their users they had caved to political pressure mounted a massive PR campaign.

The slashdot of years past no longer exists. It won't take the chance anymore. In other news, what I really want to know is why torrent sites aren't going to .onion domains ... which can't be taken down by any government order. As a 'hidden service', they're just a new tor circuit connection away from restarting... no DNS, no jurisdictional issues... not much chance of finding out even where they really are. And the .torrent files and magnet links don't take up much bandwidth, unlike the P2P transfers, which don't involve the site anyway...

I really don't get why they're sticking with blockable technologies... maybe they're just stubborn or trying to prove a point.

Interesting

[dido]

The .PH domain administrator, a certain fellow named Joel Disini whom I once met several years ago, has been known to have treated the domain as his proprietary interest. He has vigorously resisted several efforts over the years to redelegate the domain to the agencies of the Philippine government and other interested organisations, ever since it was granted to him by Jon Postel in 1990, and he has taken a dim view of attempts to control the registry ever since, so I wonder what might have gone down behind the scenes to make this happen.