Slashdot Mirror
Feds Seize KickassTorrents Domains and Arrest Owner In Poland (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal authorities announced on Wednesday the arrest of the alleged mastermind of KickassTorrents (KAT), the world's largest BitTorrent distribution site. As of this writing, the site is still up. Prosecutors have formally charged Artem Vaulin, 30, of Ukraine, with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. Like The Pirate Bay, KAT does not host individual infringing files but rather provides links to .torrent and .magnet files so that users can download unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, and more from various BitTorrent users. According to a Department of Justice press release sent to Ars Technica, Vaulin was arrested on Wednesday in Poland. The DOJ will shortly seek his extradition to the United States. "Vaulin is charged with running today's most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials," Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in the statement. "In an effort to evade law enforcement, Vaulin allegedly relied on servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits. His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice." KickassTorrents added a dark web address last month to make it easier for users to bypass blockades installed by ISPs.
So if I Google kickass torrents and Google returns a link to their site, shouldn't Google be prosecuted as an accessory?
See how fucking stupid these charges are?
I guess the DOJ needs something to distract everyone from the whole letting Clinton commit treason thing.
Warning. Last time the Feds seized a site (some child porn site on TOR) they kept hosting it themselves for a month with malware on it. Accessing KAT right now would be foolish.
"Vaulin is charged with running today's most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials," Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in the statement. "In an effort to evade law enforcement, Vaulin allegedly relied on servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits. His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice."
- is this what passes for 'justice' today?
I guess he, who has the most guns defines what justice is. Justice is the opposite of what this Orwellian prick says. Justice is in non initiation of violence by any government. Justice is in equal treatment of individuals by law regardless of their circumstances. Using government oppression to enforce copyright has nothing to do with justice.
Government may have a function, that function being enforcing contract law and dealing with fraud. That is all that any government should ever have any power to do. Everything else is oppression, not justice.
You can't handle the truth.
For trial? Hahahahaha
"His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice."
What does justice have to do with it?
"His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice."
No, what his arrest demonstrates is how low we have become allowing Hollywood to buy laws, how little understanding judges and juries have of technology, and how weak Poland is permitting us to fuck with a sovereign citizen.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
According to the ars article, it looks like the arrested man made millions of dollars in advertising revenue from his site. It is one thing to engage in filesharing - copyright infringing and all, but in addition he was profiteering big time from his activity. That makes it to me quite different from a legal point of view - he obviously made money from an illegal activity, and I expect that the punishment will be harsher because of it.
Arrests for what?
For looking at a page that offers magnet links that you might or might not access?
KAT was never about finding torrents, as you say, it isn't hard by various methods. The real value of KAT was the community. The KAT community would comment and rate torrents. As you're probably aware, there are a lot of bad torrents, and simply fake ones generated by the various copyright associations. The only thing KAT really did was enable a large group of people to crowd source the verification of torrents enabling people to find good ones. Otherwise yes you can most easily find a "torrent" you are looking for, but is it any good, or is it a fake.
However, none of this has anything to do with technology, so any site can do it, it just helps to be a popular one (i.e. a larger community to manually verify torrents). Should KAT go away, people will just move to a different one, and things continue as before. There will likely be some disruption, but it will only really be a temporary win for the copyright associations. They of course will simply use this is justification of their existence to continue to leech money from the various media industries (hence the "BILLION" dollar figure which is complete BS, as the simplistic example goes the car thief wasn't going to buy the car if he hadn't stolen it)... Rinse, repeat, etc...