Slashdot Mirror
IsoHunt Launches Unofficial KAT Mirror
An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected KickassTorrents (also known as Kickass Torrents or just KAT) at kickasstorrents.website. It might look like the original KAT site, which went down yesterday after alleged founder Artem Vaulin was arrested, but upon closer inspection it's simply a basic mirror. The isoHunt team tells me the KAT mirror is hosting files from the last year to year-and-a-half. So no, not everything is available. Furthermore, there is no forum, no community, and no support. And, you shouldn't get too attached, the administrators warn. Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't necessarily condone piracy -- at least, in most cases.
I do, I do... Okay, not for you, you only leach!
I have never heard of Kickass Torrent in the past. Ever. Now I will be very curious just to see on what have they got.
Now, this attempt to arrest an individual who is hosting a server which has url information reminds me very much of recent LEO work in Orlando Disney park, after a 2 year old was snatched by the alligators.
It was surprising to see when two days after the accident the local police reported that they, the police officers, have "identified" the "guilty" alligator and "put him down". http://www.people.com/article/...
You can't make this shit up.
At some point then it dawns that all this fuss was about PD overtime.
Same principles apply in KickAssTorrent website: police force imitate investigative work, they convince the judge that "data is in the computer" (remember the scene from Zoolander - The files is in the computer https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ),they imitate the value delivered, eventually they identify the guilty server (alligator) and take him down.
The winners: police force getting a lot of overtime pay on a work which is not really dangerous nor this is a law enforcement.
You know what enriches our lives even more? High quality cultural work, which only gets created when people can live from it. If you take away copyright law, you take away the ability for content creators to live from their creations. Yes, maybe there will be some famous hyped youtube stars who can afford thanks to lots of patreon donors. But for most artists, a world without copyright would be totally disastrous. It is already now very easy for artists to fall into poverty, with copyright gone, it will be even easier.
Piracy is illegal and it should stay that way. Its a smaller crime than say, stealing, but it is a crime.
This line of reasoning is based on the false notion that the only way for people to be paid for creative works is through copyright. This is absolutely not the case and there are many examples of alternative business models that don't rely on copyright. MMORPG's can earn money because pirating the client game code doesn't get you an account or a server to play on. Almost anything that was made through crowd funding doesn't need copyright because all of the compensation is provided upfront before the work is even created. Downloading songs is no substitute for going to a live concert.
Not to mention there are likely thousands of un-thought-of models, products, and creative services which have yet to be tried that would not require copyright.
Not all 'high quality cultural work' is created to sell as a source of income. There are some forms of media that cost too much to be produced any other way, like movies or TV series. But the cost of producing music is so low that many amateurs now produce material just as good as any professional purely as a hobby or for the recognition. Open-source software also thrives, and most of the developers for that are either enthusiasts, or working on behalf of corporate users of the software that need to improve it for their own purposes.
It could even be argued that for-profit does not produce very good cultural works, because it leads to compromising artistic values in the interests of mass appeal. Hollywood might be taking in the money, but their films are all starting to look very similar now - and how many pop songs are love odes to an unnamed person?
Don't host a mirror.
Host a mirror with the entire database available as a torrent.
Let everyone who wants to take the legal risk launch their own copycat site, with the KAT database as a launchpad so that they can go on to achieve even more. It took a few years to arrest one man in Poland - lets see them arrest twenty, spread over China, Russia, a server in a dorm room that no-one will claim ownership for, and wherever that Tor tunnel terminates.