Mirror sites keep piracy alive after Kickass Torrents Arten Vaulin’s arrest in the US
Washington July23: One day after the US government arrested the piracy website’s founder, Arten Vaulin, and blocked all the domains of the website, KickassTorrents (KAT) mirrors have surfaced which seemed to be clones of the original Kickass website on Friday.
At least two clones of KAT can be spotted, including one created by IsoHunt (KickassTorrents.website — a fairly limited mirror), and a second located at KAT.am.
In a major victory over the war against piracy by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) following the arrest of Arten Vaulin . Pirated files worth $1 billion are said to have been distributed through the site, which allows users to download pirated content such as movies, music, games and software.
KAT’s alleged founder and operator, 30-year-old Artem Vaulin, has been charged by the DOJ with “unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials,” and claimed that he collected roughly $16 million in advertising revenue a year.
There are innumerable number of torrent sites, operated by people like Vaulin, who host the content uploaded by millions of users globally on the internet.
Different tactics are used to avoid blockade by authorities globally.One of them is to host their domains on multiple service providers and mask these behind services such as CloudFare, allowing anonymity on the internet.
Indians are among the largest consumers of pirated content, driven by those not willing to wait or pay for movies and television shows.
A copy of Udta Punjab, a Hindi movie starring Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, was leaked online and downloaded by thousands of users via torrent after director
Abhishek Chaubey won a case against the Censor Board over cuts in the movie. The version given to the censor board was leaked online a day ahead of the movie’s release.
The producers of Udta Punjab were helpless in preventing the movie spreading online.
“In the Indian context ,a majority of torrent sites are not located within the territorial boundaries of the country,” Pavan Duggal, a cyber security expert added.
