A joint US-Polish law enforcement operation has led to the arrest of the alleged owner of the piracy-focused BitTorrent links site KickAssTorrents.
The US Department of Justice announced yesterday that Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin has been arrested in Poland and that it will seek to extradite him to Chicago to face criminal copyright infringement charges.
The site, which has been banned at the ISP level in countries including the UK, provides links to download and share copyrighted works such as movies and music from other BitTorrent users.
But it’s perhaps best known in the domain name industry for regularly jumping from one TLD to another as its domains are terminated by local authorities.
According to the DoJ, it has been seen on kickasstorrents.com, kat.ph (Philippines), kickass.to (Tonga), kickass.so (Somalia) and kat.cr (Costa Rica).
The department said it has seized seven domain names as part of its operation.
Source
The US Department of Justice announced yesterday that Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin has been arrested in Poland and that it will seek to extradite him to Chicago to face criminal copyright infringement charges.
The site, which has been banned at the ISP level in countries including the UK, provides links to download and share copyrighted works such as movies and music from other BitTorrent users.
But it’s perhaps best known in the domain name industry for regularly jumping from one TLD to another as its domains are terminated by local authorities.
According to the DoJ, it has been seen on kickasstorrents.com, kat.ph (Philippines), kickass.to (Tonga), kickass.so (Somalia) and kat.cr (Costa Rica).
The department said it has seized seven domain names as part of its operation.
Source
