Downloaders worldwide are a distressed lot. Their most favourite site – “KickassTorrents” has been identified and extended a closure on charges of piracy and copy right infringements. One of the sites servers was based in Chicago from where the police traced the 30 year old Artem Vaulin to Poland and made an arrest. He was charged with two separate counts of criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
It is believed that Vaulin, who hails from Kharkiv, Ukraine, founded “KickassTorrents” in 2008 and has remained widely popular ever since. It is claimed that the site received 50 million unique visitors per month. The US authorities site that “KickassTorrents” was an ‘Illegal file sharing website’. They have also mentioned that the site has many movies available for download which were still running in theatres. This causes immense loss to people involved in the creation and distribution of motion pictures and faces a huge threat to Intellectual Property rights of the minds behind movies.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) departments in the US were beneficially assisted by the International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs and the Polish Border Guard and National Prosecutor’s Office in the operation to nab Artem Vaulin in Poland.
This comes as the first of many steps required to curb piracy worldwide. Downloaders across the world are sure to find a quick substitute to the banned site. Though “KickassTorrents” may not see the light of day anytime soon, how will any cybercrime unit detect and stop hundreds of similar sites operation from various servers across continents?
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22 July 2016
Team Rapid