Type of site | Torrent directory, magnet links provider |
---|---|
Available in | Multilingual (30+ languages, English primary language) |
URL | kickass |
Registration | Optional |
Users | Over 1 million per day (August 2015) |
Launched | November 2008 |
Current status | Offline |
Part of a series on |
File sharing |
---|
File Hosts |
Video sharing sites |
BitTorrent sites |
Media Servers |
Technologies |
File sharing networks |
Academic |
P2P clients |
Anonymous file sharing |
History and societal aspects |
By country or region |
Comparisons |
KickassTorrents (commonly abbreviated KAT) was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking. [1] KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time. [2]
In December 2016, former KAT staff members revived the KAT community by creating a website with its predecessor's features and appearance. [3]
KAT was initially launched in November 2008 at the domain name kickasstorrents.com. In April 2011, it moved to a Philippine domain kat.ph after a series of domain name seizures by the US Department of Justice against Demonoid and Torrentz. [4] The site later moved across several different domains, which the operators planned to do every six months, including ka.tt, kickass.to, kickass.so, kickasstorrents.im and kat.cr. [5]
In June 2016, KAT added an official Tor network .onion address. [6]
KickassTorrents on its website claimed that it complied with the DMCA and it removed infringing torrents reported by content owners. [7]
On 28 February 2013, Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom were ordered by the High Court in London to block access to KickassTorrents, along with two other torrent sites. Judge Richard Arnold ruled that the site's design contributed to copyright infringement. [8] [9] On 14 June, the domain name was changed to Tonga domain name kickass.to as a part of the site's regular domain change. [10]
Later on 23 June, KAT was delisted from Google at the request of the MPAA. [11] In late August 2013, KAT was blocked by Belgian ISPs. [12] In January 2014, several Irish ISPs started blocking KAT, [13] and in February, Twitter started blocking links to KAT, although this was stopped after a few days. [14] In June 2014, KAT was blocked in Malaysia by the Communications and Multimedia Commission for violating copyright law. [15]
In December 2014, the site moved to the Somalia domain name kickass.so, reportedly as a result of site's regular domain change. [16] [17] On 9 February 2015, kickass.so was listed as "banned" on Whois, causing the site to go offline. Later that day, the site reverted to its former domain name kickass.to. [18] On 14 February 2015, it was found that messages mentioning "kickass.to" were blocked on Steam chat, but "kickass.so" and other popular torrent websites were not blocked, only flagged as "potentially malicious". [19]
On 23 April 2015, the site moved to the Isle of Man-based domain kickasstorrents.im [20] but was quickly taken down later that day and on 24 April it was moved to the Costa Rica based domain name kat.cr. [21] By July 2015, the kat.cr address had been removed from Google Search's results. After the removal, the top Google search result for KAT in many locations pointed to a fake KAT site that prompted visitors to download malware. [22]
In October 2015, Portugal bypassed its courts by making a voluntary agreement between ISPs, rightsholders and the Ministry of Culture to block access to KAT and most of the other popular BitTorrent websites. [23] The website had similarly been banned in India for copyright violations during that period. [24] At the same time, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox blocked access to KAT because of security concerns with some of the ads pointing to malware. [25] In April 2016, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox blocked KAT due to phishing concerns. [26] Both blocks were later removed after KAT dealt with the concerns.
One of the main domains of the site went up for sale in August 2016. [27] [28]
On 20 July 2016, the United States Department of Justice announced that it had seized the KAT.cr domain and had identified its alleged owner. Artem Vaulin (Ukrainian : Артем Ваулін), a 30-year-old Ukrainian man known online as "tirm", was detained in Poland after being charged with a four-count U.S. criminal indictment. [29] The remaining domains were taken offline voluntarily after the KAT.cr domain name was seized. [30] Following the seizure of the original KAT domain multiple unofficial mirrors have been put online. These have no connection to the original team who have been urging users to exercise caution. [31] [32] A number of these mirrors have since been taken down. [33]
Vaulin was arrested after investigators cross-referenced an IP address he used for an iTunes transaction with an IP address used to log into KAT's Facebook page. The FBI also posed as an advertiser and obtained details of a bank account associated with the site. [30] The investigation was led by special agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan, who also tracked down Ross Ulbricht, the operator of the online black market Silk Road. [34]
The criminal complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by Homeland Security Investigations, said that it was in possession of full copies of KAT's hard drives, including its email server. The investigation suggested that KAT made over $12 million per year in advertising revenue. [35]
In late August 2016, the Department of Justice followed the complaint with a full grand jury indictment of Vaulin and two other defendants, Ievgen Kutsenko and Oleksandr Radostin; while Vaulin was still being held in Polish prison. [36] Vaulin has both a Polish and US legal representation Ira Rothken as his lawyers to handle the allegations. [37] [38] In November 2016, a Polish appeals court refused to allow bail for Vaulin, stating the evidence provided by the US is sufficient to keep him in prison. [39]
The case of Artem Vaulin prosecution was officially put on hold after Vaulin "disappeared" from Poland. His bail of $108,000 was forfeited. His legal team was reported has withdrawn from the case after they lost contact with Vaulin. [40]
In mid-December 2016, some of the former KAT staff and moderators launched a website with a similar appearance as the original under the domain katcr.co. [3] The site has been offline since July 2020.
The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer, file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.
Demonoid is a BitTorrent tracker and website founded in 2003 to facilitate file-sharing related discussion and provide a searchable index of torrent files. The site underwent intermittent periods of extended downtime in its history due to the occasional need to move the server, generally caused by cancellation of ISP service due to local political pressure.
TorrentFreak (TF) is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing, as well as on copyright infringement and digital rights.
Torrentz was a Finland-based metasearch engine for BitTorrent, run by an individual known as Flippy, and founded on 24 July 2003. It indexed torrents from various major torrent websites, and offered compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website in 2012.
This is a comparison of BitTorrent websites that includes most of the most popular sites. These sites typically contain multiple torrent files and an index of those files.
EZTV was a TV torrent distribution group founded in May 2005 and dissolved in April 2015, after a hostile takeover of their domains and brand by "EZCLOUD LIMITED". It quickly became the most visited torrent site for TV shows.
PirateBrowser is an Internet browser by The Pirate Bay used to circumvent Internet censorship.
This is a list on countries where at least one internet service provider (ISP) formerly or currently censors the popular file sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB).
Popcorn Time is a multi-platform, free software BitTorrent client that includes an integrated media player. The application provides a piracy-based alternative to subscription-based video streaming services such as Netflix. Popcorn Time uses sequential downloading to stream video listed by several torrent websites, and third-party trackers can also be added manually. The legality of the software depends on the jurisdiction.
The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a unit of the City of London Police, the national lead force for fraud. It was established in 2013 with the responsibility to investigate and deter serious and organised intellectual property crime in the United Kingdom.
Mirror sites or mirrors are replicas of other websites. The concept of mirroring applies to network services accessible through any protocol, such as HTTP or FTP. Such sites have different URLs than the original site, but host identical or near-identical content. Mirror sites are often located in a different geographic region than the original, or upstream site. The purpose of mirrors is to reduce network traffic, improve access speed, ensure availability of the original site for technical or political reasons, or provide a real-time backup of the original site. Mirror sites are particularly important in developing countries, where internet access may be slower or less reliable.
Nyaa Torrents is a BitTorrent website focused on East Asian media. It is one of the largest public anime-dedicated torrent indexes.
RARBG is a website that provides torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. From 2014 onward, RARBG has repeatedly appeared in TorrentFreak's yearly list of most visited torrent websites. It was ranked 5th as of June 2021, and 4th as of Feb 2023. The website does not allow users to upload their own torrents.
1337x is a website that provides a directory of torrent files and magnet links used for peer-to-peer file sharing through the BitTorrent protocol. According to the TorrentFreak news blog, 1337x is the third most popular torrent website as of 2021.
The Torrent Project or Torrent Search Project was a metasearch engine for torrent files, which consolidated links from other popular torrent hosting pages such as ExtraTorrent. It was available as an alternative and successor for the closed Torrentz.eu and KickassTorrents sites, and its index included over 8 million torrent files, and had a clean, simple interface. Beyond allowing torrent files of popular films, it also carried self-produced content. It had an API that allowed the search function to be integrated into applications, and the news-site TorrentFreak suggested that it could have allowed streaming in the future. It had adopted the Torrents Time plugin.
YIFY Torrents or YTS was a peer-to-peer release group known for distributing large numbers of movies as free downloads through BitTorrent. YIFY releases were characterised through their small file size, which attracted many downloaders.
123Movies, GoMovies, GoStream, MeMovies or 123movieshub was a network of file streaming websites operating from Vietnam which allowed users to watch films for free. It was called the world's "most popular illegal site" by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in March 2018, before being shut down a few weeks later on foot of a criminal investigation by the Vietnamese authorities. As of July 2022, websites imitating the brand remain active.
Z-Library is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts and general-interest books. It began as a mirror of Library Genesis, from which most of its books originate.
Openload was a file-sharing website shut down in 2019 after legal action by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. The site was highly-used before its shutdown, making most of its money from advertising and cryptojacking. The site was designated as a notorious market and often used for copyright infringement.
At the time of writing the main domain name Kat.cr has trouble loading, but various proxies still appear to work. KAT's status page doesn't list any issues, but this will be updated shortly.
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