Soon after KickassTorrents, the popular torrents streaming website was taken down, clone websites with names like kat.am and kickasstorrents.websites had propped up, but it appears these are now down as well. On July 21, it was reported that owner of KickassTorrents Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland on charges of copyright infringement to the tune of $1 billion. The owner of file-sharing website KickassTorrents was indicted in the United States for copyright infringement related to the distribution of more than $1 billion worth of movies, video games, music recordings and other content. Of course, within days of KickassTorrents aka KAT being taken down, other urls had started cropping up. Torrent websites with names like kickasstorrents.website, kat.am, and urls with kickass in the name had come up. We had noted earlier that some of these websites were quite up-to-date, with the latest torrents being from anywhere between three to six days ago, depending on the category. One of the torrents was launched by none other than ISOHunt, which had also created mirror versions of The Pirate Bay, when it was taken down over legal trouble. The website set up thanks to ISOHunt is now offline, according to reports. However other replacements are popping up, reports VentureBeat, with the name kickass being present in the URL. Owner of the most popular copycat url KAT.Am told Torrent Freak, that they were not worried, "because if it’s not us, someone else will keep the game running." As we had noted in an earlier piece, with torrent sites, if one gets taken down, other soon pop up to take its place, and it's a cycle that never ends. Given that BitTorrent relies on a peer-to-peer sharing system, and does not have a “central repository” of sorts, getting rid of all content that violates copyright is an impossible task. Plus the demand for this content, ensures that online piracy is not really easy to kill completely. Also read: KickAss Torrents is offline, but online piracy is far from dead The US criminal complaint against KickassTorrents said the website offered “a sophisticated and user-friendly environment in which its users are able to search for and locate content” which is protected by copyright. It was the world's 69th most frequently visited website on the internet. The complaint said officials were able to track and identify Vaulin from records provided by Apple on his iCloud account. With agency inputs
