KickassTorrents resurfaces online thanks to new clone websites

KickAssTorrents was brought down by the US Justice Department, but clone websites are coming up fast.

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Kickass Torrents was shut down after its alleged boss was arrested by US Department of Justice in Poland

A little over 24-hours ago, KickAssTorrents was brought down by the US Justice Department following the arrest of Artem Vaulim, the man behind the popular torrent website in August. Many mourned the loss of their favourite website, but as fate would have it, cloned versions of the website are cropping up, and fast.

While we can’t specifically list out what these sites are called, it is not incredibly difficult to find them if you have tried to do so. Having visited a few of these sites, it would seem the content on them isn’t quite up-to-date, with the latest torrents being from anywhere between three to six days ago, depending on the category you look at.

The websites also seem to have a fair bit of comments on most of the torrents, something that many users will find useful in verifying the quality of the torrent they download. We cannot verify whether the comments data is from KickAssTorrents itself, or has been newly generated on these clone websites.

Truth be told, it was only a matter of time before another rose to take the place of KickAssTorrents, but what is rather surprising is the tenacity with which people came together to put together a clone. One of the mirrors for KickAssTorrents was launched by none other than ISOHunt, the website behind creating mirrors for The Pirate Bay, when that site ran into extensive legal trouble.

The ISOHunt team also seems to have gotten a petition going to get Artem Vaulim exonerated, the possibility of which is bleak at best. A new report says the US Justice Department has requested for his extradition.

Also Read: KickAss Torrents is dead for sure, but online piracy will continue

The emergence of KickAssTorrents clones so quickly is testament to the fact that if one site gets shut down, others will take its place. We’ve seen it happen before. Since BitTorrent relies on a peer-to-peer sharing system, and does not have a “central repository” of sorts, it is nearly impossible to get rid of all the illicit content floating around the internet over the protocol.

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The real issue here isn’t the medium or the platform, but the existence of a strong demand-and-supply relationship. If the supply was to be indefinitely cut, the demand would eventually start to wear thin, but that hasn’t happened in the last 15 years, where we have seen a multitude of services go down and new ones come up almost immediately in their place.

There was a time in early 2000’s when Rapidshare was the go-to hosting website for all pirated content, for those who wanted to download illegal content without having to worry about the availability of download source.

Rapidhshare started experiencing legal troubles and as the website’s demise came into site, Megaupload rose to pick up where the former left off. Even after the extremely public shutting down of Kim DotCom’s Megaupload, piracy through http based hosting sites continues to flourish with the existence of over a dozen uninhibited services.

The same situation is prevalent in the Torrents space. As one website gets shut down, others come up in their place simply due to the fact there is a high demand for pirated/free content and there are enough people willing to supply it. Shutting down a torrent website may slow the traffic down for a few days, but the network builds itself back up in no time as KickAssTorrents case shows.