The US Judicial Department says it has successfully arrested and charged the so-called alleged founder and administrator of KickassTorrents, the world’s gigantic and most famous BitTorrent sharing site. Artem Vaulin, a 30-year-old guy from Kharkiv, Ukraine, was seized today in Poland on behalf of the US, which has solicited his extradition for offenses linked to operating the website. Vaulin now meets two counts of illegal copyright contravention, one count of Conjuration to commit criminal copyright contravention, and one count of intrigue to commit money laundering. All of the sites domains are in the headway of being seized, while accessibility to the site seems to have halted.
“Vaulin is filed with operating today’s most accessible outlawed file-sharing site, subject to illegally distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted matters,” wrote Leslie R. Caldwell, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, in a statement.
“In an attempt to abstain law enforcement, Vaulin allegedly depended on servers settled in countries around the globe and transferred his domains due to repeated forfeiture and civil lawsuits. His detention in Poland, however, illustrates again that cyber criminals can run, but they cannot cover themselves from law.”
VAULIN IS SAID TO HAVE DISTRIBUTED MORE THAN $1 BILLION IN COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS
Torrent sites have continued held that they are compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and therefore also defended by its safe hideaway provisions. Since websites like KickassTorrents only permit users to provide links to pirated content, the argument goes that those websites should not be held guilty for what users do with that liberty. However, officials say Vaulin’s operation often coasted takedown requests using lengthy commands.
When questioned by Hollywood movie studios or other intellective property owners to exclude links to copyrighted content on the website, KickassTorrents is said to have denied the takedown requests based on meeting a complete list of sometimes secret and confusing pattern, writes Ars Technica.
Commands involve showing evidence of both copyright ownership and that the content in interrogation is in fact legally copyrighted, but KickassTorrents never seemed to mean which one of those requests was not answered while replying to notices. The federal affidavit says KickassTorrents was also taking in more than $16 million in broadcasting revenue as of this year.
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