There have been shady times in the torrent world recently. Mainly due to accusations from record companies and straight action from the authorities, but also after some mysterious hacking, file-sharers have been left without some larger search engines. The two giants that people use the most for file-sharing these days, got hit mercilessly during the last week. Things have settled down now.
Some days ago the fans of the Pirate Bay were unable to reach its homepage for almost two days. When everybody was already thinking the worst, it came back online and announced about a DDoS attack against their website.
Now the story with KickassTorrents is a bit different and more complicated. The website basically disappeared overnight, leaving millions of joined users into lack of knowledge. Now we have been informed that the domain Kat.ph was taken away by the Philippine administration because of complaints from local music industries. The companies are appealing for damage that online file-sharing has caused them.
In spite of the domain being seized by the government, KickassTorrents continues the business. There are millions of daily users who are using this service in a legal way sharing files and data with others, so the platform itself keeps running, just without the Kat.ph domain.
It has been reported that the whole process of suspending Kat.ph was very fast and straight. There was no big hassle or arguments around the issue, but suddenly the authorities of the Philippines decided to take action and shut down the main domain of KickassTorrents. That being done, people across the world were disconnected from the large search engine.
The complaining began from local record companies describing the business as violating copyright terms and illegally providing intellectual property online. There was no other choice for the dotPH registry to follow the order given by the government. Actually the registry clears out the issue having started already back in 2011, but without any official court order there was nothing much the authorities could do. The team of KickassTorrents has the chance to appeal the whole process to a higher court, but so far it has not been done. The United States has showed its support to the Philippines to fight against online piracy.
People behind KickassTorrents have not shared any comments yet, but they have moved the system to a new domain and everything is back up at the moment.
This having said, there is no more public information about the case, but we will definitely inform our visitors here whenever anything additional comes out.