The alleged owner of KickassTorrents, Artem Vaulin did not get released from jail after his attorney had requested it. The court in Poland said they couldn’t provide the man supervised release due to the accusations of online piracy and money laundering which were serious enough to keep Vaulin in custody. Furthermore, the government of United States denied the request from attorney to dismiss charges against Vaulin, and therefore added that they needed to take the impact of the torrent website seriously.
In July this year the police in Poland arrested the alleged KickassTorrents owner Artem Vaulin. The man accused in online piracy and money laundering has been staying in jail in Poland ever since. The young Ukrainian earned attention from the US authorities for being connected to the largest public torrent site KickassTorrents.
The court case in Poland has been ongoing now for months and Vaulin has not been able to get supervised release from jail. The defense is pointing at medical care that they claim to be necessary for the Ukrainian. The court has denied such need for medical attention and therefore also declined any release even with the supervision of local police. The attorney of Artem Vaulin will continue to fight for the human rights as long as it’s necessary.
Next, the defense team has started to question fundamental flaws around the arrest. They suggest that torrent files don’t contain any copyrighted materials themselves and therefore there is nothing criminal in Vaulin’s activity. The US authorities on the other hand claimed this to be nonsense and added that torrent sites weren’t just search engines, but something much more harmful. The prosecutor sees torrent sites as seeds for making copyright crimes possible, and compares the case of KAT to drug dealers who never touched any drugs themselves.
The US attorney is sure that criminal copyright infringement has taken place in the case of KAT and Artem Vaulin. In full response from the US attorney, Artem Vaulin needs to be held liable for the copyright infringement he has supposedly been active in, and there should be no trade-off whatsoever. The government of US wants the trial to continue in its current path and it seems for now that the Polish court is in the same boat. We can wait and see what the next events in this case bring, but at the moment Artem Vaulin will be held in custody and the trial about the accusations continue.