KickassTorrents (KAT), the most visited illegal file-sharing site in the world, recently got a knock from perhaps the most unwanted visitor in the world: The U.S. Justice Department. The DOJ has announced that U.S. authorities have charged the site’s owner, Artem Vaulin of Ukraine, with criminal copyright infringement. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court of Chicago in July, states that Vaulin, who was arrested in Poland and will subsequently be extradited to the U.S., faces one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. The most serious charge, conspiracy to commit money laundering, carries a maximum of twenty years in prison.
According to the Justice Department, KAT distributed millions of movies, TV shows, video games, and other electronic media since 2008. Movies as recently released as Finding Dory and Captain America: Civil War could be downloaded from the site. Vaulin has faced multiple lawsuits and seizures in the past, but has always been able to evade all of them by keeping his servers in different countries across the world, and by repeatedly moving his domains. The feds put the total value of the copyrighted materials on the site at more than $1 billion. With 50 million unique visitors a month, KAT is estimated to be the 69th most frequently visited website on the Internet, and operated in 28 languages. The site has made Vaulin really wealthy, too. His net worth is estimated at more than $54 million, and annual advertising revenue for the site is between $12 and $23 million. The DOJ has seized his bank account and seven domains associated with KAT.
Under the U.S. Copyright Act’s section on criminal offenses:
Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed –
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.
The Feds will usually file criminal copyright infringement charges for large-scale commercial infringement, which is why you’re most likely to see them in cases of torrent sites like KAT and a physical counterfeit goods operation, versus someone who posts a musician’s one song for download on their website for free.
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Could Vaulin have avoided this if he’d abided by the requirements of the safe harbor provisions of the Copyright Act, which limits the liability of websites for user infringement? Not likely. The aim of safe harbor is to protect against civil liability. In any case, KAT and Vaulin were rejecting takedown requests from copyright holders, without any specific details on what was wrong with the requests according to an affidavit by a Department of Homeland Security agent, as reported by Ars Technica.
Stay tuned to our blog for updates on this case.
