KickassTorrents is back and its community should be thanked for its rebirth

KickassTorrents, formerly the world’s largest torrent site, has been reborn courtesy of its original keepers. US federal authorities had taken down the site around July this year, soon after the arrest of the site’s alleged owner, Artem Vaulin. As with most torrent sites today, KickassTorrents’ (KAT) servers were distributed all over the world, making them almost impossible to take down at once. While the domain names were seized by federal authorities and its owner arrested, the site’s original database of torrents and community remain intact. TorrentFreak reports that the site’s community, which includes forum admins, moderators and members banded together to rebuild the site. Their efforts are documented on forums at Katcr.co. The team have finally patched together a site that looks like the original KAT and relaunched it as Katcr.co/New. Since these admins and moderators don’t appear to have access to KAT’s original codebase, the site isn’t an exact replica of the original site_. TorrentFreak_ points out that the user database is new and that the torrent database isn’t yet complete. [caption id=“attachment_3160622” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image[/caption] The chance to rebuild the site from scratch has apparently given the team to build a more secure KAT. “In order to keep our members safe we chose to rebuild and keep only safe elements. Despite the fact that a rebuild took longer, the safety of our community comes first,” a community member told TorrentFreak. Interestingly, the KAT crew seem unconcerned by legal action against the site. They claim that the site follows DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) procedures and that their goal is to maintain KAT as a “community-based forum and a torrent search engine” that doesn’t host unlawful content. We couldn’t verify that statement for ourselves because the new site appears to be down. A message from the site admin reads, “Servers Load have been affected, there are other few sources of this issue, it’s not just one.” Whatever else KAT members may claim, however, it’s worth noting that the federal authorities have charged the owner of the site with copyright infringement and seized the original domains for hosting over $1billion worth of copyrighted content. And who’re we kidding, KAT didn’t become the world’s largest torrent site by sticking to the letter of the law.