Kickass Torrents' KAT.ph Domain Seized By Philippine Authorities 122
hypnosec writes "Kickass Torrents hasn't been accessible since sometime yesterday, and now it has been confirmed that the domain name of the torrent website has been seized by Philippine authorities. Local record labels and the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry said that the torrent site was doing 'irreparable damages' to the music industry and following a formal complaint the authorities resorted to seizure of the main domain name. The site hasn't given up, and is operating as usual under a new domain name. The government of the Philippines has confirmed that the domain name has been seized based on formal complaints and copyright grounds."
You know (Score:5, Insightful)
You "editors" could spend all of two minutes to link to the new domain. Or is that too much to ask?
Re:You know (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, since you couldn't be bothered to do it either.
http://kickass.to
Re:You know (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for posting. Any site that has a link taken away from it by any authority should be linked to by everyone in retaliation for the censorship.
The editors should have linked to it in the summary. They should fix the oversight and link to it now.
Re:You know (Score:5, Insightful)
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You wont be able to find any illegal content hosted by the site no matter how long and hard you look, what you will find however are .torrent files and magnet links. Big difference but not one I'd expect you to be willing to accept.
There's no practical difference. You clicky the linky at KickAssTorrents website, warez flows to your computer. My point being, the torrent files and magnet links are the only way to access the illegal content behind them after all. They are essentially a complete description, a virtualization of the files. It's silly to say that a torrent site "does not host the files" because they still make the sharing possible in first place.
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See what I did there?
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Re:You know (Score:5, Informative)
1560 hits to, presumably, mostly illegal torrent files, as found by Google and directly linked to the .torrent file:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=rick%20astley%20filetype%3Atorrent [google.com]
Big nasty illegal downloading site: 61 hits, presumably a small subset of what Google finds.
http://kickass.to/usearch/rick%20astley/ [kickass.to]
Neither site hosts the actual .torrent files.
Please explain why one should be considered illegal and the other not?
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Please explain why one should be considered illegal and the other not?
He wont because he doesnt understand the technology. He doesnt understand that a torrent file is about 12KB in size and contains absolutely nothing even remotely illegal.
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You didn't even mention youtube. Massive infringement there.
But that's owned by the big boys and they are trying to figure out a way to monetize it so infringement is okay.
Of course youtube also has a TON of legal useful files.
It's sad but I think the end is coming for torrents, the internet, etc. Less than a decade most likely.
You kids will be back to sneakernet and small private sites.
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By your logic, the Internet is illegal, since you can access all manner of illegal content in as few as three clicks. Hell, illegal pron viruses sometimes flows to your computer without you even doing anything.
Heck, by your logic, people are illegal because they enable piracy. We should ban those annoying buggers.
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You wont be able to find any illegal content hosted by the site no matter how long and hard you look, what you will find however are .torrent files and magnet links. Big difference but not one I'd expect you to be willing to accept.
While technically true. KAT.ph has served up malicious malware-infecting ads and solicitations for what are obviously scams for a long time. It's not like they are saints.
That said it was a good site.... I am not going to bother with the "alternative" domains, those sites always go down shortly afterwards anyway.
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Re:You know (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not making a legal defense. I'm saying that the law itself is bad, and strictly speaking, it doesn't pass a strict Constitutional muster. The law as it stands is clearly following a different philosophy than the only justified one (public benefit), so it should not be respected, and if anything, should be actively defied. Believe it or not, the law can be wrong, and often is. Also, your broken latin phrase doesn't apply, since the law is not harsh, but injust. It is often grossly disproportionate to the extent that there have been Constitutional challenges to statutory damages, and the harshness of the law is a major concern, but the bigger flaw is that it's based in medieval economics, and has no place in the modern world. The relevant terms are themselves quite telling. 'Copyright' originated from the right to copy, back when it conveyed a positive right to make copies, because it was part of a censorship regime in which proliferation of unsanctioned knowledge was forbidden. If you are ignorant on the matter, look up the Stationer's Company. 'Royalties' are another big hint that the system is antiquated, although a number of prominent organizations calling themselves 'guilds' doesn't help the matter much.
Sweat of the brow arguments are legally invalid in regards to copyright law, per Feist v. Rural. And ethically, sharing information is generally a good thing, with only a few exceptions. I do no oppose supporting the arts, and I likely have done more towards that end than you have.
You've also thrown out the term 'freeloading,' yet another sign of an incompetent copyright proponent. Are you TRYING to fill up your bingo card on that? I would direct you to read Mark Lemly's paper [ssrn.com] on the subject.
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However, even if this wasn't the case, the only thing that matters in copyright policy is the benefits the
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Unless you're suggesting that Congress shouldn't be able to regulate the sale of goods and services within the United States, I think your argument is shit.
Ah, the catch-all argument that the government loves using so they can feel justified in doing just about anything they want with regards to such matters. That said, the constitution does say "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," so if that's not happening, something is indeed wrong.
Naturally, this means that any law you disagree with is thus no longer enforceable and you don't have to worry about the consequences.
That part just seems like a straw man.
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No, copyright is not covered under the commerce clause. If it were, then Sonny Bono could have legitimately gotten his wish of explicitly eternal copyright.
I'd love to: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for lim
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Yeah right, it is soo typical of this entitlement generation to find excuses like that.
I won't waste time and effort arguing my points with you, not due to my inability to do so nor due to lack of car analogies or all the studies that would blow holes the size of the media industry lies into your arguments, it is all out there for you to find on your own accord. What I will do however, is thank you for kindly lumping me into a generation that is decades younger than I am. What was it that fooled you? It can't be my stunning youthful looks, or... *double checks webcam*
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I also think that when you create something, it is your right to ask money for it or not.
I think you would have a hard time to find anyone here that dispute that, but creating something does not make you entitled to dictate what people do with it after they have paid for it.
On a side note, I think that I should be entitled to a refund on the 23.60€ (+30€ for drinks and snacks) I paid for myself and my wife to watch Star Trek last night as it utterly failed to deliver the experience I expect from Star Trek. /toungue in cheek
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And there's strike three. 'Compensation' is a term that doesn't make sense in this context. File sharers are sharing amongst themselves, so there is no new labor and no new product. There is nothing be compensated for because there is nothing lost with additional transactio
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That's not relevant. A hypothetical where they could have made more money doesn't mean that they've lost money. There is no product loss and no additional expenditure or time, therefore there is no loss to be compensated for.
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I'm just not seeing causation in your story.
1) Is this broadly representative of the record business, or is it like my arguing for lower pensions across the board by citing the example of some rich London pensioner who lives in a palace and has loads of dogs?
2) Really, all of this decline is due to file sharing? Nothing else happening there? Is he reliant on a segment of the market that's being disproportionately affected by file sharing? Is he a drinker? Is he almost entirely focussed on disco music, and f
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Yes, I understand that, mathematically there is "nothing lost with additional transactions". But, I think that we both agree there are some sales lost, some people would have bought the work if they couldn't get their hands on them for free.
I don't know what the studies show on this (it's kind of hard to find an unbiased study), but I would guess just offhand that the number of truly lost sales due to downloading and downloading alone are small. High prices (relative to what a person can afford) cause lost sales (and possible acquisition by downloading). (Ridiculous DRM restrictions also cause some lost sales. I won't buy iTunes stuff for this reason.)
How many people do you know say they'd love to buy X or Y but they just can't afford it? I
Re:You know (Score:5, Funny)
Camembert (2891457)
'Yeah right, it is soo typical of this entitlement generation to find excuses like that. '
Please cease and desist from using the Camembert name.
Camembert was granted a protected designation of origin in 1992 after the original AOC in 1983.
If you're not in Normandy, France and a Cheese, you are not entitled to that name even if you're old enough to be a bit runny. It's a copyright violation.
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Camembert was granted a protected designation of origin in 1992 after the original AOC in 1983. It's a copyright violation.
It's only a matter of time before the Germans catch on to this, and McDonalds are forced to sell "American beef-byproduct sandwiches" instead of hamburgers.
That is until the British lay claim trademark rights on that. [wikipedia.org]
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It's not a matter of entitlement, it's a matter of freedom. I am, by default, free to do anything I want - in this case look at what I want and tell other people about it. It's those who want to limit this default freedom in a particular case who need to come up with a reason. It is they who are claiming an entitlement for wielding power over me, not me.
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Copyright, in its current form, is entitlement. Many people infringe nowadays as "revenge" against media conglomerates who want to lock up our culture.
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Count me as one. I view sending any money to that industry as an immoral act. I believe the world would be a better place without them. I'd rather no one watch or listen to their output at all, but if it's going to be consumed I'd much rather it be pirated than purchased.
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Yeah right, it is soo typical if this entitlement generation to find excuses like that.
If you accept that the material itself can be illegally acquired by simply clicking the links, what is the issue with taking the site down?
If you accept that the drugs can be illegally acquired simply by approaching the undercover cop and offering them money, what is the issue with the sting operation being disbanded?
NB: In case you were wondering, me linking or not linking does not make my site illegal; you clicking or not clicking in a jurisdiction where you clicking would be illegal is an illegal act by YOU, not an illegal act by me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier [wikipedia.org]
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Please don't give me the excuse that, if you look long and hard enough you may find a handful of legal torrents on the site.
I'm not sure what an "illegal" torrent is, but you might be interested in this: Law and Order SVU S14E24 720p HDTV X264-DIMENSION [kickass.to]
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I don't care what it's hosting. Censorship of any kind is unacceptable.
Re:You know (Score:5, Interesting)
The editors should have linked to it in the summary. They should fix the oversight and link to it now.
The editors are now owned an operated by a corporation. As a corporation they can be sued. As they can be sued, they aren't going to partake of legal action that might jeopardize their profits. This isn't like Digg or a dozen other sites that, upon hearing from their users they had caved to political pressure mounted a massive PR campaign.
The slashdot of years past no longer exists. It won't take the chance anymore. In other news, what I really want to know is why torrent sites aren't going to .onion domains ... which can't be taken down by any government order. As a 'hidden service', they're just a new tor circuit connection away from restarting... no DNS, no jurisdictional issues... not much chance of finding out even where they really are. And the .torrent files and magnet links don't take up much bandwidth, unlike the P2P transfers, which don't involve the site anyway...
I really don't get why they're sticking with blockable technologies... maybe they're just stubborn or trying to prove a point.
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Right, and there is no way users would download and install a client in order to continue to pirate stuff? Technologies like torrents, DC++, IRC, ez-news etc. will utterly fail for that one reason.
Re:You know (Score:4, Interesting)
Accessibility. There are some people who pirate for a hobby, who would love any excuse to go cloak-and-dagger. There are also many, many more casual pirates who are just thrifty or lazy. If accessing a torrent site requires spending an hour researching and configuring new technology, they'll just find a different site - or go buy what they want legitimately.
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Any more I only seem to torrent things that I already own. Often it is faster to just download an 'illegal' copy than to find the disk in a box somewhere. Other times I opt to just re-buy via steam. If they sold movies and mainstream software I would re-buy those too.
The only time that it at all becomes morally ambiguous for me is when I download something that is cracked merely because the proper version does not work as expected. It is against the law to do so, but then again shouldn't selling a license t
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Any more I only seem to torrent things that I already own. Often it is faster to just download an 'illegal' copy than to find the disk in a box somewhere.
I know what you mean. I have downloaded albums which I own due to it being easier than going to my CD archives and ripping the original. With software though, ain't you scared of malware?
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It doesn't take a PhD to use the TOR Browser bundle [torproject.org], you could also direct users to a TOR gateway service like onion.to if you only care about protecting the anonymity of the site. I think the main reason it's not happening is because the current whack-a-mole game is not working very well. Search for any popular item + torrent on Google and you'll find plenty sites, public torrents usually refer to many independent trackers and on top of that there's trackerless peer exchange. It doesn't really matter where
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What? Someone linked to the site directly above. /. staff do have the ability to remove posts and as such are every bit as liable for links in the comments as for links in the summary.
Re:You know (Score:4, Informative)
"What? Someone linked to the site directly above. /. staff do have the ability to remove posts and as such are every bit as liable for links in the comments as for links in the summary."
No, they aren't. This reflects ignorance of how the law in the US actually works. (No insult intended. A great many people don't know how it works.)
First, the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA -- the only good provisions in the DMCA -- free them from liability from any content uploaded by their users... as long as they don't mess with that content.
Another important legal precedent says that if they DO mess with that content, including editing, censoring, or even top-down moderation, then they DO become liable for that content. Because then they are controlling that content, and if they control it they become liable for it. (Question: if you remove one "illegal" post but not another, why would you NOT be responsible for leaving that other post up? The law says you are. You made a choice.)
There is an exception: if a DMCA take-down request comes from an outside party, then they may be obligated to take down that post. That's one of the many BAD provisions of the DMCA, because it imposes a sort of "prior restraint": forcing people to act before there is any proof or court determination of illegal conduct.
So the upshot is: except for stupid parts of the DMCA (that is to say, most of it), they are far better off just leaving content alone, and not trying to censor it. They stand a much lower chance of running into legal difficulties.
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Possibly a dumb question, but does that mean any site that removes spam or has a profanity filter becomes liable?
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"Possibly a dumb question, but does that mean any site that removes spam or has a profanity filter becomes liable?"
That's not dumb at all, it's actually a pretty good question. I don't know for sure but I don't think that has really been established yet.
But we do have a general legal precedent that says if you attempt to control the content, you assume liability for it. And it's actually a pretty reasonable concept, if you think about it.
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There must be plenty of .onion torrent indexers, not that I've checked because you can still access all the largest indexes quickly and easily with DNS.
They're just playing a game of whack-a-mole.
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Define hard work. Define ownership. IP law does neither. It defines means for which corporations can abuse either case. It has been proven time and again in history and argued for and against. The experiment has run. And what we currently have now is what is causing the "hobbyist abuses".
We, upstanding, law abiding, participating citizens of whatever countries you live in are not responsible for the current state of affairs in regards to this issue.
We did not create the utter lack of respect for human creat
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Either way, hasn't screwed with their service, still working great. SickBeard Torrent version might need an update, maybe Couchpotato
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New Domain (Score:5, Informative)
http://kickass.to/ [kickass.to]
No https yet.
Re:New Domain (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone who just want the encryption https provides, you can enter https manually and accept the "wrong domain" warning; I've done so, and confirmed that the kay.ph certificate is compatible.
KAT has been pretty diligent about their certs, so they should have one for .to soon.
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Tis is great, Ive never heard of this site untill now. As our local riaa branch cut me off from the pirate bay, this place is brilliant! Thanks MPAA!
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yeah but they are ridden with porn popups, to such an extend that they are actually unusable on ipad
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http://kickassproxy.info/
Censorship bitch.
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few? really?
ok chief
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tcp, ip, http, https, ftp, smtp.... you get the picture?
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
The .PH domain administrator, a certain fellow named Joel Disini [wikipedia.org] whom I once met several years ago, has been known to have treated the domain as his proprietary interest. He has vigorously resisted several efforts over the years to redelegate the domain to the agencies of the Philippine government and other interested organisations, ever since it was granted to him by Jon Postel in 1990, and he has taken a dim view of attempts to control the registry ever since, so I wonder what might have gone down behind the scenes to make this happen.
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They just went over his head? It doesn't matter if the guy was listed as the domain administrator or not, the real control is at the DNS servers themselves.
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Maybe they gave
The damage must be incalculable (Score:2)
Well... actually it's is calculable: https://www.dot.ph/services [www.dot.ph]
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Wait their currency is actually called... "PHP"? O.o
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Wait their currency is actually called... "PHP"? O.o
And their terrorists are MILFs. [wikipedia.org]
This is getting annoying, let's go to Tor (Score:2)
For someone who just needs a torrent every 3 months or so, this cat-and-mouse game quite annoying. How about making a Tor hidden service for things like thepiratebay, just like the silk road? ( https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en [torproject.org] ). I am wary of suggesting it, because it will turn the powerful media lobby against Tor, but someone is going to have a fit about Tor sooner or later anyway. In fact, Tor is quite extreme, because it allows hosting of *anything* without any possibility for
Culture (Score:1)
It Would Be Great Fun... (Score:1)
...to see such magic that everyone who acquires something of value against the wishes of those that created the value go directly to jail for, say, 90 days. Don't want to pay for movies or music? Then make your own. Oh, wait, whats that? You're a talentless slug that can't find middle C on any instrument? Well... that's the point - you pay people who know things and can do things to do them for your benefit.
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You must work for the industry for suggesting something as stupid.
1. You're asking the government to waste an average of USD$5887 [wikipedia.org] to incarcerate someone for 90 days
2. 90 days is extreme for something like copyright infringement
3. The real losses are nowhere near what the MPAA and RIAA wants you to believe. If they can sell a song for 99 cents then the actual damage for downloading a song is 99 cents, not thousands of dollars. You really need to watch this [ted.com] and get back to reality.
Insane people like you are t
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3. The real losses are nowhere near what the MPAA and RIAA wants you to believe. If they can sell a song for 99 cents then the actual damage for downloading a song is 99 cents
Actually, copyright infringement causes no real losses; all it does is cause someone to not gain something, and even that is not certain. Yes, it is not even certain that copyright infringement causes someone to not gain money, and that is because it is also not certain that the person would have purchased the product if he/she could not download it.
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Well, yeah, we can debate wether or not there is actual losses because there's a lot of "IFs" involved, but if we take for granted that there IS losses, it should be the same as the sticker price. In the case of songs, it's an average of 99 cents on almost all Internet music stores.
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Music industry? I don't have a thing to do with the music industry, beyond being an occasional customer. Naw, I'm just some guy that had parents that taught him that stealing is WRONG, and should be punsished. And 90 days would be insanely light punishment for STEALING - should be more like 1 - 5 in the state pen. But between that, and having my car broken into by thieves so many times I lost track, and losing 10's of 1000's of dollars of tools, ham radios, CB radios, and various optics, there's nothing tha
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Its stealing, termite. You take something that doesn't belong to you, its stealing. Duh...
Impact on torrent traffic? (Score:2)
I wonder if there's any visible impact on torrent traffic from this. Obviously torrents will continue working and many people will just go to another website, but there could still be a small short-term impact. Would be interesting to see.
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I wonder if there's any visible impact on torrent traffic from this.
If memory serves, kat.ph doesn't have a tracker, or if they do, they're one of several trackers per torrent. Also, because they're a public tracker, even if the tracker went down, most swarms would be able to continue for a while using DHT and other trackerless technologies. If kat.ph went down and remained down, by time the people who had files all had them seeded, the masses would move on to the next major public tracker, as was done with suprnova, mininova, demonoid, and depending on where you live, the
Why the open internet? (Score:1)
Why do we continue to use the open-net for things like this? All sites should be moved to I2P or free net. The transfers could be done via regular net, but the sites not. Doing this would solve the problem of a single point of failure for the 'list' and the constant whack-a-mole game that is placed, and solve the problem of traditionally slow speeds thru these types of anonymous proxies which would put off all but the hard core paranoid..
Its 2013, not 2003. It's time to change tactics.
A better solution needed (Score:3)
It now seems obvious that downloading torrents from a centralised website has had its day.
Countries all over the world are blocking access to trackers and taking away the domain names, and the centralised nature of trackers has always been a weak point.
What we need is for a major player, e.g. TPB, to step up the game and go TOR only (for website access - actual data transfer would still be over clearnet). By providing access via a TOR hidden service, you reduce or remove the possibility of the site being taken down, you provide a degree of anonymity for website operators and you have the added effect of educating the wider public about the private browsing benefits that TOR allows.