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Piracy Television Entertainment Your Rights Online

Movie Studios 'Take Down' Popular KAT Mirror 111

Posted by msmash from the 'not-enough,-not-yet' dept.
Following the shut down of KickassTorrents website -- after its alleged owner was arrested, Hollywood studios are playing the game of cat and mouse with pirates to put an absolute end to KickassTorrents. An anonymous reader writes: One of the most popular KAT mirrors has had its domain name taken down following pressure from the major Hollywood studios. The Armenian .AM registry was quick to disable the KAT.am domain, after it received a stark warning from the Motion Picture Association, representing Hollywood's major studios. This notice requires you to immediately (within 24 hours) take effective measures to end and prevent further copyright infringement. All opportunities provided by the website to download, stream or otherwise obtain access to the entertainment content should be disabled permanently," MPA's email reads.As TorrentFreak reports, the takedown of kat.am domain isn't the end of the website. The publication spoke to the operator of the website, and learned that they were "making continuous" attempts to bring the website back -- utilizing the channels available. Kat.am is down already, but kickass.cd and kickass.mx mirros have since cropped up. Slashdot understands that Kickass torrent community is now back in action again, on a whole new domain.
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Movie Studios 'Take Down' Popular KAT Mirror More

Movie Studios 'Take Down' Popular KAT Mirror

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  • Piracy hydra (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you cut down one head, two will grow back.

  • Happened with Demonoid and Isohunt, too. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Thinking they can take down links to torrents is the height of hubris.

  • It's a futile battle.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ninthbit ( 623926 )
      Is it futile? Because they play wak-a-mole, anyone with flexget or other automated scripts are down until they adjust to an appropriate mirror or alt service. The casual pirates (the billions downloading Game of Thrones) now also have to hunt through the hordes of scam/virus-bot mirrors until the field stabilizes again and a site with a good rep surfaces.... Of course then the mole gets whacked again. It's about breaking the stability and ease. If piracy isn't worth the headache of researching sites and

      • Re:Why do they even try anymore (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @10:13AM (#52606339)

        The problem is that they do not offer a more convenient alternative. You might remember how it is [typepad.com].

        Even having to spend 2 days to find a new torrent source beats this.

        • I'm not saying I don't agree. I'm just playing Devil's Advocate in the sense that it does have some measure of effect. Personally, the TV side of the industry is a bunch of morons. Post a torrent with the ads included. I think people are over dramatic about how much everyone hates ads. Look at the damage YouTube is doing to them (who pays for Red?). If I could subscribe to an RSS feed of legal TV show torrents that had included ads, I would totally jump on it. It would make everything so much easier.

          • Hell, sometimes the ads are more entertaining that the main event. Just don't overdo it.

            Putting out legal torrents with ads would actually be better than putting ads on DVDs. DVD ads go stale and worthless. Torrent ads can be kept up to date and adjusted for maximum marketing effect.

      • I think you can find private torrent sites in most countries. Not sure about the OS of A, but almost all of EU countries have private tracker websites. They're not as many as they used to be, granted, but there's plenty still.

    • Ah yes, the old "if it's too hard, don't try" philosophy.

  • Can't just replace kat.cr with kickass.cd, the RSS feed facility is badly broken.

    RSS feeds seems to work at the top-level categories, but you can't turn your search results into an RSS feed anymore... Still got the RSS icon at the top of the page and in the META so your browser bar shows it. But both just show the same old HTML page instead of an RSS page:

    e.g. http://kickass.cd/usearch/test... [kickass.cd]

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @09:58AM (#52606217)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Hey, Fast & Furious 185 was pretty good. Much better than 184.

      • But what was it with the title change two releases prior? I mean, "Blink 182", what the hell.

        Still, I'm looking forward to see the premiere of "Ass". I heard it's a blockbuster!

  • Warning (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @10:04AM (#52606261)

    ... after it received a stark warning from the Motion Picture Association, representing Hollywood's major studios.

    Take it down or Michael Bay will make a movie about you.

  • Don't you mean "cat and mouse"?

    Oh, right. Got it.

    • A cat is a cherished pet, a graceful creature superior to humans. A rat (at least in public perception) is a slimy despicable thing, like MAFIAA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msmash ( 4491995 ) Works for Slashdot
      haha -- yes! Sorry, we are having some issues in Firehose, so I missed it. Fixed.

  • I guess it's the only way to avoid invasion though.

    Still sucks to see Hollywood dictating its demands to the whole world.

    And it still sucks to have the ISP as our singular connection to the internet. Where's our redundancy?

  • Wasted money (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stevez67 ( 2374822 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @10:53AM (#52606539)

    If they put their money into making really good movies, instead of spending it playing whack-a-mole with torrent sites, maybe people would go to the movies again. The current method of remaking everything with ethnically diverse cast members is boring, as was the previous method of using 3 minutes of poorly written dialog masquerading as plot between CGI content segments.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

      For me it's the 20 minutes of commercials, the lack of ushers to kick people out who won't STFU, the insane concession prices, the garrish, loud lobbies, and the high ticket prices.

      $50 for a couple to go to a movie? It's the price of a streaming box from China.

      For older films, availability is a major issue. It's hard to find anyone who will take your money... but when you do, the prices can be insane. Competitive with 'owning' a DVD which you can loan or trade with your friends, rather than the disp

    • The current method of remaking everything with ethnically diverse cast members is boring...

      But the next Batman will be an African American from the "hood"... And they're going to bring back Robin, Justin Bieber is slated to fill that role. It'll be a BLOCKBUSTER!!!

  • Game of Thrones (Score:5, Informative)

    by iris-n ( 1276146 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @11:59AM (#52606903)

    I wanted to pay for Game of Thrones. I really wanted. I have plenty of money and I like the show, why not? And I wanted to watch it on Sunday night rather than wait for the torrents to be available on Monday morning.

    So I looked it up online, it turns out that HBO does stream it, for 15 dollars a month. A bit expensive for a single series, but whatever. I have already watched too much of it for free anyway. Ok, do they stream it live? Yep, but on US time. In the UK they show it Monday night. Ugh. So paying for it won't even let me watch it on Sunday night. Whatever, at least it will be more convenient than downloading torrents from KAT or Pirate Bay, that are constantly being DDOS'ed. So, how do I sign up? I need to use a smartphone. Weird stuff. Why I smartphone? I'm not going to watch Game of Thrones on my phone, I'm going to watch it on my computer. Ok, so they allow me to watch it on my computer after I sign up through the phone. Sigh. Ok, to Google Play, and, where is it? No HBO app. Oh, it's US only. So go fuck yourself, HBO. Back to KAT.

    And this is why torrent sites will never disappear. Even people that can and want to pay for the content are forced to torrent it. Even if they manage to kill KAT, there will be other sites where I will watch the next season.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Threni ( 635302 )

      > And this is why torrent sites will never disappear.

      Kat has disappeared. There aren't any more major torrent sites; they're going to get squashed pretty quickly nowadays. Kat took stuff down pretty quickly, unlike piratebay, but that's always "down for database maintenance"; assuming it has what you're after anyway, which isn't a safe bet these days.

  • The same time kat.cr got taken down, solarmove.is is down too. I think the same people / servers were hosting both. Curious if anyone knows?
  • Am I right saying that torrent indexing is what is always get shut down? Is there a way to decentralize that with... I don't know, elastic search may be... Kind of having a distributed database that anyone could join and build their front-end from that?

  • So hosting/sharing torrent files really illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @12:20PM (#52607019) Homepage

    I must be missing something huge, because it seems to me that KAT really wasn't doing anything illegal, to the extent that they were hosting torrent files, not actually illegally hosting copyrighted content (like MegaUpload was.) Torrent files are really only informational files containing metadata and links to tracker sites--none of which is in-and-of-itself illegally hosting copyrighted material.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And if this whole NSA thing has taught us anything, it is that meta-data is much different than data, right?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ramze ( 640788 )

      They were charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

      Conspiracy means they had to intentionally help others on a large scale to commit a crime or crimes. One could say, hey, it's all just 1s and 0s... but, the truth is that they acted in a large scale (globally) to intentionally help others pirate copyrighted materials. It's not so much the torrent or magnet links... it's the business model they created that shuttled funds th

  • ... when I was brought aboard. The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

  • Accuse ISIS of copyright infringement (Score:3)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @01:16PM (#52607371)

    Then maybe our government will do something about taking down sites that facilitate online recruitment and radicalization instead of chasing after college students uploading ripped movies. Because Hollywood donors have much more pool with congress people than victims of terrorist attacks.

  • How about a periodic fee to be allowed to download copyrighted material? The system would be run by the national societies ASCAP/SACEM etc. It would be much cheaper for old stuff. The fee would also depend on the category (music, movies, software, etc) and might be subject to a volume limit. It would then be redistributed to the authors using the download statistics. Many would still cheat of course but not all (see the working though overpriced itunes, amazon, etc.) and I am inclined to think that the sys

  • Namecoin decentralized DNS:
    https://github.com/namecoin/wiki/blob/master/HowToBrowseBitDomainsAdvanced.mediawiki

    The Gargoyle router firmware supports Namecoin DNS resolution:
    https://www.gargoyle-router.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2120

    OpenNIC supports Namecoin DNS resolution:
    https://www.opennicproject.org/configure-your-dns/how-to-change-dns-servers-in-dd-wrt/

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