The ongoing legal drama of the world’s huge torrent trackers has just taken another turn. TorrentFreak reports that KickassTorrents, one of the most popular torrent trackers that had most recently taken up residence at Kickass.so, is down after an apparent domain seizure.
The .so registry has banned Kickass’s domain, according to the domain’s Whois listing. Still TF says the newly seized site has gone back to its old home at Kickass.to and that site is safe to use.
Torrent trackers are a perennial target for domain seizures conducted at the behest of copyright holders. In the second half of last year alone, two huge bittorrent-related services were the target of international law enforcement actions. PopcornTime, the popular “Netflix for torrents” was briefly taken down and forced to relocate. Then back in November, the Pirate Bay’s servers in Sweden were seized. The site only just recently came back online following that raid.
As we’ve learned before, law enforcement and copyright holders love playing whack-a-mole with torrents sites, even if it’s a demonstrably ineffective way to fight piracy. [TorrentFreak]
Picture: Michael Hession