14 DAY TRIAL // KickassTorrents has been added to the blacklist of yet another country as Irish authorities have decided that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) must block the site.
According to TorrentFreak, following a move from record labels, local ISPs need to block subscriber access to KAT. The High Court’s judge agreed and ordered the new blockade last month. This week, ISPs are implementing the blockade.
Back in 2009, Ireland was one of the first countries in the world to demand that ISPs block The Pirate Bay on copyright grounds. The decision wasn’t made voluntarily, however, but rather at the request of a series of companies, such as EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal, who asked service providers to take action.
Since KickassTorrents had quickly become one of the favorite sites for Irish Internet users, managing to climb to the top 25 most visited websites in the country, it was fairly easy to figure out that it would soon be targeted by authorities.
“We are still getting traffic from those countries where KAT is blocked. But its amount is significantly lower (up to 10% from what we had before). These measures can be pretty effective when appropriate authorities react very quickly on domain or IP change. For example, for Italy it’s just 3 days,” the site’s admins said.
This isn’t the first time and it will certainly not be the last when record labels and Hollywood studios decide to go after torrent sites and ask the implementation of ISP-wide blockades, thus stopping users from also getting access to legal content.
According to BitTorrent Inc., last year’s most downloaded file on all sites was actually legal. Data indicates that a bundle of tracks signed by Moby and freely distributed by the company was downloaded nearly 9 million times in 2013. Since BitTorrent Inc. had a written agreement with the artist, the distribution of the file was legal.
What this proves, however, is something that torrent site administrators have been saying for years, namely that not all torrents are illegal.