14 DAY TRIAL // The US has filed an official indictment against three operators of the Kickass Torrents (KAT) website in the District Court of Northern Illinois, an indictment dated on Tuesday, August 23, 2016.
The document charges three people, Artem Vaulin (aka trim), Ievgen Kutsenko (aka Eugene Kutsenko or trill), and Oleksandr Rabostin (aka Alex Radostin, pioneer, or pio), all Ukrainian nationals.
Two of the three suspects are still at large
Polish police had already arrested Vaulin at the behest of US authorities last month, and the suspect is currently being held in a Polish prison awaiting extradition.
The whereabouts of the other two suspects are unknown, and US authorities will use this indictment to have them arrested.
The charges presented in the indictment are for copyright infringement and money laundering.
The three ran over ten pirate sites
The indictment, which you can read here in a scanned format courtesy of TorrentFreak, paints the three suspects as the masterminds behind a crime ring focused on online piracy.
The three are accused of intentionally dodging anti-piracy measures by registering new domains when the originals were taken down, making money by running ads on their websites, and also running a slew of other piracy-focused services besides KAT.
This includes sites like leechmonster.com, torcache.net, rolly.com, solarmovie.com, solarmovie.ph, iwatchfilm.com, movie2b.com, hippomovies.com, bino.tv, and moviepro.net. All of these are now down.
The vast majority of the above-listed websites are live-streaming and direct-download services, which allowed users to watch movies and TV shows in their browser, or download (copyrighted) content at high speeds.
KAT crew also ran SubtitleSource
The three are also accused of developing their own BitTorrent client and running subtitlesource.com, a repository of movie subtitles.
The indictment also includes a detailed list of payments the three received for the operation of their services, which shows the three profited financially from their operation.
The indictment lists as examples of copyrighted material present on the KAT properties movies as The Butler, Batman v Superman, Deadpool, X-Men Apocalypse, Central Intelligence, Warcraft, Now You See Me 2, Jungle Book, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
