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KickAssTorrents Founder Arrested by US Government – Will Comics Piracy Take a Hit?

Published Thu, 21 Jul 2016 13:35:35 -0500

Shane Bailey writes,

You may remember Bleeding Cool ran a story about Nemesis43 a while back that talked about his major contributions to comic book piracy and others stepping up in his place after his systems went out for a while. Well, now the home of comics piracy on the net and the primary place Nemesis43 uploads his torrents was just seized by the Federal Government. During the night of July 20th, Artem Vaulin, a 30 year-old from Ukraine was arrested and all assets and domains related to KickAssTorrents were seized.

vXOoTm3 KickassTorrents (KAT) was founded in 2009 and became the go to place to pirate media after Pirate Bay faced legal troubles and was shut down temporarily. PirateBay's shut down led to millions of torrenters flocking to the site making it the most popular torrent site on the internet. The KickassTorrents site and all it's official domain names are now unreachable. There is currently no word on if Nemesis43 and other media uploaders will be affected, but according to the complaint it looks like the site is severely compromised and Feds now have access to in-site messages that could lead to their whereabouts.

We don't know much at this point, but it looks like a major blow was made to media piracy, and comics piracy in particular this week. We do know one thing from past piracy history, someone will pop up somewhere to take its place.

More on this story as it develops.

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