This popularity attracted the attention of several copyright holder groups, including the Philippine record label association PARI. In an attempt to shut down the site, PARI launched a legal procedure in which the KAT.ph domain owners are accused of facilitating copyright infringements.

This resulted in the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) issuing a temporary restraining order last week. The dotPH registry was ordered to suspend the domain name for 72 hours, a period which has now ended.

This means that once again the KickassTorrents team has full control over its KAT.ph domain.

Although the torrent site isn’t expected to revert to the .ph domain, the move is important as the KickassTorrents team are able to point the site’s users to the new Kickass.to domain. This minimizes the loss in visitors and helps Google to index the site’s new home.

At the same time the legal proceedings will continue behind the scenes.

The dotPH registry, which maintains the database of PH domain names, say that the domain owners now have the option to appeal the court’s decision. The company adds that
the domain could again be at risk if the previous order comes back into effect.

“If the restraining order is extended, we will comply and suspend the domain,” dotPH founder Emil Avancena tells TorrentFreak.

Whether this will happen is uncertain at this point. The KickassTorrents team hasn’t made any public comments on the case thus far. However, the Intellectual Property Office says that it will try to hear all sides of the story before making a final decision.

“Unless the complainant voluntarily desists from pursuing the case, it shall proceed. The IPOPHL shall decide on the matter based on the evidence presented by all parties,” IPOPHL informs TorrentFreak.

Even if the action results in a permanent domain seizure, this will achieve very little as KickassTorrents has already moved to another domain.

DotPH’s Emil Avancena agrees that domain seizures are not very useful when it comes to making websites unavailable to the public. He sees more results from ISP blockades, which have become more prevalent in European countries recently.

“It’s a simple matter to move to another domain. Getting ISPs to block the sites would be more effective but not foolproof, as the Great Firewall of China has shown,” Avancena says.

KickassTorrents, meanwhile, appears to be unfazed by all the commotion and continues business as usual at the new Kickass.to domain. It’s unknown if they intend to file an appeal and in their announcement of the domain change there is no mention of a legal case at all.

“We had to drop Kat.ph as a part of our global maintenance and move to Kickass.to. This was a hard decision, but it was necessary for the further development of KickassTorrents,” the KAT staff explain.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This status has put the site on the radar of the U.S. Government and a wide variety of entertainment industry groups around the world.

Yesterday the torrent site ran into trouble with its KAT.ph domain, and there were signs suggesting the domain was no longer in control of the original owners. Over the past few hours more details have emerged, and the Government of the Philippines has now confirmed that the domain name has been seized on copyright grounds.

The seizure is the result of a complaint filed by the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry and several individual music labels. The complaint stated that KickassTorrents was causing “irreparable damages” to the music industry, and a local court agreed to suspend the site’s domain.

“The complaint alleges that the registrant of KAT.ph is violating intellectual property rights by making copyrighted music available for download to its users,” the dotPH registry informed TorrentFreak.

Early this week the Philippine Intellectual Property Office issued a temporary restraining Order directing the dotPH registry to suspend the KAT.ph domain for 72 hours. The order, signed by the IPO Bureau of Legal Affairs, will become final if the domain owners don’t appeal.

According to dotPH, the company that maintains the database of PH domain names, the music industry first complained about KickassTorrents in 2011. However, the company said at the time that it would only take action following a court order.

“dotPH was initially contacted by the complainants’ lawyers in December of 2011 with a demand to take down the domain, and dotPH agreed to cooperate if provided with an order from a court or appropriate authority,” TorrentFreak was informed.

“dotPH received the restraining order earlier this week and subsequently suspended kat.ph in compliance with IPO’s directive,” the registry adds.

While the case is presented as a local action aimed at preventing piracy of original Filipino music, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if U.S. forces have also been applying pressure. In its latest Special 301 Report the U.S. Government listed the Philippines on its copyright “watch list,” demanding further action against so-called rogue sites.

“The United States looks to the Philippines to take important steps to address piracy over the Internet, in particular with respect to notorious online markets,” the Office of the United States Trade Representative wrote in its report.

TorrentFreak reached out to the KickassTorrents team for a comment on the domain seizure, but we have yet to hear back.

Whether the seizure will have much of an effect has yet to be seen. After the domain name was taken away KickassTorrents quickly moved to a new one, and the site continues to operate under the new Kickass.to domain.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

KickassTorrents, known more recently as simply KAT.ph, has become one of the most loved torrent sites on the Internet. In common with The Pirate Bay, when the site goes down TorrentFreak gets bombarded with emails from users wanting to know what’s going on. Today is such a day.

A couple of hours the ago the site simply disappeared from the Internet with the site’s operators departing with a brief “We have an unexpected maintenance” message on Twitter.

All emails to KAT’s operators are currently bouncing due to what appears to be an issue with their KAT.ph domain. “Destination .PH Domain does not exist or has expired,” is the message we get in return.

As can be seen from the image below, a check for KAT.ph indicates that the site’s DNS is functioning ‘correctly’, except for in Italy and India where it’s null routed and blocked respectively.

However, on closer inspection we can see that instead of pointing to the usual IP addresses associated with the site, currently the KAT.ph domain points to an IP address range associated with DotPH, the official registrar for the Philippines where KickAss registered their domain.

We cannot say with absolute certainty what this means, but it seems likely that KAT may be experiencing issues with DotPH over their domain. It is feasible that the domain has been reclaimed by the registry although on what grounds and for how long is impossible to predict.

In the meantime TorrentFreak has been informed by ProxyBay.me, the operator of the ProxyKat.net site (which still provides access to KickassTorrents), that around 50% of his proxies have begun diverting to a new domain, Kickass.to. Whether this switch is a permanent or temporary measure will probably become apparent in the hours to come.

Finally, as previously reported, a site called TorrentMirrors claims to keep torrent sites alive, even while they’re down. At this moment it appears to be keeping its word.

Update: According to a post by KAT staff member Chew the .ph domain has been seized.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Starting today, several British Internet providers started blocking the popular torrent site, as well as Fenopy and H33T.

The blockades follow on from the High Court verdict last month which required six ISPs (BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk) to block subscriber access to the three torrent sites. The legal action was initiated by the music industry group BPI, representing a variety of major labels.

Previously a similar order took down The Pirate Bay in most of the UK.

According to the High Court ruling the three sites are profiting heavily from the copyright infringements carried out by their users. For example, the annual revenue of KickassTorrents was estimated to be between $12,525,469 and $22,383,918 according to an expert quoted in the verdict.

The verdict doesn’t detail when the blockades should go into effect but TorrentFreak learned that today BT, Virgin Media, O2 and BE began censoring the sites in question. The screenshot below shows the notice Be There subscribers see when they try to access the sites.

While the blockades of the other ISPs appear to be more nationwide, Virgin Media subscribers report differing results around the country, with some able to access the sites and some not. It is expected that all Virgin customers will be blocked during the hours to come.

The admin of H33T, one of the sites that’s now blocked, told TorrentFreak previously that the blockades are the music industry’s instrument to keep their monopoly intact.

“Attacking H33T is an attack on sharers, that is the real BPI agenda. The BPI and their MAFIAA masters are playing for control of consumption of digital media in the UK. Independent networks of people freely sharing content is a challenge to their broken business model,” he said.

The UK Pirate Party is disappointed with the increase in website blocking as well.

“This is the latest in the continuing Internet whack-a-mole farce. This comes just after the European Commission study which reported that ‘illegal music downloads have little or no effect on digital music sales’,” UK Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye told TorrentFreak.

“In the Pirate Party we have always maintained that website blocking is dangerous, it is now clear that it is misguided too. The number of these blocks is now rapidly expanding. Where does this end? The BPI is out of control,” Kaye adds.

TorrentFreak contacted BPI who confirmed that the blocking started today, but the music group didn’t comment on the expected efficacy. Recent history, however, shows that it might not be the silver bullet the music industry is hoping for.

Several Dutch and UK Internet providers argued previously that the Pirate Bay blockades were not preventing people from sharing, as BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

When The Pirate Bay was blocked hundreds of proxy sites popped up, making it very easy for people to circumvent the blockade. Thus far there are few dedicated reverse proxies for KickassTorrents, Fenopy or H33T, but availability is sure to increase in the days to come.

Update: we added responses fron the UK Pirate Party and BPI.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

After Torrentz.com and Demonoid, KickassTorrents announced two weeks ago that it would soon move trade their .com domain for one with a .ph extension.

This new domain went live yesterday.

“If you encounter any bugs or problems with the new domain – please leave us a message in a special thread on our forum, the KickassTorrents team announced.

“Finally we’d like to ask our supporters to promote our new domain, so that more and more people won’t get lost due to the domain change,” they added.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.