KickassTorrents Taken Down After Copyright Concerns

KickassTorrents, one of the fastest growing and most visited torrent sites on the Internet, has been pulled offline after an inquiry from the Ukrainian authorities. The site's main server was shut down and the site's founder and his team are currently setting up shop outside the country. KickassTorrents is expected to return in a few days, TorrentFreak was told.http://torrentfreak.com/images/kickass.jpgKickassTorrents made a name for itself last year, scooping a well deserved entry in the list of most popular torrent sites of 2009.

Even though the site was only founded last year, it has quickly gown out to be one of the leading BitTorrent sites with millions of visits every month. Hosted in the Ukraine, the site has been free from trouble in its relatively short life, until now that is.

Starting two days ago, regular visitors of the torrent site noticed that KickassTorrents was unreachable. Although the site has been down for a few hours in the past due to maintenance, worries started to grow as time went on.

In an attempt to find out what was going on, TorrentFreak contacted the site’s founder, who informed us that the Ukrainian authorities were the reason for the prolonged downtime.

“Kickasstorrents.com main web server was shut down by the hosting provider after it was contacted by local authorities. We don’t have many details right now but it seems that there was no direct threat or order to shut down the site, just ‘concerns’ about the site’s activities,” the site’s founder told us.

“One way or another I’m afraid we must say goodbye to Ukraine and move the servers to other countries,” he added. TorrentFreak was further informed that the site should return in a few days once the site has moved the operation to a new location.

KickassTorrents was hosted by Mhost in the Ukraine, who voluntarily shut down the site after the local Government voiced its concerns about the site. The exact nature of the concerns are not known by the founder of KickassTorrents, but he told us that leaving the Ukraine is in the best interest of all parties involved.

Thus far many torrent sites have operated peacefully in the Ukraine, but the current events might indicate that times are changing, and not for the better. There is no official statement from the authorities but we assume that the concerns are copyright related.

We will post an update if more information becomes available.

Article from: TorrentFreak.