KickassTorrents
KickassTorrents (commonly abbreviated KAT) was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking.[1] KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time.[2]
Type of site
Torrent directory, magnet links provider
Multilingual (30+ languages, English primary language)
kickass
Optional
Over 1 million per day (August 2015)
November 2008
Offline
In December 2016, former KAT staff members revived the KAT community by creating a website with its predecessor's features and appearance.[3]
History
KAT was initially launched in November 2008 at the domain name kickasstorrents.com. In April 2011, it moved to a Philippine domain kat.ph after a series of domain name seizures by the US Department of Justice against Demonoid and Torrentz.[4] The site later moved across several different domains, which the operators planned to do every six months, including ka.tt, kickass.to, kickass.so, kickasstorrents.im and kat.cr.[5]
In June 2016, KAT added an official Tor network .onion address.[6]
Blocking and censorship
KickassTorrents on its website claimed that it complied with the DMCA and it removed infringing torrents reported by content owners.[7]
On 28 February 2013, Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom were ordered by the High Court in London to block access to KickassTorrents, along with two other torrent sites. Judge Richard Arnold ruled that the site's design contributed to copyright infringement.[8][9] On 14 June, the domain name was changed to Tonga domain name kickass.to as a part of the site's regular domain change.[10]
Later on 23 June, KAT was delisted from Google at the request of the MPAA.[11] In late August 2013, KAT was blocked by Belgian ISPs.[12] In January 2014, several Irish ISPs started blocking KAT,[13] and in February, Twitter started blocking links to KAT, although this was stopped after a few days.[14] In June 2014, KAT was blocked in Malaysia by the Communications and Multimedia Commission for violating copyright law.[15]
In December 2014, the site moved to the Somalia domain name kickass.so, reportedly as a result of site's regular domain change.[16][17] On 9 February 2015, kickass.so was listed as "banned" on Whois, causing the site to go offline. Later that day, the site reverted to its former domain name kickass.to.[18] On 14 February 2015, it was found that messages mentioning "kickass.to" were blocked on Steam chat, but "kickass.so" and other popular torrent websites were not blocked, only flagged as "potentially malicious".[19]
On 23 April 2015, the site moved to the Isle of Man-based domain kickasstorrents.im[20] but was quickly taken down later that day and on 24 April it was moved to the Costa Rica based domain name kat.cr.[21] By July 2015, the kat.cr address had been removed from Google Search's results. After the removal, the top Google search result for KAT in many locations pointed to a fake KAT site that prompted visitors to download malware.[22]
In October 2015, Portugal bypassed its courts by making a voluntary agreement between ISPs, rightsholders and the Ministry of Culture to block access to KAT and most of the other popular BitTorrent websites.[23] The website had similarly been banned in India for copyright violations during that period.[24] At the same time, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox blocked access to KAT because of security concerns with some of the ads pointing to malware.[25] In April 2016, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox blocked KAT due to phishing concerns.[26] Both blocks were later removed after KAT dealt with the concerns.
One of the main domains of the site went up for sale in August 2016.[27][28]
Revival
In mid-December 2016, some of the former KAT staff and moderators launched a website with a similar appearance as the original under the domain katcr.co.[3] The site has been offline since July 2020.