Kickass Torrents subject of U.S. indictment, alleged owner arrested

The owner of the file-sharing website KAT was indicted on Wednesday for copyright infringement in the United States for enabling the distribution of more than $1 billion US worth of movies, video games, music recordings and other content, U.S. justice officials said.

Artem Vaulin, 30, of Ukraine, was arrested in Poland and U.S. officials want him extradited to face charges that also included conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to attorneys for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

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The indictment stated the peer-to-peer file-sharing website, also known as Kickass Torrents, distributed since 2008 copyrighted works such as the film Captain America: Civil War for financial gain.

There was no legal representation listed for Vaulin in any court docket, a U.S. Department of Justice spokesman said. The company could not be reached through websites, which were suffering outages, while there was no immediate response to a request sent to KAT through social media.

One of the domains operated by KAT, Kat.cr, was the 70th most popular website in the world, according to monitoring firm Alexa.