Kickass Torrents owner, Artem Vaulin's motion for dismissing the charges that were filed against him has been rejected by the United States court. The top Torrent sites Kickass Torrents, Torrentz, and TorrentHound shutdown due to the Government's initiative to curtail piracy and copyright infringement.
Notably, Vaulin was arrested in July by the Polish law enforcements and since then he has been detained in a local prison. He filed a motion last month on behalf of his legal defense team, seeking the dismissal of the criminal charges against him. However, the U.S. court has strictly denied the motion and states that Kickass Torrents operated like a "flea market" illegal file sharing, reports Christian Today.
The defense argument that was put up by Vaulin states that he simply operated a search engine which worked in a similar way like Google. But the only difference was that Kickass Torrents indexes BitTorrent files. The argument put forth further states that the torrent files are not illegal and for Kickass Torrents, which was operating as a torrent search engine, it should not be a crime too, reports Torrent Freak.
The news outlet further quoted a motion that was filed on Oct. 17 by defense counsels, Theodore Poulos and Ira Rothken, which states, "The fundamental flaw in the government's untenable theory of prosecution is that there is no copyright protection for such torrent file instructions and addresses. Therefore, given the lack of direct willful copyright infringement, torrent sites do not violate criminal copyright laws."
Zachary Fardon, the U.S attorney compared Vaulin's motion to that od a drug dealer who wanted immunity stating that he had never touched the drug. And, the U.S. court refused to accept the argument put forth by Poulos and Rothken and dismissed Vaulin's motion to terminate his accusation.
Though Vaulin continues to be in prison, Kickass Torrents alternatives are still running. Moreover, the alternatives for Torrentz and TorrentHound, post the top Torrent sites shut down, are steadily filling up the gap and gaining traffic.
