KickAssTorrents defense demands release of suspected owner
The law firm that represents Artem Vaulin in the United States is asking the US to drop the case against the suspected owner of KickAssTorrents and release him because the site itself did not offer copyrighted material, but only torrent files.
Artem Vaulin, 30, from Ukraine, was arrested by the Polish police at the end of July and has been in prison in Warsaw ever since. The US is suing Vaulin for criminally infringing intellectual property rights and for planning money laundering activities.
According to Vaulin’s defense in the US, the allegations are unfounded, Torrentfreak writes in response to an email sent by the defense. The email states, among other things, that they are asking for the charges to be dropped and Vaulin out of prison as soon as possible.
One of the arguments that Vaulin’s defense makes is that KickAssTorrents itself has never hosted infringing material. The torrent files themselves contain only text files that do not contain copyrighted material, the lawyers cite. Other software is required to then obtain material hosted elsewhere.
They also say that it is not possible under US law to arrest someone from outside the US for copyright infringement because “the undisputed axiom is that US copyright laws have no out-of-state application.” In addition, the lawyers indicate that the KickAssTorrents servers are not located in the US, but in Canada.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act would also not consider a second-tier copyright violation criminal, and because KickAssTorrents is only a search engine for text files, the lawyers see no violation there either.
The indictment also consists of misinterpretation and misleading allegations regarding the technology behind BitTorrent and how KickAssTorrents operated. For example, no specific examples are cited where the owner of the site has to deal with downloads. The lawyers even dare to say that the investigators of the National Homeland Security investigation team have been the individuals who have committed copyright infringements in the past 180 days.
In the letter, the lawyers therefore call for Vaulin’s quick release on bail. No reference is made in the letter to Vaulin’s possible ownership of KickAssTorrents. The lawyer defending Vaulin, Ira Rothken, is the same who previously represented Kim Dotcom.