The Federal Court has ordered Australian internet service providers to block access to Kickass Torrents websites. The order comes at the behest of several major music labels who have been pushing for the blocks in court since April last year.
ISPs now have 15 days to comply with the order. Of course, none of this really matters if you know how to get around a DNS block.
Following in the footsteps of Foxtel and Village Roadshow, a consortium of music labels including Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music have successfully convinced the Federal Court to block a range of torrent sites in Australia.
Rights holders originally filed the case to block the Kickass Torrents website. When US authorities knocked the original URL offline, the companies redirected their attention to a number of mirror and proxy sites. URLs caught up in the latest ban include katcr.co, kickass.unblocked.tv, kat.al and Kickass.cd.
[referenced url=”https://staging.lifehacker.com.au/2016/02/why-australias-war-on-piracy-is-laughably-misguided/” thumb=”https://staging.lifehacker.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/02/Deadpool-410×231.jpg” title=”Why The War On Australian Piracy Is Laughably Misguided” excerpt=”Forget pirates, Hollywood need only look in the mirror to see its worst enemy. Here’s why.”]
The twenty ISPs named in the order – including TPG/iiNet, Optus, Foxtel and Telstra – will need to take reasonable steps to block users from accessing the aforementioned blocks within 15 business days.
It is likely the ISPs will implement a rudimentary form of DNS blocking to comply with the order – just as they did with previous court injunctions relating to The Pirate Bay, TorrentHound, SolarMovie and others. As we have demonstrated, these blocks are laughably easy to circumvent, even with limited computing know-how.
In addition, there’s nothing to stop these sites from resurfacing under different URLs that were not named in the initial injunction. Rights holders are required to submit additional URLs to the court every time they want one added to the block list. At best, it is a war of attrition. At worst, it is a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse.
It’s worth noting that torrenting itself is completely legal – it only becomes an issue when you start downloading or sharing copyrighted material without permission. As for piracy, it remains unclear what effect these methods will ultimately have. One thing is certain: it is a flawed solution at best.
[referenced url=”https://staging.lifehacker.com.au/2017/04/ask-lh-is-it-possible-to-access-blocked-torrent-sites/” thumb=”https://staging.lifehacker.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2015/09/piratebay-410×231.jpg” title=”Ask LH: Is It Possible To Access A Blocked Torrent Site?” excerpt=”Dear Lifehacker, I work for myself but the landlord of my building provides my internet. Previously I have been able to download using torrents, but they have recently started blocking me. Is there a work around?”]
[referenced url=”https://staging.lifehacker.com.au/2016/12/how-to-bypass-isp-blocking-of-the-pirate-bay-and-other-torrent-sites-for-free/” thumb=”https://staging.lifehacker.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/12/iStock-468088541-410×231.jpg” title=”How To Bypass ISP Blocking Of The Pirate Bay And Other Torrent Sites For Free” excerpt=”At the end of last year, the Federal Court ordered ISPs to block five popular torrent websites including The Pirate Bay, TorrentHound and IsoHunt within 15 business days. Foxtel and Village Roadshow initiated the court case in a bid to curb piracy.”]
[Via Torrent Freak]
Comments
16 responses to “KickassTorrents Has Been Blocked In Australia, Achieving Nothing”
Kickass? Didn’t that site actually die out at least a year ago?
Nope, people in the know have been using kickass.cd ever since.
Yeah, pretty sure whatever is at those urls is 95% viruses and scams.
kickass.cd is a legitimate site, listing and search of torrents. There are a lot of ads though.
These ads are sometimes malicious if you click on them. Pretty sure that is what you meant by “Scams and Viruses”…
katcr.co is a new site run by staff from the original KAT
kickass.cd is some kind of aggregator/mirror, it has all of the original KAT torrents on it and seems to get updated– most likely by pulling torrent data from other torrent websites.
It must be demotivating to be a lawyer involved in that; knowing that your talents are achieving sweet FA.
Dunno, how much are lawyers for the studios paid?
Not really sure the lawyers care. They get paid either way, and in fact, if there are future claims to make, they are likely happy to know there is more work for them coming up.
I think the lawyers love it. It’s an endless stream of money as these idiot continue to whack-a-site.
Eh probably they are on retainer anyway so this is just stupid, useless busywork that keeps them at the office when they could be at the golf course.
Pull out the form letter, add in the correct URL, hit send.
The only downside I can see here is a slight decrease in local seeds. If this is how Universal/Warner et al want to blow their yearly legal budget, by all means go for it.
“I don’t understand, why do we keep losing money!? Must be those pirates’ fault!” as they sign a massive increase to their legal budget.
The sad part is they probably pay more in legal fees enforcing this crap than they actually lose in lost sales, considering most the people who torrent probably wouldn’t actually buy their product anyway. I always laugh when they claim to have lost XY million dollars each year to piracy. They base that figure on copies downloaded and equate that to the equivalent in ticket/dvd/game sales. Unfortunately for them, it is nothing like that clear cut. Most of the time, if they weren’t pirating it, most these people would wait for it to come out on free-to-air/Foxtel/Stan/Netflix, etc, in which case the company doesn’t actually make any more money off it than they would from the pirated copy. Similarly, game companies almost certainly wouldn’t make the full retail price of the pirated copy each time. The people downloading would much more likely just wait for a year or two and catch it in a sale, paying 1/4 to 1/10th of the release price.
I haven’t even used kickass since it got originally shut down and rebooted, its not what it used to be.
I’m surprised nobody is using some sort of procedurally generated domains to bounce around every three months while old torrents keep themselves updated.
wouldn’t keeping track of something like that be rather annoying for the end user, though?
…should just make a site in deep and **** the open web
I can still access and use piratebay in Australia without a VPN… What’s with that?
When will they learn….THIS DOES NOT WORK!!!