The defense team representing alleged Kickass Torrents owner Artem Vaulin has released a statement urging the court to dismiss the case as they argued about the flawed allegations against their client.
The counsel claims that the torrent files on the file-sharing site — the largest before it was taken down in July — are not even copyrighted content and that Kickass Torrents merely acts as a "search engine," like Google but for BitTorrent files.
"Thus, at its core, the indictment merely alleges that visitors to KAT may take advantage of KAT's automated search processes to search for and locate 'dot torrent' files. Such files contain textual information assembled by automated processes and do not contain copyrighted content," lead counsel Ira Rothken explained in a new court filing.
"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," he went on to say.
He explains that the download of infringing content is done outside of the site and the computers of the users, which Kickass Torrents will have no control of.
Rothken said that the act of downloading the torrent file is not deemed infringement at all, pointing out that a torrent is legal and free from direct copyright infringement, means a torrent index like Kickass Torrents do not defy criminal copyright laws either.
The lead counsel also said that secondary criminal copyright infringement, which was filed against Vaulin as well, simply cannot be acted upon as it does not exist.
Here, Rothken claims that his client is practically being held liable for infringements that the former Kickass Torrents users committed, explaining that they were "acting in an entirely different online context."
At the moment, Vaulin remains behind bars after his bail was denied.
