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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, has suggested that his organization was crucial in getting KickassTorrents taken down [torrentfreak.com]:

Earlier this year KickassTorrents was taken down following a criminal investigation into the site's alleged operators. While the U.S. Department of Justice handles the case, based on an FBI investigation, they were not the only ones involved. According to comments made by MPAA boss Chris Dodd, Hollywood played a crucial role as well.

[...] "We have now established a global hub — an office in Brussels. It has been tremendously successful in closing down Kickass Torrents, the single largest pirate site in the world," Dodd told Variety in an interview [variety.com]. The major movie studios have helped in similar criminal cases before, so this doesn't come as a complete surprise. Generally speaking, however, the MPAA is not particularly open about the role it plays in federal investigations.

Although the takedown of KickassTorrents was a major success for Hollywood, piracy remains a problem. It's even come to a point where Dodd himself is using the "hydra" terminology, which The Pirate Bay's crew first brought up [torrentfreak.com] a decade [blogspot.co.uk] ago. The MPAA says that successes are still being booked every day, but they require more sophisticated methods than were used in the past. "We make great inroads, but it is a problem that isn't going away. Some days I do feel it is hydra-headed. But in the past few years, we have developed a more sophisticated and efficient way of dealing with piracy issues."

The next day (December 15th, 2016), the site was resurrected [torrentfreak.com] (albeit with a huge traffic load causing timeouts):

Shortly after the shutdown, several KAT-crew members regrouped in an effort to get the community part of the site back up. They launched the Katcr.co [torrentfreak.com] forum as their new home and hinted that torrents could come back too, in the future.

Today is the big day as Katcr.co (KATcr) has now launched a fully operational torrent site [katcr.co], which looks identical to its predecessor. The site starts with a clean user database but many members of the original staff are on board. "The majority of our original Staff, Admins and Moderation team joined us after Kat.cr went down – which is something we're very proud of. This shows the loyalty, dedication and real love for KAT that we all share," The KATcr team told TorrentFreak.

[...] Perhaps just as importantly, many of the site's renowned uploaders are also back. As a result, the site will be populated with a lot of fresh content right from the start. "We have all our major uploaders on board and they continued to share tirelessly even before the torrent engines returned. The torrent community can continue to expect to see uploads from all the names they know and trust," the KATcr crew says.

Previously: KickassTorrents Alleged Owner Arrested, Domain Names Seized [soylentnews.org]

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