KickassTorrents‘ owner Artem Vaulin has hired Ira Rothken as his lawyer — The same lawyer who defended Kim Dotcom in court on Megaupload case!
Reportedly, lawyer Ira Rothken has been retained by the supposed founder of KickassTorrents while the 30-year old Artem Vaulin, the alleged founder of KickassTorrents, is still under the custody of Polish law enforcement. Rothken, who also happens to be the defense lawyer of Kim Dotcom, believes that Vaulin and his accused colleagues from Megaupload (now mega.nz) have a very strong case against the United States Government.
For your information, last week Vaulin was arrested by the US law enforcement officials and KAT was shut down soon after, which definitely shocked every user of the popular website. Vaulin is currently in Warsaw prison but Rothken is certain that very soon he will be out.
“We are working with local Polish counsel to try to get Artem out of the Warsaw jail so he can assist with his defense,” says Rothken.
Why was Vaulin arrested in the first place?
The reason is that the US government filed a criminal complaint against Ukrainian-born Vaulin, charging him with criminal copyright infringement as well as money laundering. These charges have also been lodged against Kim Dotcom and Megaupload. It must be noted that the case of Megaupload is pending for quite some time now, about a decade.
Remember, his arrest was made possible with out of the way help from Apple, Facebook and CoinBase who provided US authorities with IP address, login details and purchase details.
In December 2015, a New Zealand District Court judge ordered the extradition of Dotcom and previous colleagues of Megaupload, which was promptly appealed by the involved parties. This resulted in a series of hearings that will be taking place in the coming weeks.
We aren’t much surprised that Vaulin has chosen to retain the same lawyer considering that the charges are similar. Rothken has already confirmed that he will be working with the local counsel to fight the case of Vaulin.
Rothken seems to be the perfect option for Vaulin and the rest because he is well-known for his familiarity with criminal copyright infringement charges and knows a lot about the functioning of torrent sites. In fact, Rothken has already represented isoHunt in a similar case. Rothken is pretty sure that he will be getting the charges dismissed for Vaulin and co.
According to Rothken, the complaint from the US government has no merit and the issue at hand is actually of civil liability and not of copyright infringement. He stated that “Torrent sites and trackers are devoid of any content files. If any infringement occurs, it happens offsite and leaves Kickasstorrents behind. This type of copyright theory is known as secondary copyright infringement and there is no United States criminal statute for secondary copyright infringement – that type of theory is at most a civil liability issue,” as reported by Torrent Freak.
KAT continues to stay offline as of now but the KAT community is alive and kicking. We aren’t sure if the torrent site will be resuming any time soon. Keep visiting this website for latest news on KAT.