. Access to the site was halted. Artem Vaulin started the torrent site back in 2008. “Vaulin is charged with running today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials,” wrote Leslie R. Caldwell, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, in a statement. To run the website, Vaulin used servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits. One of KickassTorrents’ servers is based in Chicago. When asked by Hollywood movie studios or other intellectual property holders to remove links to copyrighted content on the site, KickassTorrents is said to have rejected takedown notices. It was also taking in more than $16 million in advertising revenue as of this year.
