It seems that KickAss Torrents owner Artem Vaulin is not in a good situation right now. According to reports, Vaulin could be extradited to the United States for copyright infringement charges.
The Polish Supreme Court has yet to announce its final decision but it is rumored that the Polish court might just reject the appeal and decide on extradition. Vaulin is on the losing side of the case against the U.S. government when the Polish court decided for extradition to the U.S. on copyright infringement charges with his torrent site.
The charges levied against Vaulin include illegal distribution of movies, criminal indictment and money laundering. KickAss Torrents had a $54 million net worth before its permanent closure and also functioned in 28 languages.
The legalities for extradition in Poland have two stages and Vaulin has passed through the first one. The Warsaw District Court has decided that he be extradited. However, the second stage is the decisive one and if a similar rule is given, the Minister of Justice will give the final decision.
Vaulin was detained in Poland and charges were levied on him. His defense lawyer, Ira Rothken, said that they would appeal on the grounds that the torrent files can't constitute a copyright criminal infringement.
Meanwhile, KickAss Torrents, The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrents, RARBG and other torrent sites will no longer be listed on Google and Bing. Any website that has been served copyright infringement notice will be demoted and not appear on the first search pages.
Bing and Google search auto-complete function will not show terms that could lead to torrent sites. The Intellectual Property Office will monitor the compliance of the new code for the next few months. Google will follow the new code implementation but it believes that such censorships do not work.
Users rarely use Bing or Google search to search for torrents but the media and government do not seem to understand the torrent ecosystem well. Google and Bing have been blocking torrent sites and taking down millions of URLs for years but it has never affected the pirate sites.