“U.S. Authorities Charge Owner of Most-Visited Illegal File-Sharing Website with Copyright Infringement” – statement issued by United States Department of Justice on Thursday: “U.S. authorities have charged the alleged owner of today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website with criminal copyright infringement and have seized domain names associated with the website.”

— Artem Vaulin, 30, of Kharkiv, Ukraine, mastermind of KickassTorrents (KAT), was arrested on Thursday in Poland charged by criminal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. DOJ is seeking to extradite Vaulin to the United States.

— Copyrighted material collectively valued over $1 billion: “According to the complaint, Vaulin allegedly owns and operates Kickass Torrents or KAT, a commercial website that has enabled users to illegally reproduce and distribute hundreds of millions of copyrighted motion pictures, video games, television programs, musical recordings and other electronic media since 2008. The copyrighted material is collectively valued at well over $1 billion, according to the complaint. The complaint alleges that KAT receives more than 50 million unique visitors per month and is estimated to be the 69th most frequently visited website on the internet.”

— “How a few iTunes purchases helped bring down an online piracy mastermind,” Andrea Peterson reported later this after noon in the Washington Post: “Investigators were able to use details about iTunes purchases made in July and December of last year to connect Vaulin to KickassTorrents’s Facebook page thanks to information shared with the FBI by Apple and Facebook, the complaint alleges. They also found emails about the illegal filing-sharing site’s operations in the inbox of the account he allegedly used to make the iTunes purchases.”