KickassTorrents 2015 News Update: Movies, Music BitTorrent Site Listed By US as Piracy Haven

The United States government has listed popular torrents site, KickassTorrents, as one of the piracy havens in the world.

According to a report posted on TorrentFreak.com, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) came out with a "Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets" which identified the world's most problematic copyright infringers.

In the report, the United States agency said BitTorrent sites like KickassTorrents "cause significant losses for rights holders and legitimate businesses" and "undermine critical US comparative advantages in innovation and creativity to the detriment of American workers."

The USTR noted how KickassTorrents has been getting additional traffic over the past months, mostly after another popular BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, was taken down last December.

The American agency is also wary about how the KickassTorrents managed to still become fully operational, although it had domain name issues earlier this year.

KickassTorrents lost its Somalian top-level domain, Kickass.so last February, after it was banned from the .SO registry. The BitTorrent site resurrected as Kickass.to days after the takedown.

Aside from KickassTorrents, the USTR also identified The Pirate Bay, Torrentz.eu, YTS.re, Zamunda and Arena.bg as among the world's top piracy havens.

In a related news, the Somalian .SO registry has banned more domains related to KickassTorrents after going after the main BitTorrent site last month.

A separate report from TorrentFreak.com said the .SO registry has also banned Kickas.so, Kickassmovies.so, Kickassmovie.so and Kickasstorrent.so and several other domains.

Most of these domains are not affiliated with KickassTorrents, but only has the same branding, primarily to gains some web traffic.

According to web traffic aggregator alexa.com, KickassTorrents is one of the top 300,000 most popular websites in the world.