Music industry gets Kickass Torrents blocked in Australia

The Kickass Torrents BitTorrent site and related proxies will be blocked in Australia in the second major injunction to be delivered under the country's new piracy site blocking laws.

Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music alongside APRA AMCOS were today successful in their bid to force internet service providers to restrict access to the torrent site.

Within 15 days, around 21 ISPs including companies in the Telstra, Optus, and TPG groups as well as Foxtel must take "reasonable steps" to block Kickass Torrents, through a method agreed with the studios, Justice Burley ruled today.

Users will be redirected to a landing page explaining the block, and the block will remain in place for three years.

The music studios have been ordered to pay ISPs $50 per domain block. Adding any new domain to the block list will require an affidavit to be lodged with the court.

The studios took to the courts last April in an effort to block local access to eight Kickass Torrents domains.

They argued the site exploited the creativity of others and gave nothing back to artists, songwriters, record labels and music publishers who had their music stolen.

The case was held over to await the outcome of a separate blocking case instigated by film studios, which set the precedent for how piracy site-blocking laws passed by the federal government in June 2015 would be handled by the courts.

Foxtel and Village Roadshow's bid to block access to The Pirate Bay and a number of other copyright-infringing websites was granted in December last year.

The music studios' case received an unexpected windfall last July when the US government seized the domain names of Kickass Torrents and forced it offline.

It arrested alleged Kickass Torrents owner Artem Vaulin in Poland, and this month was reportedly successful in getting Vaulin extradited to the US to face charges of copyright infringement and money laundering.

The file-sharing site, however, later resurfaced.