Psst! Wanna download some free music? How about the newest version of FIFA for the game system of your choice? Or, better yet, why not watch any number of the Oscar nominated movies that have been floating around the Internet, all without leaving your house?

If it all sounds too good to be true that’s because it soon could be. After operating for the past 15 years without much interference, major online piracy sites are experiencing levels of legal scrutiny that haven’t been seen since the days of Napster. Even the uncommonly resilient Pirate Bay was taken down last month in a high-profile domain seizure that, by the process of elimination, passed the torch to what’s long been the second most popular site among pirates: KickAss Torrents.

Founded in 2009, KickAss is the 43rd most visited website in the U.S. and ranked at number 67 in the world, according to Alexa Internet rankings.

A quick review of the site turns up bootleg copies of “Birdman,” “Boyhood,” “The Theory of Everything,” and other Oscar-nominated movies. Then there’s the deep catalog of DVD and Blu-ray quality movies from the past few decades. There are six pages of search results for “Space Jam,” 56 pages for “Angry Birds,” and almost every eBook, porn parody, and software update you can imagine.

Photo: KickAss.to

Photo: KickAss.to

But plenty of torrent sites have similar selections. They’re built on a foundation of users who take it upon themselves to post torrent extensions of much larger files. Following the extension leads a user to the movie or music file, which they download by linking with other users who are hosting the file (“seeds”) or downloading it at the same time (“peers’).

Two things differentiate Kickass Torrents from the rest of the pack: its sheer size and for its ability to evade law enforcement. The site was launched at Kat.ph before moving to KickAss.to when police pressure was heating up. It moved again last year to KickAss.so before that domain was revoked by the Somalian Internet registry this week. KickAss has been restored in full back at KickAss.to.

Traffic increased by 600 percent when the Pirate Bay was shuttered two months ago, and KickAss’ millions of daily visitors spend an average of 5:18 engaged with the site. Compare that with the growing body of research that most Internet users never spend more than 15 seconds on a single webpage.

The piracy prognosticators at the copyright news site TorrentFreak predicted KickAss will be the most used torrent site online through 2015. Similar adulations have taken over Reddit, where users who have long championed KickAss have only increased their volume since the Pirate Bay’s downfall. That loyalty has grown at least partly because the site has managed to stay online, aside from a few domain relocations.

That’s possible because KickAss administrators have tried to give themselves plausible deniability. It’s not illegal to download torrent files in the United States; in fact there are a number of academic sites that distribute the latest research this way. The problems begin when a user commits copyright infringement, and legally there’s a huge difference between downloading “The Expendables 3” and NASA’s latest Mars map.

“Torrenting” has become Internet shorthand for downloading media content illegally with BitTorrent protocol. Like “Kleenex” is to tissues, though, there are other ways to use this method without falling into that class.

KickAss’ argument is that, as a general torrent site, users can link to any kind of content there. It just so happens that more users are interested in using the site to download new TV episodes over, say, scientific data, the logic goes. (This would also explain why movie torrents are conveniently featured on the site’s home page.)

Unlike the Pirate Bay, they also respond to requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In doing so, KickAss is able to remove only a small number of its torrent links while also putting itself in the position to argue that it complies with legal requests from copyright owners.

That rationale wasn’t enough to keep the site online in the United Kingdom. A London High Court judge ordered Internet Service Providers to block Kat.ph on behalf of Sony, EMI, Universal and seven other record labels. The judge agreed with the record companies’ claims that KickAss’ sole reason for existence wasn’t greater information sharing, but to distribute media content for free.

“Each of the websites purports to maintain a content removal policy which claims to provide for their removal of copyrighted content from the website upon receipt of a relevant notification,” the judge ruled, as quoted by the Guardian. “The reality appears to be that these policies are mere window dressing.”

British users have been able to access the site without much interruption thanks to a number of mirror sites and proxy services, but the intermittent outages KickAss has experienced have provided a glimpse into what sites will take over the next time the most popular torrent site goes down for good.

The site most likely to someday replace KickAss torrents could be, well, KickAss Torrents. Months after the Pirate Bay’s demise the zombie site still haunts the dreams of copyright holders in the form of mirror pages containing a database of content. Even if it takes a wooden cross, though, it’s almost certain that other sites will attract the hordes of displaced torrent users. There’s Torrentz.com, Extratorrent, and IsoHunt, three file-sharing giants that have managed to attract a similar, albeit much smaller, audience of loyal users. But the odds-on favorite to lead piracy into an uncertain future is Popcorn Time. With Popcorn Time users still seed movies, though they don’t need to actually download them.

The site has already earned the nickname “Netflix for pirates” for taking the established piracy model and injecting the convenience and speed that Netflix has helped make essential for any video site. In fact, by ditching the ugly and difficult to navigate model of current torrent sites, Popcorn Time has already become popular enough to attract attention from the company it mimics. “Piracy is one of our biggest competitors,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a letter to shareholders late last year. “Popcorn Time’s rise relative to Netflix and HBO in the Netherlands, for example, is sobering.”