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Today the popular torrent websites kickass.to announced that they will be moving to another domain. The new domain will be kickasstorrents.im and visitors are suspected to be automatically redirected from kickass.to to kickasstorrents.im.

UPDATE: Kickass.to moves again to Kat.cr

If you have issues visiting kickass.to or have been wondering if kickass.to is down you will want to visit kickass.to’s new domain at kickasstorrents.im.

Early April 23rd, the KAT team annouced “KickassTorrents is moving to a new domain name” and provided information on their blog. The website gave no particular reason why they chose the .im domain name, or if they consider it a safe domain extension.

KAT has moved from domain to domain on a few occasions over the recent years. The first move was to evade law enforcement and pressure from the entertainment industries. Other moves were based on a yearly rotation tradition.

KAT chose a domain extension from the Isle of Man where the .im registry (IM Registry) can’t respond to individual cases. The registry doesn’t suspend or terminate domain names themselves. Disputes are reviewed by a representative of the local Government. However, the .im registry claims to have ‘zero tolerance’ for copyright infringement and internet piracy.

The new move means that kickasstorrents.im will be accessible to more countries that may have been previously blocked. The nearly 2 million URLs that were previously blocked by Google through DMCA notices will now be available under the new domain.

Torrent websites have lost a large chunk of web traffic due to Google’s new anti-piracy algorithm. This means that it a change for the domain name in the future seems likely to happen.