While the world celebrated World Internet Day on Thursday, netizens in India woke up to popular file sharing sites blocked by Internet Service Providers. This was following a recent John Doe order by the Madras High Court, on a suit filed by the city-based Copyright Labs for preventing piracy of Tamil Film 3 and a Telugu movie Dammu. Major video-sharing websites, including Daily motion, torrent and piratebay remained inaccessible to users.
While ISPs including Reliance and BSNL had blocked these sites earlier this week, Airtel got into the act on Thursday blocking as many as 26 websites. Users who try to access these sites got to see the message, “Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders.” The Madras High Court had issued an interim injunction on March 29 wherein 3the ISPs including MTNL, Bharti Airtel, Aircel Cellular, Hathway Cable and Datacom, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications and TATA Teleservices were directed against allowing infringement of copyright through the communication, duplication, downloading and uploading of content without a proper licence.
Harish Ram, CEO, Copyright Labs, hired by producers of the movie 3, R K Productions Private Limited, for the online anti-piracy management of the movie, said that the ISPs had misinterpreted the order. “Instead of blocking specific URLs that were screening the movie, they blocked the whole sites,” he said. . “Anyway, enough damage has been done since the action was taken only 45 days after the movie got released,” he added. “While Sites such as You Tube provide specific tools to remove content, thereby respecting the copyright order, others such as Daily Motion don't even reply to mails,” he said.
While film producers allege there is a loss of almost Rs 3 -5 crore on every high budget movie because of online piracy, users of such websites are upset at the developments. “Torrent files of even rare movies are easily accessible and good prints are downloaded in just about thirty minutes. Besides, if the movie is really good, we watch it in the theatre too,” said Justin George, who uses movie-sharing avenues on the internet.
“With rising costs, theatres are increasingly out of reach. Producers can tap such sites and charge us minimal rates, instead of blocking them,” says G.K. Mevin., a user.
Internet activists across the country are enraged too. “It is infuriating that movie, whose claim to fame (‘Why this kolaveri') was because of the power of the internet, is seeking to restrict it,” said Anivar Aravind, a Bangalore-based internet activist. Activists point out that ISPs have chosen to overreact owing to fear of being charged with ‘contempt of court.' Besides, blocking a particular page is more difficult and so ISPs chose to implement a blanked ban on the site, say activists.
Incidentally, official websites of the Indian Supreme Court, the All India Congress Committee and the Department of Telecommunications experienced Denial of Service attacks on Thursday. The internet hacktivist group ‘Anonymous's opIndia' (opindia_revenge) claimed responsibility for the act as also that of the attack on Copyright Labs's website. However, Mr .Harish said, that they had taken off the site themselves, responding to attacks. “We took a preventive measure to safeguard our site,” he added.
This copy has been corrected for spelling and format errors
Friends, the bloackage is all about strangulating the internet slowly. The internet is the medium by which Egypt and Tahrir Square were successful. These politicians fear wave of consciousness and wave of mutual love between people. Anna and Ramdev were able to expose all the politicians, and paidmedia nexus due to internet only. All this awareness spreads fast via internet. And that is why you see so much censorship by Mr Sibal. The piracy used to happen in days of cassettes and tapes also. A good movie would always be a hit and bad one always a flop. This is a falsely created problem, its their reaction and their solution. Wake up and support movements well before you get strangulated totally.
Do not know where this is going to end.... Students(12 marks included in entrance!), Teachers (Teacher eligibility test), Doctors(refusal of visa NOC), Govt Servants (Exam for promotions)... The prosecution list is endless..
This is really nonsense, banning a website for those 2 underrated
movies is not acceptable. Some one please fight against this and bring
back the torrentz.eu.
This is outrageous, the court order shows the level of technical know-
how of Indian Judicial system. Banning entire websites for the sake of
two not-so-good movies is ridiculous.Torrent websites are frequently
used for sharing open source contents. How the court would justify it's
order by denying access to those who share open source contents.
What the court and the ISPs don't understand is "necessity is the
mother of invention". It's time to learn about proxies and VPN.
They want to enjoy the benefit of these sites. People who have worked in these movies itself use sharing sites.
I would say boycott '3' and 'Dammu'.
Actually those who download pirated movies are those who will never
spend and watch a movie in the theater or even buy a legit DVD. So the
producers/directors/film industry will not loose anything by not
blocking the site or gain a single penny more by blocking the site.
This move will only infuriate other legit torrent users like me.
This is really disgracing and disappointing. These file sharing websites are the greatest resources for knowledge seekers and learners. If some couple of users released or releasing the illegal torrents then track those user's IPs and penal them and charge them in criminal cases. The restriction doesn't seem to be practial and justical. Its like, "banning the whole IPL organisation becuase of Luke's molestation charge"!. Don't you agree?
Super, why not block facebook and other social media and also the press
media?? where is India going?
Seriously, man there are so many ways to get into a site. This is only
for people who don't understand tech world.
what nonsense! these guys copyright labs need to be sued into oblivion. the damage they have caused to protect their worthless movie needs to be paid in full. let vimeo, dailymotion and others along with the subscribers sue them. this is utterly ridiculous of ISPs like airtel too. they did not owe an explanation to their own subscribers!
Funny how our country seems to take the worst out of every other country
and implement them here. How about we get a dictator to run India as
well eh? Why do we even bother with notions such as free speech, right
to access of information. I truly hope that the people who implemented
this ban are brought to court and punished for unconstitutionally infringing on the rights of millions of people and causing economic damage.
Tamil films are exempted from entertainment tax in Tam!l Nadu otherwise
it is 15% (considerable lower comparing all !ndia average.
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