As part of his war against video piracy, actor Vishal has been working with a select team to bring offenders to book.
Vishal’s team has been conducting raids on shops, which sell pirated films across the State, and is handing over the offenders to the police.
A couple of days ago, Vishal, the president of Tamil Film Producers’ Council, and his team were aiming to trapping the administrators of tamilrockers.com and tamilgun.com, the two major sites which make many new movies available online immediately after their release. During this process, the team identified a website, which they thought was among the most significant hubs of online releases.
Tracing the Internet Protcol (IP) address, they identified the administrator of the site as one Gowrishankar of Tirupatthur, Vellore district. Under the guise of talking about a deal to upload new movies, they invited Gowrishankar to a premises in Triplicane.
When he stepped in, Vishal and his men nabbed him and handed him over to the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Triplicane, alleging that he was a leading figure in online piracy.
The case was entrusted to the Central Crime Branch. During interrogation, the police found that the suspect was running a website called tamilgun.in that promoted advertisements in magazines and at times, pornographic material. The administrator was earning a few thousand rupees a month through the business, the police said.
He was in no way connected to tamilgun.com or tamilrockers.com.
The police suspect both these websites are operated from outside the country.
Remanded to custody
The investigation further revealed that Gowrishankar had little knowledge of the internet or computers since he had studied only up to Class X. He was remanded to judicial custody.
“The administrators of online piracy websites get lakhs of rupees by releasing new movies. The websites have had a long and unchallenged run since their servers are located abroad,” said an investigator.
Even after the latest arrest, the administrators of the websites had declared that they would continue to release new films.
According to the KPMG India-FICCI Indian Media and Entertainment Report 2017, the annual loss to the film industry due to online piracy is ₹1,800 crore.
