Film piracy: three held

October 13, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:49 am IST - HYDERABAD:

Three students found themselves in the dock for having illegally uploaded the latest Telugu blockbuster movie ‘Rudramadevi’ on various websites and made money. The police caught the trio, including two engineering students, on Monday.

Prashanth Chaitankar (20), pursuing aeronautical engineering course, Pavan Kamble (20), a B Tech student, and Tanveer Ahmed, an MBA student, all residents of R C Puram, purchased around two dozen websites in the last few months. They copied the links of ‘Rudramadevi’ movie from a website ‘www.movierulz.to’ and uploaded it on their own websites, the police said.

While they earned just a handful of money through advertisements they got for their websites, it resulted in revenue loss of crores of rupees to the producers.

Following a complaint from anti-video piracy cell of the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce, the police began investigation.

The movie was uploaded on different websites the day it was released. Viewers could also download the movie from the websites. All of the three persons had uploaded around 3,000 movies till now and earned between Rs. 15,000 and Rs. 20,000 every month.

“The accused got money through the advertisements that they got from different companies. Whenever a visitor clicks on the pop-up advertisement, it will take them to the main website of the company,” Additional Commissioner of Police (Crimes) Swathi Lakra said.

Tanveer Ahmed took assistance of his friend Joanne Francis of Mumbai whom he came in contact through social-networking site.

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