Indian Media Magazine – Media, Television, Movie and Celebrity News

The Madras High Court has granted some relief to Inter­net users in India, cour­tesy an appeal filed by a con­sor­tium of Inter­net Ser­vice Providers ask­ing for speci­ficity in com­plaints of infring­ing con­tent, instead of a John Doe/Ashok Kumar order. The order, issued on the 15th of June 2012, of which Medi­aNama has a copy, states:

“The order of interim injunc­tion dated 25/04/2012 is hereby clar­i­fied that the interim injunc­tion is granted only in respect of a par­tic­u­lar URL where the infring­ing movie is kept and not in respect of the entire web­site. Fur­ther, the appli­cant is directed to inform about the par­tic­u­lars of URL where the interim movie is kept within 48 hours.”

Read­ers might have noticed that, over the week­end, Indian ISPs enabled access to sites like Vimeo, The Pirate Bay, among oth­ers. These sites had been pre­vi­ously blocked because of a John Doe order granted to Copy­right Labs (for the movie Dhammu). The John Doe order, against a name­less entity, which allowed stu­dios to tell ISPs to block user access to many video shar­ing and tor­rent web­sites pre-emptively, to pre­vent upload­ing of content.

The clar­i­fi­ca­tion from the Madras High Court came fol­low­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tion to the court by a con­sor­tium of ISPs, point­ing out the John Doe order has also led to legit­i­mate con­tent being dis­abled, and they can still block access to infring­ing con­tent when informed by the stu­dios. Copy­right Labs had also given to the ISPs, a list of sev­eral URLs with pirated content.

On con­di­tion of anonymity, an ISP rep­re­sen­ta­tive told Medi­aNama that they felt that ISPs were being wrong­fully vil­i­fied on the Inter­net, when it was never really their fault, and that they were only com­ply­ing with the court orders. They felt that it was adversely going to impact their busi­ness if video stream­ing is dis­abled for users.

Start­ing with the movie Sing­ham, for which Reliance Enter­tain­ment had taken a John Doe order last year, movie stu­dios have been con­sis­tently get­ting John Doe orders block­ing access to file shar­ing, video shar­ing and tor­rent­ing websites.

What This Means

Read­ers might recall that a John Doe order has recently been granted to Viacom18 for the film the Gangs Of Wassey­pur. Fol­low­ing the Madras High Court order, which sets a prece­dent in terms of demands of speci­ficity, ISPs may not com­ply with requests for block­ing of entire web­sites, and use the Madras High Court order to get the courts to instead ask stu­dios to be spe­cific. Just like the John Doe orders issued in the past set a prece­dent for more, this order might just set a wel­come prece­dent for specificity. Note that this is the way it should have been, in any case: under the IT Rules (2011), all stu­dios had to do was ask ISPs to block access to spe­cific URLs.

It doesn’t mean that John Doe orders will not be granted, but it does sug­gest that they will be contested.

I’m quite sur­prised that the ISPs went and con­tested these orders: one notion was that with a reduc­tion in video-watching online, their costs would have reduced. How­ever, rev­enues for mobile oper­a­tors might also have been impacted, since many of their users choose pay-as-you-go plans, and video stream­ing would con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant revenues.

*

Addi­tional Reading

Our Take

Jun 6th 2012: Anony­mous India’s Take­downs Could Be Coun­ter­pro­duc­tive
May 27th 2012: John Doe Orders: What Needs To Be Done
May 19th 2012: Need Speci­ficity In Court Orders On Online Copy­right Vio­la­tion In India, Trans­parency From ISPs

John Doe Orders

May 17th, 2012: ISP Wise List Of Blocked Sites
May 17th 2012: Air­tel Blocks Vimeo, Dai­ly­Mo­tion & All Major Tor­rent Sites In India Fol­low­ing John Doe Order
May 11th 2012: Dai­ly­Mo­tion Blocked In India On RCOM; Air­tel & RCOM Block Book­mark­ing Site Xmarks
May 4th 2012: Reliance Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Blocks The Pirate Bay & Vimeo
Mar 30th 2012: Pro­duc­ers Of Tamil Film ’3′ Get Court Order Mak­ing ISPs Respon­si­ble For Check­ing Piracy
Aug 30th 2011: Reliance Enter­tain­ment Gets Order To Block Piracy Of “Body­guard” On File Shar­ing Sites
Jul 21st 2011:  Files Shar­ing Sites Blocked In India Because Reliance BIG Pic­tures Got A Court Order

Anony­mous India Action

Jun 14th 2012: Anony­mous India To File RTIs Seek­ing Infor­ma­tion Against Inter­net Cen­sor­ship
Jun 11th 2012: Anony­mous India’s June 9th Protests In 18 Cities: What Hap­pened Where
May 30th 2012: Anony­mous Defaces More Indian Web­sites
May 26th 2012: Anony­mous Hacks Into Reliance Servers; Redi­rects Users To Warn­ing Page
May 25th 2012: Anony­mous India Releases Reliance’s Site Block List; Calls For On-Ground Protest On June 9th 2012

*
Sub­scribe to MediaNama: SMS (India only) | Face­book | Twit­ter | Daily Newslet­ter

read more by click­ing here .….