Luthra & Luthra’s Delhi office won in the Supreme Court today for Indian B2C portal Ebay and its managing director Avnish Bajaj, in the case of eBay v State and Avnish Bajaj v State.
Luthra’s litigation practice co-founding partner Vijay Sondhi and partner Sanjay Kumar, with managing associate Saleem Hassan Ansari, principal associates Varun Pareek and Anirban Bhattacharya, and associate Wasim Beg acted for Ebay and Bajaj.
Bajaj’s website Bazee.com India Private Limited (BIPL), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of EBay, had carried a listing offering a mobile phone video clip of two Delhi Public School students filmed in sexually explicit acts for sale in 2004.
They had appealed against a May 2008 judgment of the Delhi High Court, which was delivered by Justice Muralidhar, and had declined to halt the trial court proceedings against Bajaj under section 67 of the Information Technology Act 2000 (IT Act) for the offence of publishing an obscene product and making it available for sale.
BIPL was not arraigned as an accused and the high court held that the law recognises deemed criminal liability of the directors of a company irrespective of the company being joined in as defendant.
Ebay, in its appeal before the Supreme Court, challenged the high court’s reasoning behind Bajaj’s prosecution that a company’s directors can be independently deemed criminally liable under the IT Act, even when the company itself is not arraigned.
A bench consisting of justices Dalveer Bhandari, Dipak Misra and Sudhansu Mukhopadhyay set aside the prosecution of Bajaj, according to a statement from Luthra & Luthra.
Counsel Muneesh Malhotra acted for appellants Aneeta and Anil Hada, senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi acted for Bajaj, senior counsel Sidharth Luthra appeared for eBay.
The respondents had instructed counsel Rajesh Harnal in the appeal by the Hadas while additional solicitor general PP Malhotra appeared for the state. Arun Mohan was amicus curiae.
The order was not yet available at the time of going to press.
- Update 28 April, 18:33: Click here to download the Supreme Court order
[Correction: An earlier version of the article had incorrectly described the high court’s order. This has been corrected. We regret the error.]
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The CBI, IPS officers and the local police will hunt you down and you get jailed for drawing a cartoon of a politician, if you download a sex video of a politician and upload it elsewhere you will be crucified by the law.
But what about the innocent young boys and girls, they have gone through this billion times and nothing has been done till now to put a tab of further issues getting popped up. The DPS MMS Scandal video is still available for download. There are several websites that are SELLING this kind of MMS videos, why has no action been taken against them ?
Agreed, internet is vast and cannot be tamed, but at least we can put an end to the upload/download of the video by tracking the IP address, how difficult is that ?. I am sure the circulation of the MMS will be reduced considerably if such a law is implemented immediately. This will not only save lives of thousands of girls but also save those students who record for fun and the video gets leaked.
What is the government/social workers/NGO waiting for ??? Isn’t anyone interested in filing a PIL in this regard or all of them are busy filing PIL against dumb issues related to celebs and film stars. Why the most infamous videos are still being uploaded/downloaded and no one is tracking them???
This entire plague can come to sudden halt even with handful of arrests being made for upload/download of such material.
THINK !!! Tomorrow it might be your sister / daughter / brother / son who might get axed by this plague.
This problem is not one that can be solved by legislation or litigation. It's a problem of values in society, and one that can only be solved by society itself - not the government / social workers / NGOs by themselves.
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