RM Partners won a John Doe order in the Bombay high court today, directing several websites to take down the downloadable copy of the yet unreleased Hindi film Udta Punjab, and temporarily restraining cable operators from telecasting the film.
But the high court steered clear of blocking the entire websites as that would have effectively operated as a gag order.
Advocate Shailesh Mendon was briefed by RM Partners partner Nikhil Rodrigues for Udta Punjab’s producer Balaji Motion Picture. Balaji made Bharat Sanchar Nigam and 49 websites and cable operators, defendants in the dispute.
The copy of the film which was submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), for certification, was leaked to the online piracy websites reported Huffington Post.
Justice GS Patel refused to grant Balaji the relief of blocking the entire websites and limited the relief to the take down of the copy of, specifically, Udta Punjab.
He noted in the order:
“[…] it is unreasonable to expect any of the intermediaries or cable operators Defendants to block entire websites. It is one thing to ask that links to a specific download of the film in question be taken down or rendered inaccessible. But to ask, as the Plaintiffs do, that an entire website be rendered is in itself unreasonable. The suggestion implicit in the plaint, that all these 800 websites have only illicit content and that they have no permissible or legitimate content, is unwarranted and without disclosed basis.”
“[….] the reliefs sought if granted would operate as pre-censorship or gag orders.”
Advocate Gauraj Shah was appearing for one of the defendants – Hathway Cable & Datacom.
Udta Punjab won in the Bombay high court on 9 June against the CBFC which had censored 89 scenes from the film. Naik & Naik won the high court’s order which cleared the film for release tomorrow with only one censored scene and three disclaimers.
Imperfect block list?
Out of the 115 URLs supplied for the block, the vast majority of bit torrent link hosting domains, such as 1337x.to, bigfile.to, desitorrents.com are extratorrent.cc already blanket-blocked by the DOT on a Delhi Airtel and other connections, displaying the following message since the mass porn and torrent-site block that was first reported by Legally India in August 2015:
“Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. Please contact administrator for more information.”
However, several URLs on the blocklist were still accessible at the time of publication, such as files hosted on archive.org - an not-for-profit archive of web-pages and internet content.
And at least one very popular torrent portal with more than 20 listings of Udta Punjab for download was completely accessible, at least on our Delhi Airtel connection.
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Good strategy to drum up interest though!
The court did the right thing by not blocking entire websites and just the links. There is a difference between passing a John Doe order and asking for a gag order in that disguise.
One week and this movie will be on the telly.
I am not from the CBFC.
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