censorship
Poor Jolly-LLB 2, albeit getting lots of free but priceless publicity from spending time in court defending cases by lawyers, of all people, will now have to make four cuts in order to satisfy a bench of the Bombay high court.
Bollywood film "Udta Punjab" will hit the theatres on Friday after the Supreme Court today refused to block a Bombay high court order allowing its release while the Punjab and Haryana high court dismissed petitions seeking a stay on it.
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.
The Bombay high court on Monday overruled the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) recommended 13 cuts for Bollywood film "Udta Punjab" and cleared the film for release with one cut and three disclaimers by the filmmakers here.
The censor board on Friday told the Bombay high court that some of the scenes recommended for deletion in the Hindi movie "Udta Punjab" were "very vulgar".
Naik Naik & Company managing partner Ameet Naik with senior advocate Ravi Kadam acted for Phantom Films in their Bombay high court appeal against the censor board’s decision to ban the film Udta Punjab.
The Caravan investigates Indian broadcast censorship via the government’s low-key Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC), which presides over the suitability of jokes in The Simpsons for kids, criticism of Narendra Modi and other politicians, and the chilling effect on explicit language on channels such as Comedy Central, and the more political:
The government’s attempt to exert control over television isn’t limited to supposedly obscene content. It has also targeted matter that it deems politically dangerous. In April, for instance, the ministry of information and broadcasting banned Al Jazeera News for five days for “cartographic aggression”—displaying a map of Kashmir that did not depict Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Aksai Chin as part of India. The most prominent recent example of such censorship occurred in early August, when the government served the news channel NDTV with a show-cause notice over its coverage of the case of Yakub Memon, who was executed in July for his involvement in a series of bombings in Mumbai in 1993, in which more than 250 people were killed. The channel, the notice said, “not only questioned the judicial system of India but tended to denigrate the very institution.” Similar notices were sent to two other channels, ABP and Aaj Tak, for airing telephone interviews with the gangster Chhota Shakeel.
NK Singh, the general secretary of the Broadcast Editors’ Association, is stinging in his criticism of these actions. “The notices were made on invented pretexts and are an example of the typical predatory instinct of the state machinery to hunt media freedom,” he said when I met him in September. He argued that the channels had violated no laws, and that they were within their rights to cover every aspect of the case. “If there was a contempt of court, why didn’t the court take cognisance against the channels?” he said.
Is this the end of the block? Possibly not despite reports of a government U-turn...
“I reject with contempt the charge that it is a Talibani government, as being said by some of the critics. Our government supports free media,” said telecoms minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, saying that ISPs were ordered today to unblock websites that did not contain pornography that were accidentally included in the secret list of 857 pornographic sites to be blocked in India online.
Indian internet service providers (ISPs) received a notice from the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) two days ago (31 July), ordering the blocking of 857 websites, many of which appeared to host pornography, according to an authoritative source at an ISP.
Several pornography web sites are currently inaccessible in India on several internet service providers (ISPs).
"New Delhi authorities on Wednesday asked India’s federal information technology ministry to block the taxi-hailing apps of US -based Uber and its local rival Ola in the city in a bid to enforce a ban on the companies’ services,” reported Reuters.
However, QZ reported last year that blocking of services such as Uber, which rent servers in the cloud, could prove to be “practically impossible without accidentally blocking other services”.
The Caravan magazine’s website has published an internal Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) memo to its regional offices, with a list of words that should be banned from movies and other media it is responsible for censoring.
The Delhi High Court on 23 June blocked 472 websites, but later updated its John Doe order to only block 219 websites, for alleged copyright violation, reported Medianama. The order, which came on the complaint of FIFA 2014 broadcasting rights owner Multi Screen Media, was only implemented in July.
Multi Screen Media instructed advocate Sai Krishna Rajagopal who drafted in senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Akhil Sibal, according to Quartz India. It contended that by allegedly live streaming FIFA online not only were those sites violating its copyright but were also causing tax losses to the Indian government.
The sites blocked include URL shorteners, file storage sites, services for emailing large files, audio files site Wapsip, Telugu content download sites and cartoon sites. Medianama added that the fact that URL shorteners and Google Docs are on the blocking list indicates that the court has not checked every site it has ordered to be blocked, though Quartz added that Google Docs has not been blocked in India.
In August 2012, the Ministry of Communications had similarly blocked 100s of URLs.
The Bombay high court has declined granting interim relief to movie director and producer Anurag Kashyap over a challenge of the government's rule to superimpose a "smoking is injurious to health" warning on movies whenever a cigarette is shown on screen.
The Censor Board had not given one of Kashyap's movie a certificate after he refused to include the warning in his movie Ugly. However, Chief Justice Mohit Shah and Justice MS Sanklecha said it would not grant interim relief and said he'd have to petition the central government to change the rule. [PTI]
Naik Naik & Co represented Kashyap, according to the Bombay high court's causelist of today.
Dalit Scholar Kamal Bharti was arrested after making allegedly derogatory remarks against Uttar Pradesh minister Azam Khan in a Facebook post about suspended bureaucrat Durga Shakti Nagpal, reported the PTI.
Bharti had posted that Nagpal was arrested for ordering the demolition of a mosque wall, but when a Madarsa in the state was abolished no action was taken against the officials who were deputed to execute the demolition. He had reportedly added: “It is the ‘will and wish’ of the Urban Development minister Azam Khan which prevails and not the law of the land”.
A unified regulator – the Unified Financial Agency (UFA) - for markets, insurance, commodities, pensions, and eventually banking, also subsuming the SEBI, SAT, IRDA, PFRDA, and FMC and merging the RBI with it, was proposed on Friday [BS]
US Supreme Court may partially strike down law denying legally married gay couples full marital rights, though the verdict of the nine-judge bench is not likely before June even as final arguments draw to a close [Express]
Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation lambasted the government for the ambigious Section 66A of the IT Act and Intermediary Guidelines. The committee suggested that evidence of foreign websites refusing to honour Indian laws should be made public [TOI]
Family of late Delhi HC judge Jagjit Singh – a judge of the HC for 11 years until 1975 – obtains their medical entitlement under the HC Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act after a protracted legal battle [India Today]
Bombay HC directs Goa to file 151 FIRs containing illegal mining charges against former ministers, mining company owners and state officials [Hindu]