Can Online Piracy of Intellectual Property Really Be Curbed Now?

In its recent ruling, the Madras High Court has, in more ways than one, brought about an important curve to what had become a worrying factor in the country.

The sweeping orders to ban entire websites, which hosted a couple of pirated movies, caused huge uproar across the country, even drawing the ire of global hacking movement 'Anonymous,' which went on a rampage, hacking many Government of India and ISP websites. Heaving a sigh of relief after the recent ruling, Internet Service Providers across the country have now been instructed to just remove the link with pirated property after the owner of the intellectual property points out an infringement to the court.

The ruling, in layman terms, defines clearly that only owners of intellectual property can protect their product online from piracy, by banning the particular link and not the entire website. This will no doubt please many in the country who were rattled after many popular websites like Pirate Bay and Vimeo were banned.

While for many intellectual property owners like movie/music production houses and software firms, this ruling has come as good news as they could now legally stop piracy, many others are simply pleased that they would have uncensored legitimate access to torrents and intellectual property for free.

Copyright lawyer Danish Sheikh at the Alternative Law Forum explained that before this particular order came about, vague orders were being passed in John Doe cases.

Now this court order has ensured that Internet Service Providers will have to comply with court orders that identify the links causing infringement and take it down instead of a sweeping rule to take down entire websites. "However, we need to look at whether it was only the public that forced the Internet Service Providers to take up this matter in court or whether there were commercial motives too."

What makes this ruling interesting however is that there is a flip side to this too. While it could protect online content legally, it could also be a motivation that could open up other channels of piracy. Executive director of Centre For Internet and Society Sunil Abraham said that site-wide and content-specific John Doe orders is a disproportionate response to copyright infringement online as they result in significant collateral damage to access to knowledge. Site-wide block orders result in censorship of the public domain and openly licensed software and cultural works. URL-specific block orders undermine fair use/fair dealing exceptions such as access by the disabled, access by students and researchers and non-profit lending. War on consumers using block orders and arrest warrants will only result in copyright infringement using VPNs and using offline means.

The need of the hour are new business models and not a crackdown on everyday practices of citizens online, he added.

However, for crusaders of anti-piracy in the Sandalwood industry, which loses crores each year to movie piracy, appealing to the moral conscience of people is the way forward.