Last April 2020, the American multinational mass media and entertainment company Disney ordered the removal of a series of URLs and mirror websites and again, the Delhi High Court ordered the pullingdown ofsuch websites dealing in digital piracy.
In the month of September, 118 rogue websites were blocked by Disney. These websites were the ones that streamed Disney’s contents illegally.
Along with the defendant Kimcartoon.to and Ors., there were many other websites that were pulled down by Disney such as KissCartoon, KissAnime, and GoGoAnime were also targeted for streamlining Disney shows and cartoons.
Department of Communication (DoT) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information (MEITY) were the organizations involved in the lawsuit as co-defendants.
Disney Enterprises filed the lawsuit as these websites were streaming the original and copyright content created by Disney and that too without any prior authorization from them.
Justice Rajiv Shakdar was the judge in this matter and after carefully analyzing the content on these websites he restrained the defendants from ‘hosting, streamlining, reproducing, distributing, making available to the public and/or communicating to the public or facilitating the same on their websites through the internet in any manner whatsoever any cinematograph work, content, program, and show in which the plaintiffs have copyright’.
This decision was made in order to protect Disney from irreparable damages to its commerce and statutory interest. For protecting the piracy of Disney, the request of the interim injunction was also granted by the Delhi court to protect the originality and creativity of their content.
The role of defendants i.e. DoT and MEITY was also called an error of ‘description and not intent’ and they were ordered by the court to block the websites with immediate effect.
Before 2015, India had never seen a firm crackdown on digital piracy but with the rise of cases gaining significance in number and action, a firm criticism is expected on what is generally shown on the Internet.
This decision is a big relief for the producers of original content creators.
