“The offence is not in viewing, but in making a prejudicial distribution, a public exhibition or letting for sale or hire without appropriate permission copyright–protected material. These error pages appear to have confused the penal provisions regarding obscenity with penalties under the Copyright Act, 1957.”
In a later order (dated August 30), Justice Patel asked all ISPs to display a more accurate generic message worded as follows:
“This URL has been blocked under instructions of a competent Government Authority or in compliance with the orders of a Court of competent jurisdiction. Infringing or abetting infringement of copyright-protected content including under this URL is an offence in law. Ss. 63, 63-A, 65 and 65-A of the Copyright Act, 1957, read with Section 51, prescribe penalties of a prison term of upto 3 years and a fine of upto Rs.3 lakhs. Any person aggrieved by the blocking of this URL may contact the Nodal Officer at xyz@[isp-domain] for details of the blocking order including the case number, court or authority to be approached for grievance redressals. Emails will be answered within two working days. Only enquiries regarding the blocking will be entertained.”
He made it clear that this message is to be displayed by all ISPs, who are to also designate a nodal officer whom aggrieved persons could contact for details on the blocking.
The matter has now been listed for 23rd September, when the court will examine if a more complete error message can be displayed by the ISPs. TCL had submitted that the display of a more detailed message is technically infeasible because its inbuilt software does permit display of a file exceeding 32MB. Finding this to be unacceptable, Justice Patel has asked TCL to forward the copy of this order to its overseas suppliers and impress upon them the need to increase the permissible file size.
In his inimitably witty style, Justice Patel ends his order by noting a hilarious submission by Mr. Tulzapurkar (who represented TCL) that “these blocks and John Doe orders seem to be sought only for forthcoming or anticipated box office flops”. Perhaps there is some truth to this axiom after all! John Does and blocks may help publicise otherwise mediocre movies. And to this extent IP enforcement plays out in stranger ways than we’ve come to expect!