The producers of the blockbuster movie Piku have obtained a Piracy Blackout Order against Vimeo, The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents. Except for Vimeo, the other websites mentioned are popular in online piracy and illegal file sharing.
Piku is one of the most awaited Bollywood movies that have just premiered. Three movie studios namely Saraswati Entertainment Creations Limited, MSM Motion Pictures, and Rising Sun Films have joint venture for this movie.
Piracy Blackout Order
It instructs the domain owners to restrain themselves from “making available” and distributing the Piku without any proper license. The Indian High Court issued this order which prohibits the websites and ISPs from giving access to various links that contain the movie in pirated versions. MSM Motion Pictures obtained the same order against 13 websites that are also pirating movies.
Blackout orders were already granted to movie makers before but this one has a stronger impact as it targets websites involved in piracy.
Drawbacks
The domains listed in the court order are outdated. For example, for the pirate bay, they listed Thepiratebay.org but currently they use “thepiratebay.se”. As for Kickass Torrents, they misspelled the domain as kickasstoreents.com.
Surprisingly, Vimeo is also part of the list of domains in the court order. This popular video sharing platform doesn’t usually get cited as infringing material. It is a channel for indie filmmakers where they can show their original works.
This is the first in India’s film industry; and their main hope is for piracy to reduce.