Maharashtra: 29 websites offering pirated movies, music, suspended, says special police unit

Within a month of its establishment, the unit had identified 900 such websites and begun initiating legal action after the end of a three-month pilot.

A specialised unit of the Maharashtra Police has suspended 29 websites, which they claim, offered pirated versions of popular Bollywood films and music. The Cyber Department of the state police had set up the Maharashtra Cyber Digital Crime Unit as a pilot programme in August 2017 in co-operation with the Motion Pictures Association of America, an influential industry body. The unit was set up to protect the entertainment industry from piracy. Within a month of its establishment, the unit had identified 900 such websites and begun initiating legal action after the end of a three-month pilot.

Balsing Rajput, the Superintendent of Police, said that the police first issued notices under the Criminal Procedure Code to the domains hosting the errant websites, asking them to take action. “The domain registrars adhered to our notices and suspended the services of the websites,” he said. The police estimate that the websites suspended so far had been causing significant monetary losses to the owners of the copyrighted content.

According to police estimates, the entertainment industry stood to earn Rs 8 crore a month, money that was earlier shifted to the websites featuring pirated material. Figures provided by the police show that among the suspended websites, ‘kuchrangpyaarkeaisebhi.net’ attracted monthly traffic of 19.99 million users, ‘badtameezdil.net’ had 17.3 million users and ‘tuaashiqui.com’ had 13.58 million monthly visitors.