Historic piracy injunction for Piku: Delhi High Court, Piracy Law in India, Use of Torrents in India and Copyright

The Delhi High Court granted restraining orders against websites and cable operators from streaming, broadcasting or publishing online the film Piku without permission. Justice Indermeet Kaur of the Delhi High Court passed this interim order on the plea of the producers of the movie as a proactive step to prevent “irreparable damage that might occur to them”. The Court issued notices to ISPs, cable operators and websites etc. about this and particularly to ISPs to block access to certain websites that were mentioned along with the plea and any that would be communicated in the future.
I am sure most of you were already ready to or are looking for a good “720p” or “1080p” print of Piku on one of your torrent search engines. It is a practice a lot of people undertake. Needless to mention, piracy is a crime. And the irony is that almost all (even illegally, mostly theater print) “downloaded movies” show this kind of a commercial. But people are reckless in ascertaining their point of view.
“So what?”, “Tujhe kya”, “Mera Internet hai”, “Tell me if you want it?”, “Hume kon pakdega?”, “Sab Karte hain”. India has surfaced as one of the biggest hubs of piracy, be it the 50 rupee Movie combo DVD at Palika or some torrent website. People if you think it is not possible to find you, please give up the notion. In 2012 more than 1000 people were tracked down in an anti piracy drive by the Kerla Police for pirating a Malayalam movie. Then for the typical mockery, “Eh why doesn’t the Government do anything?”. The law (Copyright Act 2012) is in place and it has made significant changes also. The only reason that India has not been able to successfully ban these services is because the servers rest outside India and we don’t have any law to extend our jurisdiction to that extent today. As an end user if you download a pirated version of things you are not entitled to, you can be booked criminally under this Act and can face prison for up to 2 years. The US law is more stringent here where felony even extends up to 5 years of jail time. The UK however has come up with a wonderful policy last year abolishing its online piracy law, making it mandatory for the offenders to buy the product that they illegally downloaded. Whether or not the IT Act has an implication here, I would love to have opinions from the readers also. In mine, the IT Act has no clear definition of Cinematographic Content Copyright infringement. To add to your knowledge such copyrights have a lifetime of sixty years.

Is torrent illegal?

No, Not at all. Torrenting as a means was made to encourage peer to peer file sharing (Computer to Computer and not server to computer). Even websites like Wikipedia encourage heavy file sharing via torrent so as to lower server loads. If you download an open source software via torrent or share something you are legally not bound otherwise not to, it is perfectly fine but the contrary can fall under infringement and effects and be criminal as well as civil. So the best deal is to purchase DVDs and CDs or online if it be. After reading this you might not stop practicing piracy and being a party to it, but remember someone is resolving.