Torrent users will get 3 years in jail and hefty fine for viewing torrent site, blocked URL in India

NewDelhi August 22The Indian government, with the help of internet service providers, and presumably under directives of court, has banned thousands of websites and URLs in the last five odd years. But until now if you somehow visited these “blocked URLs” all was fine. However, now if you try to visit such URLs and view the information, you may get three-year jail sentence as well as invite a fine of Rs 3 lakh.

This is just for viewing a torrent file, or downloading a file from a host that may have been banned in India, or even for viewing an image on a file host like Imagebam. You don’t have to download a torrent file, and then the actual videos or other files, which might have copyright. Just accessing information under a blocked URL will land you in jail and leave your bank account poorer by Rs 3 lakh.

If you visit such a URL, you will be shown the following warning.

“This URL has been blocked under the instructions of the Competent Government Authority or in compliance with the orders of a Court of competent jurisdiction. Viewing, downloading, exhibiting or duplicating an illicit copy of the contents under this URL is punishable as an offence under the laws of India, including but not limited to under Sections 63, 63-A, 65 and 65-A of the Copyright Act, 1957 which prescribe imprisonment for 3 years and also fine of upto Rs. 3,00,000/-. Any person aggrieved by any such blocking of this URL may contact at [email protected] who will, within 48 hours, provide you the details of relevant proceedings under which you can approach the relevant High Court or Authority for redressal of your grievance”

This is a change compared to the earlier message that users would encounter on the blocked URLs in India. The earlier message would read that the URL has been blocked at the direction of DoT. Of late, however, the government bodies were not only experimenting in how to implement the blocks but were also trying to figure what message to show to users. Recently, the blocked URLs also gave out not reachable error without specifying any message.

In India, most of the URLs and websites were blocked using DNS-filtering. This means the DNS of the blocked site was added to a list maintained by the internet service provider and whenever a user tried connecting to that site, the DNS server of the internet service provider would block that request. However, this was easy to bypass as a lot of people started using – or were already using – third-party DNS services such as those maintained by Google. It is also ineffective if a site uses HTTPS or in other words encryption to secure the network between the user’s computer and the site server.

But in the last couple of years internet service providers, probably at the request of government bodies, have invested lot more in bolstering the mechanism through which they block websites. Indian government bodies too, instead of relying on internet service providers that are many, has started bring into play the big companies like Tata Communications and Airtel that manage a number of internet gateways in India.

Lack of clarity on it as well as no prior information on something like this, which may make, almost every web user in India a criminal, does indicate that this is just a message and not any sort of official government policy, which is going to be enforced. However, at the same, it is also clear that the mere presence of this message to web users mean that they may end up in trouble if a government body or cops do decided to follow through on anything that they believe is an “offence under the laws of India, including but not limited to under Sections 63, 63-A, 65 and 65-A of the Copyright Act, 1957”.

The problem, for now, doesn’t seem to that India is moving to block half of the internet through a policy the way China does. Instead, the issue is likely due to the John Doe orders that Indian courts are issuing at the regular interval at the request of content creators like Bollywood film makers. The lawyers of film studios often approach courts ahead of a movie’s release seeking preventive blocks on the URLs they compile in the list.

To put this in perspective, Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distribution used by a lot of users and advocates open source as the driving force. The company uses torrents as on of the alternative source to distribute their operating system. This move will, in theory, make it illegal for you to go the torrent site and search for Ubuntu and download it. This will majorly impact the way internet users use the internet in the country.

At the time of writing the warning had started rolling out on MTNL connections in addition to Airtel and Tata. We did not experience any issue or warning on bypassing it using ‘https’ method while we did face either the warning or we could not connect to the website while trying to access major torrenting websites. IndiaToday was the first one to report this and there are no official announcements on the issue as of writing.