Piracy and online copyright violation has become a serious issue for Indian entertainment industry. The owners of films and music records have adopted many measures to prevent online theft of their movies and songs but the same has been of little help to them so far.

They have tried blocking of copyright violating websites, DNS redirection, using distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) to take down copyright violating websites, using DNS cache poisoning attacks to manipulate DNS services, etc. Most of these activities are illegal to perform yet the entertainment and media industry is hiring professionals to do the same. This can make them liable for civil and criminal actions.

The correct procedure is to follow a techno legal procedure to take down the infringing material as per the laws of India and other jurisdictions. For instance a DMCA complaint to Google to remove infringing contents from its search results and platforms is the available legal option than launching DDoS against the offending website.

The cyber litigations against Indian and foreign websites is going to increase in future. Even the Indian intermediaries are required to comply with cyber law due diligence requirements to escape the civil and criminal liabilities. While European countries are stressing upon cyber due diligence for businesses operating there yet India is yet to enforce this requirement.

In this background managing anti piracy work is a tedious and expertise based requirement in India. Indian law enforcement agencies have expressed their inability to locate the person uploading the copyright violating content due to use of anonymous services. The expectations that the internet service providers (ISPs) would block websites hosting such illegal content have also been unsuccessful. In fact, many attempts by the ISPs to block such websites have not been effective in the past.

Besides facing anonymous online postings the law enforcement agencies of India are also facing the problem of lack of cooperation by international telecom service providers. The reluctance on the part of administrators of foreign domains to reveal the details of those behind websites retailing pirated movies had also slowed down anti-piracy initiatives.

Even the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) route is not successful in all cases. Recently the United States refused to serve summons upon U.S. websites including Facebook and Google for violating Indian laws. Indian attempt to do so was blocked by U.S. thereby leveling very few options to Indian government and other stakeholders.

The film and music industry of India must invest good amount of time, energy and money resources to protect their assets and intellectual properties. Adopting illegal means is the last thing they can afford in these circumstances.