As an anti-piracy action against FIFA World Cup, the Delhi High Court has blocked the URL’s of around 472 websites. Justice V Kameshwar Rao passed this order on June 22 based on a complaint filed by Multi Screen Media Discovery Limited. MSM Discovery LTD has a license agreement with FIFA that gives it the right to broadcast FIFA World Cup in India, Bhutan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, and Nepal. It is also a distributor of Sony channels in India. It filed a complaint and the HC was supposed to pass its judgment within a week.
In the complaint, MSM Discovery Ltd mentioned that they are the ones who have spent a considerable amount of capital in order to acquire Mobile Transmission and Internet Broadband Transmission Rights. It requires a great deal of investment to achieve this exclusive status. Therefore, MSM Discovery Ltd wants the High Court to protect their rights against any sort of infringement other websites are causing.
The company claims that to broadcast FIFA World Cup is a right that it has earned in return for huge investment and hence, this right has to be exclusive for the company. Other websites have not made any such investments, as such it is illegal for them to broadcast, rebroadcast, host, retransmit, stream, exhibit, provide access and download to the viewers the matches of FIFA World Cup 2014.
This is why the company filed a complaint because the websites are causing MSM Discovery Ltd a great loss by taking away its revenues.
The High Court has put a ban on a very long list of websites, which do video streaming, and video hosting in different countries of the world. The list has names of websites like Vidup, Luckyshare, Bitshare, freakshare, letitbit, Terafile, PirateBay.mk to torrent websites, the list is too long. The most shocking and surprising names of websites to have surfaced on this list are that of the two Google URLs.
These Google URLs are – docs.google.com and googlevideo.com. Some Telugu websites are also there on list like – telugump3.biz, telugumasthi.wapka.me.
This order that has been given by the High Court has not justified the ban that it has put on Google Docs. On Google Drive, users are allowed to upload video files on Google Docs, which then can be shared as a link. That is why saying that Google Docs is supporting FIFA World cup piracy is not right. Not everybody using Google Docs upload FIFA World cup matches on their drives. So High Court needs to sleep over its decision, as some sites on the ban list reveal that this decision is a hasty one that needs reanalysis.
