Slashdot Mirror
India Lurches Toward Internet Censorship
First time accepted submitter ixarux writes "India is at a crucial crossroad at the moment. Internet censorship laws are getting stricter as it begins to ban file-sharing and video-sharing websites. It started with Indian courts allowing censorship of Google, Facebook, etc. It has now gone one step ahead and decided to ask ISPs to block file-sharing sites. It is the movie industry which is again at the forefront of this. Anonymous retaliated, and targeted the websites of various Indian government websites in protest. What India lacks at this crucial juncture are debates in the public domain about this and citizens actually organizing protests as seen in the West."
If the movie companies have enough money to bribe the number of governments that they seem to, people are not illegally downloading nearly enough movies.
It's the ruling Indian Congress Party which is supporting moves to crack down on the internet, because they view the internet as a threat to their continued rule. The Indian Congress Party likes to outwardly market itself to the world as democratic, but inwardly they really want a One Party State, with a mere token opposition as a figleaf.
The ruling party has been making a lot of predatory moves since it took office - like trying to get its own men onto the Election Commission, which under the constitution is supposed to be an independent oversight body for elections. They've also brought in dubious new inventions like Electronic Voting Machines, which they claim will allow elections to be conducted more efficiently, but which could dangerously be used to rig votes, since they could easily be tampered with while offering no paper trail.
The Congress Party has increasingly been using the courts to harass members of political opposition parties, even while blocking any criminal investigation into their own party members. They are also engaging in rampant wiretapping and eavesdropping on opposition party members. The ruling party also wants to create new security agencies which are directly under the control of the central govt where the party currently holds power, while diminishing the rights of the states.
They are doing all these things because they want to keep themselves in power in perpetuity. Oh, and this is the same party that invokes Mahatma Gandhi's name at every opportunity, since they figure that by doing so, it gives them unlimited carte blanche to do whatever they want. They're just trying to keep India safely in the arms of Gandhi, you see. :p
The Indian courts have not explicitly blocked file sharing sites. All they have provided is a generic order to stop the copyright infringement. The company Copyright Labs which is looking to stop the piracy of its films, maintain that they provided the ISPs with a list of specific URLs that were to be blocked. The ISPs have apparently decided (40 days after the blocks were requested) to block entire domains rather than individual URLs. One of these parties is liable for damages for the blanket blocks.
The courts haven't necessarily done anything wrong here besides being ingenuous.
Quillem : An India-centric mishmash of things.