India Threatens 3-Year Jail Sentences For Viewing Blocked Torrents (intoday.in)

"It is official now. The punishment for rape is actually less..." writes an anonymous Slashdot reader, who adds that "Some users think that this is all the fault of Bollywood/Hollywood movie studios. They are abusing power, court and money..." India Today reports: The 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 a three-year jail sentence as well as invite a fine...

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.
While it's not clear how this will be enforced, visiting a blocked URL in India now leads to a warning that "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 up to Rs. 3,00,000..."

Comments

Technical solution

[OpenSourced]

Better use emule to share, with Kad network if all emule servers are down. You don't have URLs to block there.

I know that the issue here is the outrageous punishment of the law, but the situation here is asymmetrical in that the content creators have all the financial incentive to fight legally, and the content sharers very little of it. However, the asymmetry is reversed on the technical side, so that's where you can play your cards.

Re: Technical solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I get your point, but please don't say "content creators." Most (the majority as a whole), not all, content creators (actual artists) receive very little. It's the recording/license studios and the Evil MegaCorps that are getting all the money contributing to this insanity.

Re:Technical solution

[Calydor]

The ed2k protocol had several advantages over torrents, one of the larger being that you could search the network itself for rarer files (single mp3 files or stuff like that) without having to have access to Pirate Bay etc.

Hell, the network would even work if your ISP blocks all DNS lookups (and you don't use Google DNS, of course) to Pirate Bay.

eDonkey and eMule may be pretty old protocols, but remember: Just because it's old doesn't mean it's bad, and just because it's new doesn't mean it's better.

War on Access

[Howitzer86]

Ludicrous. I wonder who will have the honor of being the first country to exact the death penalty for file sharing.

Accessing files by working around the state protected gate keeper? DEATH!
Accessing streams rather than hunting down the tape in a bargain bin somewhere because you can't get it otherwise anymore? DEATH.
Visiting sites otherwise banned by the government because it contains information they don't want you to know or share? DEATH.
Running a site banned by accident? Byzantine appeals process... followed by DEATH.

Imagine the pressure. Here's your first computer kiddo. Don't press this big red button though. If you do, they'll come and murder the whole family.

Re:War on Access

[tbuskey]

Ludicrous. I wonder who will have the honor of being the first country to exact the death penalty for file sharing.

Accessing files by working around the state protected gate keeper? DEATH!

Larry Niven wrote The Jigsaw Man about escalating penaties for crimes.

Re:War on Access

[diga33]

You know what they say: download a Michael Jackson song, get 10 years in jail, kill Michael Jackson get 4.

Actual Theft

[Howitzer86]

It's probably less risky to steal an actual DVD at this point. Hell, target the guys at the market selling the bootlegs. They won't call the cops.

Re: I Am Not Understanding

[orlanz]

No, most or almost all are taught British English. And they end up with a upper middle class dialect.

This is why Americans have so much trouble understanding them.

Re: I Am Not Understanding

[kamapuaa]

English is an official, relatively widely spoken language in India. The Indian dialect is separate and distinct from British English, much the same way Australian English is its own thing.

Furthermore, almost nobody would think Indian English sounds like Upper-Middle-Class UK, and people in the UK often find Indian accents distinct from their own, and perhaps even difficult to understand.

Seems they've normalized it with actual theft

[Solandri]

I was gonna post a snarky reply agreeing with you. But upon researching it, they've just normalized the penalty to be the same as if you stole an actual DVD. Their penalty for theft is a fine and up to three years jail time. Unlike the U.S. where you have to steal a certain amount of property value before you can face jail time, India seems to have no such threshold.

Alarmism

[jma05]

All this is pointless hyperventilating by people who understand little about India.
India is one the LEAST punitive countries in the world. It does not believe that putting people in the prison is a solution for anything – even for things most of us would agree that people should be put into prison for.
India’s incarceration rate is 33 (one of the lowest in the world) per 100,000
US incarceration rate is 698 (highest incarceration rate in the world, if you ignore Seychelles) per 100,000
Have you ever heard of anyone put in prison in India for downloading a file? The law has been around since 1957. I am not even sure if for-profit bootleggers who sell media in India have been in prison for more than a few weeks. This is just some tech-ignorant government bureaucrat getting carried away. If a 0.01% of Indians tweet about it, the warning will be edited to something realistic. This has been the pattern about most India alarmist articles on Slashdot.

Re:Alarmism

[Anonymous Coward]

All this is pointless hyperventilating by people who understand little about India.
India is one the LEAST punitive countries in the world. It does not believe that putting people in the prison is a solution for anything – even for things most of us would agree that people should be put into prison for.
India’s incarceration rate is 33 (one of the lowest in the world) per 100,000

Selectively applied laws with ridiculous penalties are a tool for corruption and extortion. You can see this in the U.S. where many defendants, particularly poor ones, get their verdict dictated by the prosecutor rather than the judge with a "plea deal" (you just take what I am handing you independently of what you may or may not have done, or I'll throw so much at you that, baseless or not, more will get to stick than if you just bend over right away), making a mockery of due process.

Re:Alarmism

[jma05]

You are entirely looking at India with US legal system lenses. In India, the political system is not dominated by lawyers i.e. the politicians don't have a legal background as much as they do in US. Public prosecutors don't routinely run for elections and hence have an interest in promoting themselves as "tough on crime". AFAIK, terrifying the defendant with disproportionate punitive threats and forcing him/her into a plea deal is not an issue in India. There, the problems are more around the legal process taking simply too long due to inadequately funded institutions, outdated laws and generally a less agile system (poorer country), rather than an overzealous application.

That said, both India *and US* do have arbitrary application of law - due to different reasons and cause different sets of problems. Corruption is of course more in India, as you would expect in any country with its per capita income. Yet, I'd say that far... far more people are put in prison in US due to arbitrary application of law than in India, even though the due process is said to be much better in US.

Re:Alarmism

[mjwx]

All this is pointless hyperventilating by people who understand little about India.

This. People who have never travelled don't understand how these things work in places like India. Everything is corrupt. Everyone takes and makes payouts. No-one rocks the boat.

What has happened is that the movie moguls paid the politicians to make these laws. The politicians took the money and made the law. The law will never be enforced because it relies on the police.

The police also take bribes. So do the judges. Most crimes can be gotten out of with a nominal sum of money. This is why the charges will never be enforced, the worst case scenario is that they're used as a new way to collect bribe money for a little while. Actually enforcing the law is rocking the boat. This means it gets attention, people start asking questions, politicians who took the bribes will be looked at and whilst it's OK to take bribes it's never OK to admit it. The only people untouchable are those who made the bribes for the law... but that is solely due to the fact they have enough money to pay their way out of any trouble they might get in.