The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in India are currently blocking websites in accordance to a Supreme Court directive. As of now Reliance Communications and Airtel are blocking The Pirate Bay, Vimeo, DailyMotion and a few other torrent sites across parts of India. The note users in India subscribed to the Internet through these ISPs are seeing is:

Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders

The reason behind this censorship is a John Doe order obtained by film distributor Relance Entertainment. Citing piracy concerns ahead of blockbuster releases, Reliance Entertainment has been using John Doe orders to get websites blocked. Since Reliance Entertainment and Reliance Communications are under the same leadership, the companies worked together in restricting access to the websites. Speaking to Rediff.com, Reliance Entertainment’s VP for anti-piracy said, “Our primary contention is that the copyright of our films should be protected, and that they should not be available for viewing or downloading on sites. But for Dangerous Ishhq, only our own affiliate will block the sites. We are not saying that the entire site should be blocked. Other ISPs should ensure that they block the availability of our films, not the entire site.”

As Airtel users started getting affected, infamous hacktivist group Anonymous decided to retaliate. The hacktivist group called for supporters to target websites of the Supreme Court of India, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, data.gov.in, and All India Congress Committee (AICC). As of writing this only AICC is down. The attack is a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) whereby the website is so inundated by visitors that it crashes. The official Twitter page for the co-ordinated DDoS @opindia_revenge seems to have backed down and are desperately trying to explain Indians that their actions do not harm the websites but only cause some downtime.

The court order for '3', which was passed on March 29, restrained 15 ISPs, including BSNL, MTNL, Idea, Vodafone and Tikona, from violating the copyrights of the producer. "We sent the orders to all ISPs. This was followed up with letters in which we specified the names of websites that host content illegally. Once the movies were released, we sent another letter specifying the URLs identifying the location of the pirated copies of the movies," said Harish Ram, CEO of Copyright Labs.

 Ram said the response was poor and the ISPs acted only on Thursday. "Also, we specifically asked them to block the URLs and not the websites. They are acting nearly 40 days after the release of '3' and the way they went about it has created confusion," he said. The ISPs must have decided to act as the company is pursuing a contempt of court petition after the delay in implementing the earlier orders, he said.