Kolkata court orders ISPs to block 100+ Indian pirated music sites

There has been a lot happening on the web, off late - there are plenty of pirated media sites that have been shut, including those who host files for free, such as Megaupload. But it appears it’s not just the international sites that are facing the heat from the music and film industry. A news covered by Ars Technica talks about a Kolkata court having ordered some 387 ISPs around India to block access to 104 pirated music sites. Unlike sites hosted in other countries, where the sites themselves have been taken down, the court has ordered ISPs to block access to those sites. The order comes after a complaint was filed by the IMI (Indian Music Industry) against these sites. 

Online piracy issues coming to light

The initial target was some 300 sites, but this boiled down to 104 sites, based on the amount of pirated content put on those sites. Medianama has a list of those 104 sites that are now to be blocked. A particular site songs.pk was said to have been shut down, but it seems to have re-appeared online under a new domain. We tried checking some of the sites on the list and they still seem to be active and accessible, so it’s going to take a while before they are blocked by all the ISPs. The blocking of these sites may take place using a number of methods. One would be to simply block the IPs of the sites, the other modes being blocking the DNS and the third using deep packet inspection. Going by past incidents, there are ways around this and the tech savvy crowds are likely to find ways to bypass the restrictions.

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Blocking sites has been a challenge and it looks like the courts will have to order shutting down of the sites completely. The activities on the Internet are now being taken seriously and monitored closely. It’s just not the pirated sites, Facebook and Google have been in the news recently for content that was posted on their services. Executives of the companies were asked to be present in court for hearings.