INTRODUCTION
India ranks among the world’s largest markets for online video consumption. Cheap mobile data and a rapidly expanding subscriber base have built one of the most commercially significant digital entertainment ecosystems anywhere. In 2023, paid streaming subscriptions in India crossed one hundred million for the first time.[1]
Running parallel to that legitimate economy is a shadow market of considerable scale. Pirated streams of new film releases appear online within hours of theatrical premieres. Unlicensed IPTV services mimic the design and functionality of legitimate platforms while paying nothing to rights holders. Piracy aggregator websites attract tens of millions of monthly visits from Indian IP addresses, and live sports fixtures are routinely broadcast on unofficial channels in real time.[2]
The legal architecture built to address this problem has grown more sophisticated over fifteen years of judicial and legislative effort. Yet the gap between what the law commands and what actually happens online remains wide. This article examines the principal legislative instruments, the judicial innovations that have shaped enforcement practice, the particular difficulties posed by live broadcasting and platform liability, and what a more coherent framework might require.
THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM
Streaming piracy is not a monolithic phenomenon. At its simplest, it involves uploading ripped content to freely accessible hosting platforms. More commercially damaging are the subscription-based IPTV piracy services, which operate precisely as legitimate streamers do but license nothing. Research published by the Broadband India Forum estimated that unlicensed IPTV services attracted approximately forty million regular users in India during 2022, generating revenue of hundreds of crores of rupees annually for operators who bear none of the creative or licensing costs borne by their legitimate competitors.[3]
Live sports piracy is a third and particularly acute category. The commercial value of a cricket international or Indian Premier League fixture is almost entirely front-loaded: it evaporates once the final ball is bowled. Pirate streams of live events appear within minutes of broadcast commencement, and the harm to rights holders is complete before any legal remedy can practically be obtained. Speed, not doctrinal sophistication, is the irreducible requirement, and the legal system has historically struggled to provide it.
THE LEGISLATIVE FRAMEWORK
COPYRIGHT AND CINEMATOGRAPH LAW
The Copyright Act 1957 is the primary instrument. It confers on owners the exclusive right to communicate works to the public, a right that extends straightforwardly to streaming. The 2012 amendments introduced provisions addressing the circumvention of technological protection measures and raised criminal penalties for commercial-scale digital infringement.[4][5]
The Cinematograph (Amendment) Act 2023 added provisions targeting cam-ripping, the recording of films inside cinemas for subsequent online distribution, carrying penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment and fines of ten lakh rupees.[6] How vigorously these provisions will be enforced in practice depends on the vigilance of exhibition staff and local police, both of whom have competing demands on their attention.[7]
THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ACT 2000 AND THE 2021 RULES
Section 79 of the Information Technology Act 2000 grants qualifying intermediaries a conditional safe harbour from liability for third-party content. Platforms must exercise no editorial control over that content and must act expeditiously to remove it on receiving actual knowledge of its unlawful character. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 require large platforms to acknowledge and act on takedown notices within a defined timeframe, appoint a grievance officer accessible to Indian users, and implement proactive measures to prevent the upload of infringing content.[8]
JUDICIAL INNOVATION
Courts have moved more decisively than the legislature in tailoring remedies to the realities of digital infringement. The foundational contribution is the John Doe or Ashok Kumar order, which permits rights holders to obtain injunctions against unnamed and unidentified future infringers before a major release or sporting event. Served on internet service providers, such orders obliged ISPs to block infringing streams as they appeared without the rights holder needing to identify each infringer individually.
The more structurally significant development is the dynamic injunction, established in UTV Software Communications Ltd v 1337X. to.[9] The Delhi High Court there confronted the hydra problem: piracy sites migrate between domains and mirror addresses faster than individual court orders can follow. The Court held that where a website is established as a rogue platform whose predominant purpose is infringement, a single order can cover all future mirrors and proxy sites, with rights holders empowered to notify ISPs of new addresses without returning to court each time. The dynamic injunction is a genuine procedural innovation, acknowledging that static legal orders cannot contain continuously evasive digital infringement.
The instrument has been deployed extensively in the live sports context. In Star India Pvt Ltd v Haneeth Ujwal, the Delhi High Court granted anticipatory relief before the IPL season, restraining unnamed defendants and platforms from streaming fixtures without authorisation.[10] The practical challenge persists that social media platforms and encrypted messaging services can distribute live stream links to hundreds of thousands of recipients in seconds, before any blocking mechanism operates.
PLATFORM LIABILITY AND ITS TENSIONS
The Supreme Court’s analysis in Shreya Singhal v Union of India[11] endorsed a narrow reading of the actual knowledge requirement under Section 79, holding that a platform acquires actionable knowledge only through a court order or government notification rather than through a private complaint. This places a real procedural burden on rights holders who must initiate formal proceedings before platforms are obligated to act, a requirement ill-suited to infringement measured in hours rather than months.
The 2021 Rules attempt to address this by imposing proactive compliance obligations on large platforms, but the enforceability of those obligations remains contested, and their practical effect on piracy levels is as yet unclear. The tension between platform immunity and rights holder protection is not a problem India invented; every major jurisdiction is working through it. What distinguishes the Indian approach is its heavy reliance on court-based enforcement rather than administrative or algorithmic systems, placing a considerable and cumulative burden on a judiciary already stretched across a vast docket.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
A brief comparison with other jurisdictions illuminates what is working and what is not. The United Kingdom’s regime was developed following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cartier International AG v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd.[12]It embeds website blocking in a more structured regulatory framework that reduces the courts’ operational load while preserving judicial oversight of the underlying legal principles. The European Union’s Article 17 of Directive 2019/790 imposes upload filter obligations on large platforms, premised on the view that commercial intermediaries profiting from content ecosystems should share responsibility for copyright compliance within them.[13]
Both approaches reflect a shift away from purely reactive enforcement toward structural obligations that operate before infringement reaches scale. India’s dynamic injunction points in the same direction but has not yet been matched by equivalent administrative infrastructure or platform-level obligations with real teeth.
CONCLUSION
India’s copyright enforcement architecture has improved considerably over the past decade, and the dynamic injunction represents a genuinely important contribution to the global conversation about containing digital piracy. But improvement is not adequacy. The fundamental problem remains the same as it has always been; infringement moves faster than the law.
Closing that gap requires several things working together. A dedicated administrative mechanism for expedited blocking of rogue websites, operating outside the full civil litigation cycle, would reduce pressure on courts and accelerate enforcement timelines. Binding and enforceable proactive compliance obligations on large platforms, backed by meaningful penalties for non-compliance, would reduce the baseline volume of infringing content. Greater investment in international enforcement cooperation would address the cross-border architecture of serious piracy operations, which are rarely contained within any single jurisdiction.
Copyright enforcement is sometimes characterised as the concern of large studios and broadcasting groups. That characterisation misses the point. The creative sector, from independent filmmakers to music composers to sports broadcasters, depends on the ability to recoup investment through lawful distribution. When piracy erodes that foundation, the losers are not only shareholders but the writers, directors, technicians, and performers whose livelihoods depend on a functioning legal market. India’s legal system has recognised this. What remains is the harder work of making that recognition operationally effective.
Author(s) Name: Priyam Pratik (Allahabad University, Faculty of Law, Main Campus)
References:
[1]FICCI and Ernst & Young, ‘India’s Media and Entertainment Sector: Tuning into Consumers’ (FICCI-EY M&E Report 2024) <https://www.ey.com/en_in/media-entertainment> accessed 12 April 2025.
[2]MUSO, ‘Global Piracy Report 2023’ (MUSO Research, 2023) <https://www.muso.com/research/global-piracy-report-2023> accessed 14 April 2025.
[3]Broadband India Forum, ‘The Economic Impact of Online Video Piracy in India’ (BIF Policy Paper, 2022) <https://www.bifindia.com> accessed 10 April 2025.
[4] Copyright Act 1957, s 14(1)(d)(ii).
[5] Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012.
[6]Information Technology Act 2000 (India), s 69A
[7] Cinematograph (Amendment) Act 2023 (India), s 6AA <https://www.mib.gov.in> accessed 13 April 2025.
[8]Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, rr 3 and 4(4).
[9]UTV Software Communications Ltd v 1337X.to [2019] CS(COMM) 724/2017 (Delhi High Court) <https://indiankanoon.org/doc/81838761/> accessed 14 April 2025.
[10]Star India Pvt Ltd v Haneeth Ujwal [2014] CS(OS) 1860/2014 (Delhi High Court) <https://indiankanoon.org/doc/156563012/> accessed 17 April 2025.
[11]Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) 5 SCC 1.
[12]Cartier International AG v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd [2016] UKSC 53; [2017] 1 All ER 700 <https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2015-0157.html> accessed 18 April 2025.
[13]Directive 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market [2019] OJ L130/92, art 17 <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0790> accessed 19 April 2025.