2.0 leaked: Why is it so hard to stop the Tamilrockers?

Chennai, Dec 1: Nearly 12,000 websites were ordered to be blocked by the Madras High Court, which included 2,000 suspected sites of Tamilrockers.

Despite this order, hours after the release of the movie 2.0 in theatres, the same was available on Tamilrockers. This is not the first instance and the big question is why is it so difficult to stop Tamilrockers.

OneIndia spoke with a few cyber police officials to understand what makes it so hard to take down Tamilrockers. Firstly, there is a time lag between the order of the court and the action taken. Once the order is passed, it has to move through multiple channels before the websites are taken down.

Secondly most of the leaked prints were sourced from Malaysia. Here the film is either recorded on mobile phones or sourced from labs during the post-production works.

More importantly, the battle is not against one individual. Tamilrockers is not run by a single entity or an individual. There are several people behind this and are anonymous in nature. Further most of the sites are hosted on proxy servers which are based out of either Ukraine or Russia. Due to this there is a legal complication as the question of immunity arises.

Officials explain that the battle is a never ending one. Cyber crime officials have to act within the ambit of the law and in this case under Sections 69(b) and 70 of the Information Technology Amendment Act of 2008. While courts order the taking down over 1000s of websites, it just takes a few minutes to create proxy URLs for these proxy sites.

Last month, the anti-piracy division of the Kerala police had arrested 5 Tamil Nadu natives who were behind the hosting of Tamilrockers. Viluppuram natives Prabhu, Karti and Suresh were arrested for uploading Pulimurugan through the website Tamil Rockers that was being hosted from 19 domains including .in, .ac, .me, .ro and .co.

There have been several occasions in the past when the websites have been blocked. However the administrators changed their domain names and resurfaced moments after the block.