Overview
- India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued the March 11 notice, signed by Joint Secretary C Senthil Rajan, requiring takedown without vitiating evidence.
- The government cited Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act and Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, warning that non-compliance could forfeit safe-harbour protections.
- The crackdown followed complaints from OTT platforms including JioCinema and Amazon Prime Video, with officials linking the flagged channels to roughly 1,166 titles.
- An annexure of about 120 pages lists channel URLs, names and link counts, with several channels exceeding 2,000 pirated links and over 150 exceeding 500.
- The identified content spans movies, web series, television serials and audiobooks from major services, and Telegram had no immediate public response to the directive.