India - 5 men from Tamil Nadu held by anti-piracy cell

The anti-piracy division of Kerala Police arrested five Tamil Nadu natives who were behind hosting the popular piracy websites Tamil Rockers and DVD Rockers. A team led by SP anti-piracy cell BK Prasanthan arrested three persons from Viluppuram and two from Tirunelveli for uploading new Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films through their websites registered under multiple domains.

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. Tirunelveli natives Johnson and Jagan were arrested for hosting the piracy website DVD Rockers. “All of them were arrested in connection with the complaints received from the makers of the films Pulimurugan and Ramaleela,” said Prasanthan.

The police team tracked the culprits by tracing the bank accounts where they received payments from advertising agency that hosted advertisements on the websites. The police team also confiscated laptops, hard disk, mobile phones that were being used by the team to upload films.

Police said that the examination of bank accounts revealed that the owner of Tamil Rockers earned more than Rs 1 crore through the business and the owner of DVD Rockers earned Rs 75 lakh last year.

Two months ago, state police’s cyberdome had blocked the website Tamil Rockers by writing to the Centre’s computer emergency response team. It asked the agency to instruct all internet service providers to block the website. Police had then taken up a case with the Centre when the makers of Prithviraj-starrer Vimaanam complained that a pirated version of the movie had appeared on the website.

On several occasions earlier, the website was blocked and hacked, but the administrators changed their domain names to resurface whenever it was blocked. The cyber police units of various states, particularly southern states, have registered cases against the administrators of the website for streaming pirated copies of films.