India - The Maharashtra government's Cyber Digital Crime Unit (MCDCU) has shut down 29 websites which were involved in providing pirated copies of Bollywood, Hollywood and TV content since a long time.

A release issued by MCDCU said that the initiative is first of its kind in the continent where piracy was being curbed at source preventing losses worth crores to the entertainment industry.

MCDCU was set up in order address digital piracy and focus towards protecting the media and entertainment industry from its menace. It started as a pilot project last year in order to protect intellectual property from piracy and is being termed as first of its kind initiative in south Asia.

An estimated number of 88.56 million users were found to be using the suspended websites providing pirated content every month and were one of most sought after websites being surfed for pirated content. The said websites would upload content from movies, TV series in a very short time after its official release making it accessible to every user accessing the website.

This affected the media and entertainment industry directly in India and led to huge losses even to the government resulting in unemployment in the entertainment sector.

MCDCU issued notices to domain registrar of these websites under section 149 of CrPC (Criminal Procedure Code) forcing them to suspend operations of these websites.

The Indian entertainment industry's annual gross output is around Rs 2 lakh crores of which the industry pays around Rs 96000 crores in direct and indirect taxes to the government and generate employment for around 24 lakh people.

The MCDCU initiative will reportedly help the industry an additional Rs 8 crore a month after suspension of these websites through their users who will now use the official content sites promoted by the industry for the respective content.

In the past there had been private companies and hackers who were hired by Bollywood and Hollywood to launch attacks on pirated websites but it was termed illegal eventually leading to closure of such start ups.

Also, the past process of contacting the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and complaining about pirated websites had a very low success rate and that too would take long time.

This initiative by the Maharashtra government seems a positive relief for the entertainment industry.