Last month, the TorrentFreak team (by the way, a great source for copyright and piracy news reporting!) reached out to us regarding a criminal copyright decision in State of M.P. v. Priyank & Ors. from Judicial Magistrate of First Class(JMFC), Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh). A big thanks to them for bringing this acquittal decision to our attention which seems to have missed all radars in India. The case had been going on for a decade and involved the popular torrent site TellyTorrents. Back in 2015, the arrest of Priyank Pardeshi, the main accused, had been widely reported and the case was touted as a success against an international piracy racket. Fast forward to 2025, Priyank Pardeshi along with his two co-defendants were acquitted due to a lack of evidence. TorrentFreak has covered the detailed facts quite nicely in their recent coverage here. The readers can also find my brief views on the legal position in that article. Surprisingly, the acquittal on account of glaring defects in the prosecution’s case hasn’t found coverage in Indian media. This post is an attempt to bring this legal development to the readers of this blog. Moreover, I wish to substantiate my observations on the legal position in this short blogpost.
On reading the order, the crux of why the acquittal happened is quite evident. The witnesses from the Telugu Film Chamber acknowledged that they had not seen the accused uploading the pirated movie to the website. There was no authorized official agency or lab report/testing to prove that alleged content was pirated. On the allegation regarding the accused Priyank running the website, the Court held that no documentary evidence had been furnished to prove that he was involved in creating and running the website. Neither was there evidence showing the payments being made to him through that website.
The case law on expert evidence/opinion in criminal copyright trials is scattered. Still, an overarching picture derivable from the jurisprudence is that Courts do generally consider expert opinion/evidence (forensic reports, for example) to be necessary in deciding questions of infringement. The Jabalpur Court’s reasoning aligns along this line. In West Bengal v Nitya Gopal Basak, the Calcutta HC noted that one of the reasons for expert evidence is to save judicial time and labour from going into these complicated questions of piracy. Consequently, one can understand the Jabalpur Court’s refusal to take the statements of the witnesses from Telugu Film Chamber at face value.
In fact, there is a judgment from the Tis Hazari District Court that involves lapses in the prosecution case similar to what transpired in the present TellyTorrents case. State v Bhushan Kumar also involved a movie piracy scenario. The Court however held that the VCDs and video cassettes were never examined by technical experts. The Investigating Officer also didn’t procure any material from the owner to compare the allegedly pirated VCDs. Neither were the seized VCDs sent to any agency for getting an independent opinion. All these procedural lapses in the realm of digital forensics weakened the prosecution case and resultantly, the Court acquitted the accused. In another case (State v Nawal Kumar), no opinion of any independent expert/Forensic Science Laboratory was sought and the case against the accused fell apart. The TellyTorrents case therefore is not unprecedented in the kind of weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. This has happened before in criminal copyright trials. Independent expert evidence therefore becomes important. Statements of a complainant in relation to proof of piracy may become unreliable because the complainant would of course be an interested witness. Readers can refer to paragraph 17 of this case from Bengaluru district court for a similar line of reasoning.
Even as macro-level debates around criminalization of copyright law and its related provisions continue, the TellyTorrents case is a striking reminder of the procedural shortcomings that prevail in the criminal prosecution system at the ground level.