A Delhi District Court was behind the recent blocking of four URLs for Z-Library, reported Entrackr on Thursday. A repository of pirated articles and books, reports of Z-Library’s blocking on ISPs like ACT following an unspecified court order broke on August 13th. Now, the Department of Telecommunications has published the blocking order issued by Justice Dinesh Bhatt of the Tis Hazari Courts on August 1st, directing ISPs to comply with it. The Court was acting on a complaint filed by Taxmann—a publisher of corporate and legal literature. Taxmann alleged that other defendants to the petition—like Hathway, ACT, Vodafone, Spectra, MTNL, Jio, BSNL, and Bharti Airtel—had not complied with the blocking order. The Court subsequently ordered the 'Ministry of Communications and IT' and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (also listed as defendants) to issue notice to these ISPs to block Z-Library’s URLs within one week. Why it matters: The Z-Library case follows in the footsteps of ongoing litigation against other sites pirating academic research in India—for example, LibGen and Sci-hub are being sued for copyright infringement by powerful academic publishers. While these publishers cry foul about piracy, researchers in India argue that the free access to knowledge these websites provide is a boon to their research. Otherwise, their access to research is often stymied by prohibitively high fees charged by academic publishers. How these cases pan out could substantially impact the future of education and research in India. Z-library has not removed ten Taxmann books despite the Court’s orders…
