The Indian Music Industry (IMI), an industry consortium of 142 music ompanies, has obtained orders from the Calcutta High Court directing all Internet Service Providers (387 ISPs) to block 104 music sites (listed here). Court orders were obtained on 27th of January, 6th February, and the 1st and 2nd of March 2012. ISPs have been directed by the court to block all 104 sites within 36 hours. MediaNama has a copy of the docket which IMI has prepared, with information on the court order and the websites blocked, but it essentially has the order against Songs.pk as a sample. Apurv Nagpal, CEO of Saregama, told MediaNama that the first order was against songs.pk, and subsequent court orders covered the rest of the sites. The IMI made a case against each website, he added, with proof of piracy of content from labels by each site. Indian content businesses have increasingly been taking the legal route to combat piracy: T-Series filed lawsuits against several major companies like YouTube (which was later settled), MySpace, Yahoo and Ibibo, and even got the founders of Guruji.com arrested. Reliance BIG Pictures began getting generic "John Doe" orders trying to force filesharing sites to prevent movie uploads, and getting some of them blocked. This is by far the biggest anti-piracy initiative till date. How They Will Block The court has asked ISPs to block the sites using any of the three methods: 1. DNS Name blocking: which ISPs use to for looking up IP addresses corresponding to…
