Star India's response to MeitY’s Draft “The Information Technology [Intermediaries Guidelines (Amendment) Rules] 2018” outlines its concerns about the definitions of an intermediary, safe harbour and the content takedown notifications. These are all the important points the media company raised in its submission. These points have been paraphrased unless explicitly quoted. Piracy and intellectual property online under Rule 3(9) On piracy Star India says that with the growth of internet consumption, “tremendous increase has been witnessed in online piracy, which has caused massive losses to digital content producers and artists.” According to industry estimates, pirates make 35% more than the actual producers of content: “Much of this revenue has been on the back of pirated content being uploaded on so-called “user-generated” content platforms, social media platforms, torrent sites and others which enable selling advertising to make money off it.” “The content industry has been making attempts at curbing this massive leakage. However, it runs into rough weather when dealing with online platforms, most of whom qualify to be protected as 'intermediaries'” Misuse of the present law: "Several intermediaries have misused the provisions of Section 79 of the IT Act and the Rules by wrongly interpreting the provisions to mean that they have complete immunity from compliance with Indian laws and enforcement agencies." Star India said that intermediaries have built ad-based businesses using third-party copyrighted content, adding that illegal use of copyrighted content needs to be controlled: “While some [intermediaries] may have collaborated with content creators, the lack of legal provisions…
