There’s a need for proactive means of curbing pirated content online, Viacom18's General Counsel Anil Lale recommended while speaking of ways to tackle piracy at a seminar at the US Consulate General in Mumbai, on March 19, 2024. The discussion ‘The Privacy-Cybercrime Nexus: Risks to users and challenges in disrupting the criminal ecosystem’ focused on the link between digital piracy and cyber threats. Discussing the impact of piracy on content creators and the entertainment industry, Anil Lale underlined that there's a lack of this differentiation between normal copyright infringement and commercial-scale copyright infringement in Indian Copyright law. He was of the view that this has led to reactive measures to the “virus” of piracy,and that there is a need to deploy proactive methods for deterrence and “demonetising piracy”. Need to demonetise piracy: “…right now, we go to courts, we take John Doe orders, we take dynamic injunctions, we use that to go to ISPs and ask them to block the websites. Everything is reactive. Nothing is proactive today. So how do we shift this dimension from a reactive to proactive is something that we need to really think about. And I don't think that resolution lies in law itself or in governmental agencies itself,” Lale stated. Lale also talked about Digital Rights Management (DRM)—technology that prevents copying and specifies a time period in which the content can be accessed or limits the number of devices the media can be installed on. He said DRM has also proved to be ineffective…
