Delhi High Court: Pratibha M Singh, J. directed Telegram and Mega that whenever unauthorized and illegal content, relating to the copyrighted data or any content using the DocTutorial (‘Plaintiff’) mark, is noticed in any of the channels/websites/URLs hosted by Telegram or Mega (‘Defendants’), the Plaintiff would be free to issue notice to Telegram and Mega and upon receiving such notice, defendants shall immediately take down all the illegal/unauthorized content posted or uploaded or communicated on their platforms within 48 hours.
DocTutorials Edutech Private Limited is an online medical entrance examination coaching platform for examinations such as NEET PG, FMGE and NEET SS which provides high quality audio visual medical content, which is paid, soft copy notes, test and discussion videos, regular test series, etc. All of these can be accessed by subscription through the mobile application or the Plaintiff’s website. The grievance in the suit was that there were several unknown persons, who were uploading and transmitting the video lectures on publicly accessible platforms. Defendant 1-Telegram is a cloud-based messaging platform and Defendant 2-Mega Limited offers cloud storage and file hosting. Both these platforms are being used by unknown Defendant 5 and 6 to share the Plaintiff’s content unauthorizedly. Despite efforts, the Plaintiff could not identify the unknown persons, who were indulging in such illegalities. Accordingly, the present suit was filed seeking blocking orders against the said websites, URLs and Telegram channels.
As per an order dated 25-01-2022 passed by the Court, injunction was issued against the defendants and were directed to take down all the unauthorized illegal contents and also provide details of the offending parties including the IP details, identification, emails, phone numbers etc. An affidavit was filed by Mega mentioning a few details like email addresses and IP address in some cases of the offending parties but is unable to identify the actual persons, who were communicating the infringing content on these channels and on the said URLs and websites. This is due to Mega being a free cloud service having limited storage, thus limited details are required for registration. It is only after the first level of storage is crossed that the same becomes a subscription service and requires further details for registration.
Mega and Telegram however submitted that they have no objection to the ‘take-down’ orders of infringing channels.
Thus, the Court directed that whenever unauthorized and illegal content, relating to the copyrighted data or any content using the Plaintiff’s mark, is noticed in any of the channels/websites/URLs hosted by Telegram or Mega, the Plaintiff would be free to issue notice to Telegram and Mega- Defendant 1 and 2. Upon receiving such notice, Defendant 1 and 2 shall immediately take down all the illegal/unauthorized content posted or uploaded or communicated on their platforms within 48 hours.
A further direction is issued to Department of Telecommunications-Defendant 3 to block the concerned URLs, websites, as communicated by the Plaintiff from time to time, within 48 hours, which shall be given effect to by the ISPs.
[DocTutorials Edutech Private Limited v. Telegram, 2022 SCC OnLine Del 2056, decided on 14-07-2022]
Advocates who appeared in this case :
Ms Anjali Anchayil, Advocate, for the Plaintiff;
Ms. Anushka Sharda and Mr. Madhav Khosla, Advocates for D-1;
Mrs. Bindra Rana, Ms. Priya Adlakha, Ms. Rima Majumdar and Ms. Shilpi Sinha, Advocates for D-2;
Ms. Nidhi Raman, CGSC with Mr. Zubin Singh, Advocate for D-3.
*Arunima Bose, Editorial Assistant has reported this brief.
