In November 2017, when Tamil movie Ippadai Vellum, starring Udhayanidhi Stalin and Manjima Mohan hit the theatres, a team of eight techies working out of Anna Nagar in Chennai, got busy. Sharath Kumar, former Operations Head of Tamil Film Producers Anti-Piracy cell, recalls that a few hours before the release, they started scouring through social media, messaging platforms and scores of websites to see if the film had been leaked online.
Within hours, as expected, TamilRockers — the most notorious movie piracy website — had uploaded a camera quality print of the film. Sharath and his team had their work cut out. They used takedown tools to block the prints, appealed to various domain registries to block as many sites, found the source of the leak and went to the IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) Cell of the Tamil Nadu police which deals with intellectual property rights.
Though the anti-piracy cell started operations in May 2017, the focus initially was on a wipeout campaign. More than 60,000 infringing links on Facebook, 18,000 videos on YouTube, and 24,000 movies on Dailymotion were removed amongst other things. It was only when Ippadai Vellum was leaked, that the team got an FIR filed against TamilRockers for the first time. In the next two years, the team filed 40 police complaints against many sites like TamilRockers, Tamil Gun and Tamil Storm.
In the last three years, the Tamil film industry — and a few notable producers — have declared war on movie piracy. But like a multi-headed hydra, the problem keeps coming back, and in different forms. Today, it is not just theatrical releases that have to be protected, but even movies releasing exclusively on OTT (Over-the-Top) platforms are under the threat of piracy.