More than ten years ago, Indian police arrested the alleged mastermind behind the popular TellyTorrents site. The supposed piracy kingpin, who spent 311 days in custody before being released on bail, saw his life fall apart soon after. Now, ten years later, the 40-year-old is cleared of all charges and formally acquitted by the court. However, at what cost?
In the summer of 2015, the then 29-year-old Priyank Pardeshi was arrested by the police in Pune, a large city in western India.
The authorities and rightsholders saw Priyank as a kingpin in the local piracy scene, and these allegations were widely repeated by many news sites at the time.
Priyank was certainly not a typical pirate site operator. He worked at IBM in California. However, during a work-related visit to his home country, he was suddenly arrested, after investigators found pirated movies on his system while they were collecting evidence in an unrelated matter.
TellyTorrents and Camcording
In addition to Priyank, the authorities also accused two others of being involved in the scheme, which also involved the popular torrent tracker TellyTorrents. This site was a high-profile target, as it was one of the prime locations where the Bollywood blockbuster Bahubali had leaked online.
The case seemed fairly straightforward too. According to the police, the alleged piracy kingpin confessed to running TellyTorrents, earning huge sums in revenue, and storing 1,243 pirated movies. Not just that, he allegedly also revealed that they were involved in camcording films in local theaters for subsequent pirate releases.
These revelations were also shared publicly in the media, to give the case additional weight.
“Priyank revealed that Rahul Mehta of Delhi and Toni of Ghaziabad used to shoot films from cinemas and multiplexes and would prepare their pirated movies. They used to supply it to Jabalpur and many cities across the country and even in Australia and France.”
The Case Collapses (After 10 years…)
Priyank spent 311 days in custody before he was released on bail. While the prosecution seemed convinced that they had a case, it completely fell apart in court a few weeks ago, when a judicial magistrate in Jabalpur fully acquitted the lead defendant and two co-accused due to a lack of evidence.
In a detailed judgment, Magistrate Kishan Dev Singh Patel dismantled the prosecution’s case, revealing that the police investigation was almost entirely devoid of technical evidence.
Despite the serious charges under the Copyright Act and IT Act, the court noted that:
– No Forensics: The police seized computers, laptops, and hard drives but failed to send any items to a forensic lab for analysis. There was no independent verification that the files on the devices were actually pirated movies.
– No Money Trail: Despite claims that “huge profits” were made, the prosecution did not produce a single bank statement or transaction record linking Priyank to the website’s revenue.
– No Domain Link: The police failed to provide any documents to prove that Priyank purchased or owned the TellyTorrents domain name or that he paid for the servers in question.
“There are no documents on record to show that the illegal website TellyTorrents was created/operated by Priyank Pardeshi,” the judgment reads, leaving no other option than to dismiss the claims.
The prosecution relied heavily on testimony from representatives of the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce in Hyderabad, who acted as expert witnesses. In court, however, these witnesses admitted that there is no hard evidence that Priyank pirated movies or that he operated TellyTorrents.
A Systemic Failure
According to Kartik Sharma, an analyst at the renowned law blog SpicyIP, this acquittal is not an outlier but part of a pattern where Indian law enforcement fails to meet the basic standards of digital evidence.
“The crux of why the acquittal happened is quite evident,” Sharma informs TorrentFreak. “The witnesses from the Telugu Film Chamber acknowledged that they had not seen the accused uploading the pirated movies to the website.”
“Also, there was no testing done by an authorized official agency or lab to establish that the alleged content was pirated.”
Sharma notes that similar lapses have led to acquittals in other high-profile piracy cases, such as State v. Bhushan Kumar in Delhi, where police failed to compare seized VCDs with original copyrighted material.
The weak evidence in these cases, including a lack of digital forensics, is ultimately what leads to a full acquittal of the defendants. However, by then, most of the personal damage is already done.
The Human Cost
While the “kingpin” narrative has been dismantled by the recent court verdict, the decade-long process has taken its toll. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Priyank highlights the human cost.
“I was unable to work for the last 10 years because after I came out of jail, people looked at me like a big criminal,” he says.
“No company would hire me because, during background verification, they could see that a criminal case was pending against me. Other people stopped seeing me as a good person. Even getting married was difficult.”
The other defendants will have similar stories that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. In this light, it is particularly confronting that one of the co-accused, Dilip Gulwani, passed away while the trial was still ongoing.
A Living Hell
Looking back, the now 40-year-old Priyank feels as if he has been framed, and he’s considering fighting back legally to recoup some of the damages.
Priyank was no stranger to TellyTorrents but notes that his involvement with pirate sites was limited to installing a forum and setting up a website. The earlier-mentioned ‘confession’ was coerced, he alleges.
All in all, the whole experience was traumatizing. While Priyank had no sympathy for the anti-piracy forces that ruined his life, he would caution pirates to reconsider their options. If caught, Bollywood can turn lives into a living hell.
Priyank hopes to continue his life now. He started a family and earns enough to pay the bills. However, he believes that his career would have been much more successful if the criminal piracy prosecution was never started.
iBomma: The New Piracy Kingpin
Interestingly, as the TellyTorrents case concluded, a new alleged Indian piracy ‘kingpin’ was caught. On November 15, the Hyderabad Cyber Crime Police arrested Immadi Ravi as the suspected mastermind behind the popular pirate streaming platform iBomma.
This high-profile takedown occurred shortly after the theatrical release of Baahubali: The Epic (a remastered combination of the film franchise). The original Baahubali film, meanwhile, was at the center of the TellyTorrents case exactly ten years prior.
Notably, the film’s director, S.S. Rajamouli, has also gotten actively involved in the iBomma case and openly thanks the police for their hard work.
As with TellyTorrents at the time, the piracy allegations against Ravi are widely echoed in the press, ranging from a lavish lifestyle financed by millions of dollars in piracy proceeds to forged identity papers. While these could all be true, the TellyTorrents case shows that caution is warranted.
That brings us to the final point of interest, or a lack thereof. While most Indian media is widely reporting on all new allegations in the iBomma case, the acquittal of the criminal defendants in the TellyTorrents case does not get a single mention.
—
A copy of the original TellyTorrents court order, issued by Magistrate Kishan Dev Singh Patel and acquitting all defendants, is available here (pdf).
Source: 
TorrentFreak.com
Be the first to comment