Viewing torrent sites will never put you in jail

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"3 years of jail along with 3 lakhs of fine"


You should have heard above line many times. The news about the new Indian Government regulation was gone viral. The news mentioned public that Government will prohibit you from visiting torrent sites and will earn you 3 years in jail and a 3 lakh rupee fine respectively.




The news had made Indians crazy. Most of my friends were still using torrents and they were sharing their views through their social accounts stating that "let's meet in the nearby jail".

while we visited extratorrents.cc, browser came up with this below message: 

The statement above is ‘If you visit such a URL, you will be shown the following warning. “This URL has been blocked under the instructions of the Competent Government Authority or in compliance with the orders of a Court of competent jurisdiction. Viewing, downloading, exhibiting or duplicating an illicit copy of the contents under this URL is punishable as an offence under the laws of India, including but not limited to under Sections 63, 63-A, 65 and 65-A of the Copyright Act, 1957 which prescribe imprisonment for 3 years and also fine of upto Rs. 3,00,000/-. Any person aggrieved by any such blocking of this URL may contact at urlblock@tatacommunications.com who will, within 48 hours, provide you the details of relevant proceedings under which you can approach the relevant High Court or Authority for redressal of your grievance’

However, Prasanth Sugathan, Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Centre India in an interview given to NDTV said that there is no law that can put the citizens of our country in jail for just visiting a website. Here is his official statement.


‘Visiting any website, even if it is a blocked site is not illegal either under the provisions of the Copyright Act,1957 or the Information Technology Act, 2000, the only exception could be if a person views child pornography. 
Torrent sites are often used to share free and open source software and literary and artistic work licensed under Creative Commons licenses.'

So the point is, Visiting torrent sites will not put you in jail. While downloading or streaming something is a different case. Downloading or streaming movies through piracy is still illegal. The warnings were made by the government as a result of some film piracy cases going on in the court.


If you still wish to access blocked torrent sites,

  • Become Anonymous: Use Proxy Websites.
  • Bypass via Browser Extensions.
  • Use VPN.
  • Use IP Rather Than URL.
  • Change Network Proxy In Browsers.

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