A case was filed at the Hon'ble Delhi High Court by Channel 2 Group Corporation against Http://Live.Mycricketlive.Net/ & Ors..1 Channel 2 submitted that they are the exclusive agency with whom the ICC Business Corporation FZ LLC (the organizer of ICC Men's World Cup) 2019 ("World Cup, 2019") had entered into an Audio Assignment agreement permitting them to stream the Cricket World Cup, 2019. Channel 2 alleged that the Defendant's attempt to stream the World Cup, 2019 will lead to irreparable losses which they in the past have incurred at various instances.
Channel 2 further submitted that, due to the unique nature of online piracy and the unstructured nature of the internet, enforcement of rights against such pirating websites is a time consuming and mammoth task. The pirated websites can switch from one domain name to other and most of the times, such websites hide under the garb of privacy, as a result of which it is difficult to pin down the allegations against such website owners. Thus, if at this stage the Court insisted on Channel 2 to identify the individual parties and collect evidence against each Defendant, it would delay the matter inconsiderably and lead to indispensable losses to Channel
It was further submitted that none of the Defendants were licensed or authorized to broadcast/stream the World Cup, 2019. Further, since the World Cup has already started and will continue till July 14, 2019, if the Defendants were not restrained with immediate effect, the Plaintiff will remain without any remedy.
The Court was convinced with the facts placed before it and thus passed an ex-parte injunction in favour of Channel 2, however, any defendant complying with the interim order of this Court may broadcast the relay of the score update only after a time lag of 15 minutes. The Court further directed the search engines to take down/delete from their search result pages, listings of websites/ URLs which are infringing upon the Plaintiff's copyright and broadcast reproduction rights, as and when notified by the Plaintiff.
Compiled by: Adv. Sachi Kapoor | Concept & Edited by: Dr. Mohan Dewan
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