Maharashtra Cyber Cell nabs owner of online streaming app ‘Thop TV’ over charges of content piracy

The violator, Satish, of cybersecurity norms has been remanded to seven days of police custody by a Mumbai court.

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In a major move to safeguard the interest of content creators, Maharashtra Cyber Cell arrested founder and owner of an online streaming application Thop TV.

The founder identified as Satish Venkateshwarlu, an IT Engineer, has been nabbed from Hyderabad on 12th July for offering pirated content of broadcast and OTT platforms.

The violator, Satish, of cybersecurity norms has been remanded to seven days of police custody by a Mumbai court.

Notably, the arrest has been made followed by a complaint lodged by Viacom 18 Media along with another broadcaster to the Maharashtra Cyber Cell. In the complaint, the broadcaster alleged that the “rogue standalone” application had been stealing and transmitting their content without authorization.

The Cyber Cell has registered a case against the owner of Thop TV under Sections 43, 66, and 66B of the Information technology Act, 2000, Section 63 of the Copyright Act, and Section 420 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The preliminary investigations of the Maharashtra Cyber Cell team found that the accused would steal content from other platforms by using an inbuilt Application Programming Interface (API).

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“Maharashtra Cyber cell has done a technical investigation into the FIR, and accordingly we have arrested one culprit from Hyderabad. The culprit had used Thop TV as a platform and as an app. He primarily provided free content on Telegram," said Sanjay Shintre, SP, Maharashtra Cyber.

It is to be noted here, the online streaming platform had a lot of Indian users and it had gained massive popularity in the last two years since its existence. There are over 5,000 paid subscribers of the application along with lakhs of viewers.

Unlike other platforms, Thop TV charged a reasonable amount of Rs 35 from its users and it also provided an annual package.



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