HC continues with criminal proceedings against Yahoo! India

Nothing seems to be calm at the moment, for social networking companies in India, as each day is turning out to be trickier than the previous one. Now, an Economic Times report confirms that the High Court will continue with the criminal proceedings against Yahoo! India. The popular messenger service has been one of the accused in the ongoing court case against some 21 social networking sites, on grounds that the content on these sites are of an objectionable nature. Yahoo! India had challenged a lower court’s summoning, and moved the High Court. In his statement, according to this report, Justice Suresh Kait stated that he would not pass any order at this stage, but will hear the case, before the trial court does on March 13. 

Trying to wriggle out...

Yahoo! India Pvt.Ltd has been one of accused in this case, which sees 20 other social networking sites struggling to escape the demon of content filtering. These websites have been accused of hosting objectionable content on their sites, be it in the form of text, video or images. In one of our earlier reports, highlighting the case of Yahoo!, we had quoted Yahoo!'s representative begging to be an exception in this case, considering that it is not a social networking site. The report quoted Arvind Nigam, during the court hearing, as saying, "I am not a social networking site like other accused in the case. I only provide email and chat services. Moreover, no objectionable material has been attributed to me and hence my case is different from others." Reportedly, on hearing this, Justice Suresh Kait, who's overseeing the proceedings, stated, "Then why you have been made an accused?"

Nigam, reportedly also stated, that unlike the word doing rounds, no objectionable content had been downloaded off their site. The ET report further states, "Yahoo India had said the complaint and the order of the magistrate dealt with alleged objectionable material retrieved from various websites including Zombie, Orkut, Youtube, Facebook, Blogspot and none of them pertained to Yahoo."