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Friday, December 17, 2004
Moral police goes too far
The CEO of Baazee.com, Avnish Bajaj, has been arrested in the Delhi Public School (DPS) MMS case. For those new to the subject, here’s the history: two kids in DPS shot a pornographic clip of a sexual act on a mobile phone, and began circulating it through MMS. A young man called Ravi Raj, a student of IIT Kharagpur, got hold of VCDs of the footage and started selling them on the auction site, Baazee.com, which had recently been acquired by eBay. As soon as Baazee was informed of the contents of the VCD, it was removed from their site. The DPS students involved were expelled, Raj was arrested, and now Bajaj.
This sets a dangerous precedent. If in a shopping mall an individual shop owner does something illegal, then surely the responsibility for that ends with him – especially if the owner of the mall kicks him out after it is brought to his attention. Imagine, for example, if I was to peddle illegal material through this blog. Would I be responsible or would Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, which owns Blogger, get arrested? Clearly the buck would stop with me, and international law recognises that.
Blogging services and auction sites are enablers, and it is unreasonable to expect them to monitor every shred of activity that they enable, as long as they are quick to act when any malpractice is brought to their attention. The Indian cyber laws need to be amended and modernised, and Bajaj will hopefully be released soon. The authorities should not be too harsh on Raj, either. It was a misguided act on his part, and the young man was no doubt unaware that reselling something that was freely available anyway would bring the wrath of the moral police upon him.
Instead of shooting the messenger, we need to understand the message.
This sets a dangerous precedent. If in a shopping mall an individual shop owner does something illegal, then surely the responsibility for that ends with him – especially if the owner of the mall kicks him out after it is brought to his attention. Imagine, for example, if I was to peddle illegal material through this blog. Would I be responsible or would Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, which owns Blogger, get arrested? Clearly the buck would stop with me, and international law recognises that.
Blogging services and auction sites are enablers, and it is unreasonable to expect them to monitor every shred of activity that they enable, as long as they are quick to act when any malpractice is brought to their attention. The Indian cyber laws need to be amended and modernised, and Bajaj will hopefully be released soon. The authorities should not be too harsh on Raj, either. It was a misguided act on his part, and the young man was no doubt unaware that reselling something that was freely available anyway would bring the wrath of the moral police upon him.
Instead of shooting the messenger, we need to understand the message.
