On Wednesday, Nagariknews.com ran a news story along with a ‘sting operation video’ on the copyright infringement by a well-known cyber business company.
Police arrested the owners of Dreams & Ideas – Dipankar and Abhinav Kasajoo who made name, fame and money through cyber business. They also redefined Nepali modeling industry with their very popular cybersansar.com and made money by developing websites for government agencies and others.
Their greed for money probably was much more and that put them into the illegal business of downloading pirated High Definition (HD) movies through torrents and selling them to customers through a website – givemehd.com (now closed) which lists hundreds of available movie titles.
Nagariknews sting video shows a man posing as a customer visiting the office of Dreams & Ideas and buying a 3D movie with Abhinav himself talking about it and handing a copied movie on external hard drive.
I wonder how they can do this so openly. Didn’t they know that was illegal or they were just trying to ignore? The news surprised many and a lot of people, including those in similar business, have asked me the same question: why they need to do so to earn a little more money?
It becomes even ridiculous with the price of the movie – Rs. 100 (US$ 1.5) for HD movie and Rs. 200 (US$ 3) for a 3D movie. With so many successful sites running, I know they earned a lot of money only through advertisements, and there was absolutely no need for them to go into something illegal.
In Nepal, we could buy a pirated DVD of any English or Hindi movie for Rs. 25 (less than half-a-dollar) anywhere as freely as we could buy a newspaper. Copyright law is not strongly implemented, but that’s not an excuse to anyone to do an illegal business.
Sadly, the Kasajoos are sons of Vinaya Kumar Kasajoo, a noted journalist and writer who is the chief commissioner at the National Information Commission and has been an advocate/expert for online journalism and related issues.
It’s still to see if they are proven guilty or not, but it should go down as a story of greed!
