THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: At a time when the decision on screening the Christmas releases of Malayalam films in the theatres in the state is still hanging in balance owing to the stand-off between producers and exhibitors, pirates are cashing in on the opportunity using advanced technological formats through messenger application services including Telegram.
Though the Cyberdome of state police had developed an advanced piracy tracker software and busted several online piracy websites, the new format of piracy sharing in Telegram proves to be difficult for the cops to clamp them down.
According to the information gathered from techies, film piracy is rampant through Telegram. Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging service in which the user can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers and files of any type. The film pirates use Telegram for this purpose as the source code of such messaging services could be broken easily by cyber hacking experts.
Telegram has the maximum size up to 2 GB in sending files compared to other applications. It is also more secure. The files can be shared in a fraction of seconds to many users. As per the details sourced from some users, there are many closed channels which share new Malayalam, including ‘Anandam’ and ‘Pulimurugan’. For instance, there is a channel titled, ‘HD-Malayalam’. After joining this group, one could see the web links of new films.
After activating the link, the downloading of the film takes place as like in Torrentz website. Subsequently, that link is being shared with another user. Cyberdome experts pointed out that the piracy in Telegram was hard to crack as the messenger is an end-to-end encrypted application.
“Our software piracy tracker can’t track them down. There is no surprise that the pirates use Telegram for the piracy purpose. However, we are closely watching it,” a senior IT engineer of Cyberdome said.
Manoj Abraham, Nodal Officer, Cyberdome and Thiruvananthapuram range IG, said he has received three to four complaints regarding the uploading of films through Telegram.
“We are monitoring it. But it is not quite rampant. It’s learnt that the downloading time of such files was huge and users don’t spare time to download it. Hence piracy in Telegram won’t last longer,” Manoj Abraham said.