CHENNAI: The Centre’s resolve to keep the controversial documentary by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin on the Delhi rape case under wraps within the country failed miserably, as millions viewed, downloaded and shared it soon after it was uploaded onto YouTube.
Barely an hour after BBC Four screened the documentary for the UK audience, the film appeared online, links of which was shared on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The links also did the rounds on WhatsApp and other chat messaging services. Some of these uploads had garnered over a million views by Thursday afternoon while #IndiasDaughter was a globally trending topic on Twitter.
At the time of writing, however, the Indian government had moved to pull down many of these videos from YouTube with a YouTube spokesperson confirming, “While we believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society and that services like YouTube help people express themselves and share different points of view, we continue to remove content that is illegal or violates our community guidelines, once notified.”
By late Thursday evening most videos were blocked or removed by YouTube with a statement that said: “This content is not available on this country domain due to a court order.” Other videos had the following statement, “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by British Broadcasting Corporation.”
Interestingly, YouTube left Indian users a clue in its statement about the ban being specific to a country domain. Essentially, Indian users can switch domain to another country at the bottom of YouTube’s home page and can continue to watch the video.
Meanwhile, the documentary also appeared on Bit Torrent websites where users can download it without restrictions.