Many Indian ISPs blocked the Internet Archive in the past week due to two orders from the Madras High Court, it has surfaced. The orders came following cases filed by Red Chillies Entertainment and Prakash Jha Productions, who filed motions for the block to protect their films, “Jab Harry Met Sejal” and “Lipstick Under My Burkha” respectively. 2,650 URLs were blocked as a part of the order: the exact same list of sites was used by the both the plaintiffs.
MediaNama has reached out to Prakash Jha Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment to find out why the Internet Archive was a part of their list — and why both their block lists were identical.
Several hours before MediaNama broke the story on the website being blocked, the Internet Archive had already found out about the block and attempted to reach out to the Indian government, to no avail.