MUMBAI: Creating a website and storing on it information accessible to others can land one in trouble for cyber crime, the Bombay high court (HC) has held.

The high court recently dismissed a petition by a Pune resident to quash an FIR lodged in 2011 against him for defamation caused by sending offensive messages through computer resources . The FIR was filed under the Indian Penal Code and Section 66A of the Information Technology Act.

A media house had filed a complaint against Manoj Oswal, the petitioner, for distribution of allegedly defamatory pamphlets with references to two websites that had information about the family of the media house owner. Oswal's contention was that the IT Act could not be invoked since the term 'website' was not covered in Section 66A, which punishes a person for 'sending' offensive information. He said information merely stored on a website was no offence under the section . "Incorporating some matter about any person in a website does not mean sending it. It remains in the website . A person is not sending anything by merely creating a website," his lawyer Kushal Mor argued.

The high court dismissed these submissions as untenable and fallacious.

The legislative intent behind the IT Act was not to exclude 'website' as a medium of sending, a high court bench of Justices C S Dharmadhikari and S B Shukre held.

"It is abundantly clear that the offence under scrutiny was a computer-related offence," the court said.

Cyber offence

As per section 66 A, IT Act, it is an offence for a person to send by a computer resource or a communication device: Any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character Any information which he knows to be false, but yet sends it 'persistently' through such computer resources to cause annoyance, 'inconvenience' , danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, or ill will Any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient about the origin of such messages

Punishment

Imprisonment for up to three years and fine

High court order

Creating a website that may contain false or offensive information and facilitating its access to others would fall under the definition of 'sending messages' under section 66A of the IT Act 'Inconvenience' cannot be read in isolation and must be read as a whole under the definition of an offence under the section It is only false information that causes inconvenience