JOIN USThe anti-piracy cell of the Kerala Police on Tuesday made a crucial breakthrough in the case involving piracy of blockbuster Malayalam film Premam with the arrest of three Plus One students in Kollam for uploading a pirated print of the movie on the Internet. The students were arrested early on Tuesday and brought to Thiruvananthapuram for a detailed interrogation.
One of the students supposedly created a proxy Internet Protocol address and uploaded the film on the Internet, four days after its release. M Iqbal, DySP, told reporters here on Tuesday that the arrested students were being probed to trace the source of the pirated print. “By nabbing the first uploader of the movie and two others connected with the incident, we have made a critical breakthrough,” he said.
A pirated print of the film – marked ‘censor copy’ – had appeared on the Internet last month, bringing under the scanner the state unit of the Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and two studios where some of the film’s post-production works were done. Officials in the anti-piracy cell on Monday recorded the statement of producer Anwar Rasheed in connection with his complaint. Rasheed had earlier resigned from associations in the industry protesting what he called a failure in tracking down the culprits. Premam, directed by Alphonse Putharen, has emerged as one of Malayalam cinema’s all-time biggest grossers.