When file sharing site Kickass Torrents (KAT) went offline after its alleged owner, Artem Vaulin, was detained in Poland last week, Indians were the most greatly impacted by the move.

That would have made kat.cr India’s 29th most popular site, based on Alexa, before it was shut down (worldwide, kat.cr rated just 75th)…..

“Clearly, rights owners have their own copyright management system where they have routine takedown attempts that works through the year with the online community, including Google,” describes Associates & Saikrishna associate Ameet Datta.

Normally this procedure is semi-automated by agencies contracted by studios to comb the Internet for copyright-infringing content, and it can be pretty rapid when working with reputed firms.

End users—the ones who download and view the content—are almost beyond the reach of Indian law due to slow court procedures and too little studio interest in alienating customers, concur two copyright attorneys interviewed.

Nevertheless, there’s also digitizing copies of films, or the fight against those record films with a camcorder in films before they’re released on film displays, which uses an assortment of techniques, including more and sophisticated digital watermarking.

Studios can also attempt to interrupt the real physical distribution network of pirated movies, where pirated content is sold on the road after being burned onto DVDs, copied to memory cards or mobile USB drives.

But those distribution mechanisms seem to be going online, and it’s here that attorneys and movie studios have been seeing the most activity lately.

Since 2012, content and Indian movie studios -right holders, including TV networks with exclusive transmission rights to sporting events that were huge, have been becoming more closely acquainted with a particular John Doe. Truly John Doe nor Ashok Kumar exist, although in India, he’s also colloquially called Ashok Kumar.

That would usually contain individual pages on websites like KAT or Pirate Bay that supply accessibility to pirated movie files over the peer to peer BitTorrent protocol from other Internet users, in addition to bigger and smaller flybynight sites, modelled on YouTube, which host whole pirated videos for direct streaming in your web browser.

Frequently, these are just short term measures to prevent on-line piracy from stealing the thunder of a release date, as films have frequently illegally become accessible online afterward, when nearly all gains are made for the studios. This is why courts are frequently approached by attorneys now Friday release before a picture’s.

The precise variety of sites that are blocked is potentially enormous.

The big danger is that innocent sites also occasionally change.

“There are not any amounts,” says an analyst at National Law University Delhi’s Center for Communicating Government, Parul Sharma, “but throughout time, there have been various instances where over-blocking has occurred.”

She cites, as examples, the John Doe orders issued for the rights holders of the Fifa World Cup -bizarre sites, or the India- .

“The trouble with over-bloc-king is mainly that individuals who are blocked are usually players that are actually modest,” says Sharma. “They don’t have cash or knowledge to go against these (big studios procuring John Doe orders), and all of us end up losing on valid address or content.”