Three arrested for piracy

Hyderabad: Two engineering students and a businessman from the city were arrested by the Cyber Crime Police on Monday for circulating pirated copies of Rudramadevi online.

Director and producer of the movie Gunasekhar had lodged a complaint at the Cyber Crime Police Station on Friday stating that the pirated copy of the movie was being circulating on many webs ites.

The police extracted the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the websites that were hosting the movie and grounded two engineering students Prashanth Chaitankar (20) and Pavan Kamble (20), who hailed from RC Puram.

During investigation, the duo revealed that their classmate had suggested this model in order to earn easy money. Following the suggestion,

the accused purchased 12 websites and uploaded over 1,200 pirated movie links and earned $ 1,700 since 2014. After recording their confession, the police seized two CPUs, one internet router and two mobile phones from the accused.

The police also apprehended Tanveer Ahmed (30), a businessman from RC Puram who was uploading the pirated videos of films. Tanveer used to download pirated movies and process them online and sold them to other websites.

Tanveer was aided by his brother Zafer Ahmed who resides in Saudi Arabia and a woman named Joanne Francis from Mumbai. He confessed to have posted 2,050 film links on his website and earned about Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 per month.

During a press conference on Monday, additional commissioner Swathi Lakra said that the accused were being booked under Section 66 of IT Act, Section 420 of IPC and Section 63 of Copyrights Act.

Swathi added that the origin of the website that hosted pirated movies were traced to Sri Lanka and that a team would be sent to nab the accused.