“Congress Party ko desh se nikalo” (Make the Congress Party leave India) – are the words Rahul Gandhi is heard saying in a video spoofing his All India Congress Committee speech on January 17, 2014. Rohit Iyengar, a young film student in the United States of Americacreated the spoof video by “auto-tuning” the speech to sound like a song being sung by the Gandhi scion. Uploaded on YouTube on January 20, 2014, the video begins with the disclaimer – “Words in the speech have been taken out of context for comic purposes”.

What followed, though, is far from comic.

Within four days,the video fetched “229,396 views, 2852 likes, 128 dislikes and 276 comments”. On January 24, 2014,Iyengar discovered that his video had been removed by YouTube because of copyright claims by a certain Desi Records. The link to the video now opened to the following frame:

We spoke to Iyengar, who has been a “YouTuber for 5 years” and has a YouTube channel by his name with over 2000 subscribers. He specialises in auto-tuning and has produced over 100 videos for his channel. Not too deterred by the current controversy, Iyengar said, “I do much more than just Auto-Tuning. So I’ll do something else for a while and then when the spark strikes I may make another AutoTune Remix”.

Ever since his video was removed, Iyengar has been putting up status updates on facebook raising an alarm about “online censorship”. According to him, “the involvement and obscurity of Desi Records” in the entire episode “is very fishy”. There is no public information on who the owners of Desi Records are, where it is based or what the basis of the copyright claim is. Other than the fact that it’s a music label, no other details are available. It’s not even clear whether such a label exists anymore.

YouTube refused to reveal any details about Desi Records’ ownership. A YouTube spokesperson informed Newslaundry, “As a policy we do not comment on individual videos and follow YouTube’s community guidelines which prohibit things like hate speech, shocking or disturbing content, illegal acts, and graphic violence, and we give our users tools to flag content so that we can review and remove anything that violates our policies. We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities, copyright owners wherever possible to take down content. This is consistent with our longstanding policy.”

Iyengar,in response, claims that he has not copied anyone’s tune. The 18-year-old isn’t new to such controversies, though. “Previously I had spoofed ArnabGoswami featuring LalitModi, which was taken down by Times Now for copyright infringement”.  As opposed to the copyright claim made by Times Now, in the case of the Rahul Gandhi video, the channel that owns the footage (the video displays the Rajya Sabha TV Logo) hasn’t claimed any copyright.

All calls, smses and mails to Congress politicians who are involved in the party’s social media presence such as Deepender Singh Hooda and Sanjay Jha went unanswered. When Rajya Sabha TV isn’t claiming a copyright violation and the maker of the video says the tune used is original – what is the basis of the copyright violation? Also,who is Desi Records?

 Newslaundry has been documenting cases of misuse of the IT Act especially  Section 66A in its Internet Inqalab section.  Similarly, Section 79 of the IT Act aids censorship by making intermediaries such as google, Twitter and facebook liable for third party information shared in the online space in certain cases as given below.

According to sub-section 3 of Section 79, an intermediary shall be liable for any third party information, data, or communication link made available or hosted by him if –

“(a) the intermediary has conspired or abetted or aided or induced, whether by threats or promise or otherise in the commission of the unlawful act;

 (b) upon receiving actual knowledge, or on being notified by the appropriate Government or its agency that any information, data or communication link residing in or connected to a computer resource controlled by the intermediary is being used to commit the unlawful act, the intermediary fails to expeditiously remove or disable access to that material on that resource without vitiating the evidence in any manner.”

Explanation – For the purposes of this section, the expression “third party information” means any information dealt with by an intermediary in his capacity as an intermediary.

(Source: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/section-79-information-technology-act)

According to the Google Transparency Report 2013, India is among the top 5 countries which made the most number of requests to remove content. As reported in The Guardian, the top five takedown requests from January to June 2013 are as follows:

• Turkey (1,673 requests for 12,162 items)
• United States (545 requests for 3,887 items)
• Brazil (321 requests for 1,635 items)
• Russia (257 requests for 277 items)
• India (163 requests for 714 items)

It isn’t clear though, whether the case in question falls within the realm of censorship because of the involvement of Desi Records. This could simply be a case of copyright violation. The copyright infringement notice of YouTube, as available on the website, is given below:

In this specific case, the basis of copyright violation is not clear.

Despite being sure that he hasn’t done anything wrong, Iyengar is wary of re-uploading his video. He has already received two copyright violation notices from YouTube. “If one gets more than 3 copyright strikes they can get their YouTube account deleted permanently. I don’t want to risk that happening…I filled out their formal counter-notification form to get the video reinstated. I have to wait around 10-14 business days to see the outcome of that. Fair use is a legal grey area so we just have to wait and see. Fingers crossed.”

Coupled with a procedural protest, Iyengar is hopeful that his aggressive online campaign against the attempt to muzzle his voice and creativity will bear fruit. “I re-uploaded the video on my facebook page and many other fans have re-uploaded it on their own channels so it is still very much out there.”

The video can be viewed here.

The popularity of the video has only increased after being taken down from YouTube. Not letting this imbroglio bog him down, Iyengar has now created an apology video for “pissing off” Rahul Gandhi. The video “Sorry I autotuned you Mr Rahul Gandhi” has over 18,000 views till now. It seems that there’s nothing like a little censorship to stir up the creative juices.

The author can be reached at Somi Das