According to “The Rob Report” released by Ernst & Young and the Internet and Mobile Association of India in October 2024, online piracy costed India’s entertainment industry INR 224 billion in 2023. This makes India’s piracy economy the 4th largest revenue segment in its media and entertainment industry. Of this, INR 137 billion came from theatrical piracy and INR 87 billion from OTT platforms, with GST revenue losses estimated at an additional INR 43 billion.

Unlike most IP disputes, piracy cannot wait for litigation to be resolved in due course. A film leaked on release day, a sporting event streamed without authorization, a series available before its premiere and content streaming on OTT being made available illegally: these are immediate commercial injuries that compound by the second. This piece examines how Indian courts have responded, the legal standards that have emerged, and the institutional questions that remain.

The Institutional Response

The Delhi High Court established a dedicated Intellectual Property Division in 2022, following the abolition of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board and the transfer of certain IP matters back to the High Courts. The Madras High Court followed in April, 2023, and several other High Courts have since created specialized rosters or divisions for intellectual property disputes.

Most piracy actions are brought against unknown defendants (John Does), and the central question is often whether the court will grant a blocking order. In some cases, the Bombay High Court has taken a relatively stricter approach to wholesale blocking, requiring evidence that a website contains “no legitimate content whatsoever”. Conversely, the Delhi High Court, has adopted a more qualitative approach focusing on whether the dominant purpose and character of the website is to facilitate infringement.

Expanding the Scope of Relief

The Delhi High Court has progressively expanded the architecture of anti-piracy injunctions to address the speed with which infringing operators migrate across domains, URLs and applications. Dynamic injunctions, recognised in Indian copyright litigation since 2019, permit rights holders to extend blocking relief to mirror and redirect websites without filing a fresh suit for each iteration.

More recent orders have gone further, attempting to address future infringing iterations and fast-moving live-streaming contexts as well. Dynamic+ injunctions address this gap. In Universal City Studios LLC v. Dotmovies.Baby, the Delhi High Court held that the injunction must cover content created on a continuing basis after the original order; pre-empting the harm caused as new works are released rather than responding to it after.

Superlative injunctions go further still. In Star India Pvt Ltd v. IPTV Smarter Pro, the Delhi High Court, in anticipation of live IPL broadcasts during court vacation, passed an order directing ISPs to block infringing domains, URLs, mobile applications, and associated interfaces notified by the plaintiff in real time. While this is the most operationally effective remedy developed so far, it vests rights holders with a quasi-adjudicatory role that raises questions about procedural fairness, particularly the risk of capturing legitimate platforms engaged in fair use.

The Concentration Problem

The jurisprudence developed by the Delhi High Court has, over time, positioned it as the preferred forum for piracy litigation in India. The legal standards are comparatively more developed, the relief available tends to be broader, and the Court has demonstrated a consistent appetite for doctrinal innovation, and these are qualities that, understandably, attract sophisticated rights holders and their counsel.

The IPAB’s history offers a cautionary parallel. Its suspension was not a consequence of adjudicatory failure but of institutional unmanageability, an accumulation of pendency that no internal mechanism could absorb or redistribute. The network of IP divisions established across India was, in part, a structural response to that collapse. The concern now is that the quiet gravitational pull of forum preference may be slowly recreating the same conditions, not through any deliberate choice, but through the aggregated effect of individually rational filing decisions.

The Bombay and Calcutta High Courts have passed plaintiff-centric injunctions in piracy matters, but neither has had the volume of filings necessary to develop a coherent body of precedent. The continued gravitation toward Delhi has, if anything, aggravated this concentration, leaving those Courts without the case density needed to contribute meaningfully to the field.

The network of IP divisions now established across India represents an institutional asset that remains largely underutilised. The structural logic of decentralization only holds if it is actually used. India now has the infrastructure for a genuinely distributed IP enforcement architecture, one that the IPAB era did not meaningfully possess. Whether that architecture is allowed to mature, or whether it quietly atrophies while Delhi absorbs what it can, may ultimately say more about the legal profession’s habits than about the courts’ abilities. The divisions exist; the question is whether the litigation, and the development of law it carries with it, will follow.