A Delhi court on Monday relieved Yahoo! India by dropping all charges against the Internet giant company for allegedly hosting objectionable contents on it site and also penalised the petitioner for dragging it in the list of 21 other odd websites.
While dismissing the case administrative civil Judge Praveen Singh slapped a fine of `5,000 to the plaintiff Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasim and said, “The complaint against Yahoo! India does not sustain in the eyes of law. Thus the complaint against Yahoo! India is dropped.”
In its argument, counsellor of Yahoo! India Sanjay Jain has said, “ The objectionable items downloaded from the Internet were not from Yahoo! India. In fact, there was no evidence that the objectionable materials were downloaded from Yahoo! India. They have randomly picked up from the popular sites.”
The court had on December 20 last year, in an ex-parte order, issued summons to 22 social networking websites, including Yahoo! and asking them to remove “anti-religious” or “anti-social” contents from their sites.
The court’s order has come amid a raging controversy over monitoring Internet content, which arose after Union teleommunications minister Kapil Sibal had asked the social networking websites to “screen” the content. The websites, that are listed under the 22 odd Internet companies which are complaint by Mr Qasim for hosting alleged objectionable and blasphemous content, include Facebook India, Google India Pvt Ltd, Google Orkut, YouTube, Blogspot, Zombie Time, Exboii, Boa-rdreader and IMC India.