Teenagers who ‘uploaded’ Premam arrested, quizzed

KOLLAM: The anti-piracy cell of the Kerala police on Tuesday achieved a major breakthrough in the Premam piracy probe  with the arrest of three teenagers from here  who had allegedly uploaded the pirated copy on the internet.

The arrested are  two Plus-One students and their friend Sadiq, 18, all from Peroor in Kollam.  They were taken to  the  headquarters of the anti-piracy cell in Thiruvananthapuram for further questioning.

They  are  believed to have uploaded the movie on their website  using a fake IP address, from which over 1.5 lakh downloads took place.  However, they did not derive any commercial benefit out of it.

Sadiq had contacts with many people abroad  through chatting and they were into hacking, mainly copyright information, said anti-piracy cell DySP M. Iqbal.

They also formed special groups on social media to interact among themselves. The arrested confessed that they had received the pirated copy from the members of this gang. 

The police team also seized computers, hard drives, compact discs  and pen drives from the house of a teenager.  Premam,  directed by  Alphonse Puthren and produced by Anwar Rasheed, had gone vital on the internet and WhatsApp a week ago. Anwar Rasheed had filed an online petition  and the anti-piracy cell of the state police is probing into the matter.