Garuda, an important Diwali release, stars “Action Star” Aditya. The movie checks all the boxes for being a major smash, thus it should be a hit with the actor’s fans and a money maker for the producers. However, there is a problem. The Tamilrockerz, a group of movie pirates, has threatened to release the movie online before it hits theatres.
The premise of the upcoming online series Tamilrockerz is perfectly summarised in the sentence above. However, the drama it depicts on screen closely resembles actual events that occurred somewhere in or around 2018 before a major Kollywood film star’s release.
A group that eventually went by the moniker of Tamilrockers ran the piracy website. The group’s beginnings are mainly unknown, however according to certain reports, they appeared around 2011. The go-to locations to download free pirated content at the time were torrent sites like Pirate Bay.
The group was initially mostly unknown because they only ever uploaded Tamil movies to their website. When they started stealing content from other regional languages, their popularity increased.
The size of the gang is still unknown. The size of their organisation, however, suggested that they had a presence outside of India.
Three people who were allegedly associated with Tamilrockers were detained by Kerala Police in March 2008 on piracy-related allegations. Karthi and two of his assistants, Prabhu and Suresh, were detained in Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, where Karthi is thought to be the mastermind of Tamilrockers.
In response to several complaints from filmmakers who claimed that their films had been illegally uploaded to torrent networks just days after their release, the police made these arrests. The organisation is also accused of leaking Pranav Mohanlal’s debut film, Aadhi, as well as the Mohanlal smash movie Pulimurugan online.
A police investigation into the accused’s bank activities, according to one media report, showed that they must have made more than Rs 1 crore from the illegal enterprise.
The pandemic has increased web traffic to sites that engage in illicit piracy. In a 2021 joint research, Akamai Technologies, a CDN and cybersecurity company based in the US, and MUSO, a data company assessing global piracy, found that between January 2021 and September 2021, the demand for stolen content grew dramatically on a global scale.
India alone saw 6.5 billion visits to websites that promote piracy, ranking third behind the US (13.5 billion) and Russia (7.2 billion). However, torrent websites like The Pirate Bay assert that even after paying for server fees and upkeep, they still do not generate much money. The site’s representative has even gone so far as to suggest that they are likely losing money.
