Justice For Rights, A NGO has filed a petition against Netflix, Amazon Prime and others on a plea to remove vulgar and sexually explicit content from these online platforms.
The Matter
The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought the Centre’s response to the plea. The matter has been listed for further hearing on the 8thof February by a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V. Kameswar Rao.
Advocate Harpreet S. Hora appearing for the NGO sought a law or guidelines for regulating such contents available on these platforms.
The petitioner said online platforms offered vulgar, sexually explicit, pornographic, profane, virulent, religiously forbidden and morally unethical contents in order to attract more subscribers and generate profit. The NGO alleged that most of the content available was in violation of the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act.
The Two Sides Of The Coin
Well, to an extent the claims filed by the NGO are worth considering because some of the shows on these platforms have shown vulgar and sexually explicit content without any apprehensions. Sacred Games, for instance, has been in news both for its performance backed intriguing content and the unnecessary sex scenes that could have been avoided. Many people felt that though the series had cutting edge pace and a solid content, the excessive vulgar language and sexual scenes made it an uncomfortable watch.
Earlier Amazon also received a lot of flak from audiences on their first original series Inside Edge. Inside Edge had less of sexual content, but the use of abusive and vulgar language wasn’t well accepted at first.
Although the petition is against all the online platforms, Netflix because of its international content is at a greater risk. It has more content that Indian’s may not find suitable as per their liking. On the other hand, the online platforms do have a content rating and certification like movies to defend their sides. It’s as per user discretion if you feel that the content is explicit or vulgar, you may not watch it.
Let us see, how the court will react to this petition and what kind of judgment will be made. Till then enjoy the online content as per your whims.
