Centre must find solution to block porn sites -SC

Voicing concern over mushrooming pornographic sites on internet, the Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre to find out solution to the "hydra headed" problem after government virtually expressed its helplessness, saying "if we block one site, another crops up".

"Human mind is very fertile and technology runs faster then law. Law has to keep pace with technology," a bench headed by chief justice R M Lodha said.

Additional solicitor general L Nageshwar Rao submitted that when one site is blocked, similar multiple sites crop up. He said that government is taking steps to bring servers operating from foreign countries to India to control sites.

"If we block one site, other crops up. There are also hidden servers in the country and it is difficult to control them. All social media are being operated from foreign land," he said, adding that parental control software should be provided to keep indecent material on net from children.

The bench, however, said some solution has to be found out for the problem.

"Law, technology and governance have to be synthesised to control pornographic materials on internet," it said, observing, "There are rules to control such sites and some method has to be found out".

The court was hearing a petition filed by Indore-based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani who pleaded that although watching obscene videos was not an offence, pornographic sites should be banned as they were one of the major causes behind crime against women.

The petition filed through advocate Vijay Panjwani says that the absence of internet laws encourages people to watch porn videos and over 20 crore porn videos or clippings are freely available in the market, which have been directly downloaded from the internet or copied from video CDs.

The apex court also directed the Centre to place contents of the petition before an advisory committee set up under Section 88 of IT Act so that it can suggest ways to control the problem.

The apex court had on November 18 last year issued notice to the department of telecommunication (DoT) seeking its response as to how to block websites with pornographic content in the country, particularly those featuring child pornography.