Indian Government Lift The Ban On VLC Media Player – VideoLAN
The wait for VLC Media’s website is finally over! Here we are to pacify you with this interesting bulletin! VLC media player’s website has been finally unblocked in India, after a month’s wait when a letter was issued to the government by a software engineer. The site of Developer VideoLAN was blocked for around 6 months in the nation.
It had also issued a notice in legal matters to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in October, over the case of blocking of its website in the country. The organization also stated that it would adopt legal remedies for the breach of the organization’s rights under the Constitution of India and international law. Also, it is worth noting that the government has previously engrossed VLC as part of the Digital India program.
A tweet was shared by Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) a few days back which confirmed that the ban on the VLC media sites has been lifted. As per the reports available from the previous year, VideoLAN has applied to a Right to Information (RTI) application with the DoT to gain more information regarding the ban.
RTI was reported seen referring to Meity, which in return claimed to have no updated information on the ban on the VideoLAN site. After this, the developer of the open-source media player issued a legal notice to Meity and DoT, in which it claims that it had not received any notice before the ban.
The president and the leader of VideoLAN, Jean-Baptiste Kempf stated on the website that the traffic had declined by 20 percent since the ban has been approved in India in February. He also revealed his confusion regarding the ban targetting some internet service providers (ISP) that had blocked the site in India whereas others had not taken action in this.
Moreover, the ban appeared to have only affected the VideoLAN site. The app was available on other web platforms like Google Play and App Store for downloading. VideoLAN later issued a legal notice in September to the DoT with the aid of IFF which claims that the reason being is the site had not been communicated even after six months.
In its notice to the government, VideoLAN claimed that the blocking of the site desecrated international freedom of speech obligations and also breached Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The organization also conveyed that it would proceed with legal remedies for the breach of its rights, in its notice issued last month.
