Complaint against websites: court issues fresh summonses

Metropolitan Magistrate Jay Thareja issued the summonses and directed the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to get them served upon the accused websites.

The court issued the summonses after the counsel for the complainant submitted to it the remaining three forms, which were required to be filled up as per the prescribed norms of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the USA and India.

"I am issuing summonses to these 11 US-based websites and the MHA will serve it," the court said and fixed the matter for further proceedings on April 15.

The court earlier on June 8 had directed MHA to get the summonses served to these US-based websites which have been arrayed as an accused in the complaint filed by Vinay Rai.

An MHA official had earlier told the court to start extradition proceedings to secure the presence of the websites based abroad and had referred to the MLAT between the two countries saying instead of issuing summonses against them, it should initiate extradition proceedings.

The court, however, had said it would not initiate the extradition proceedings and had asked the official to assist complainant's counsel S P M Tripathi in filling the forms for service of summonses.

The websites named in the complaint filed against them for allegedly committing offences like those of selling obscene materials to the youths and hatching criminal conspiracy include Facebook, Orkut, YouTube, Yahoo, Blogspot, Google and Microsoft.

The Centre had earlier told the court that there was sufficient material to proceed against the websites for the alleged offences.

The court had on December 23 last year issued summonses to 21 social networking websites on the complaint.