(3) Any person who contravenes the provisions of sub-section (1) or sub-section (2) shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and with fine which may extend to ten thousand rupees. Explanation.—For the purposes of this section, “advertisement” includes any notice, circular, label, wrapper or any other document including advertisement through internet or any other media in electronic or print form and also includes any visible representation made by means of any hoarding, wall-painting, signal, light, sound, smoke or gas. In response, the Court directed Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, in September 2016, to block results for a number of keywords and keyword strings provided by the Court. In April 2017, the Court clarified that only results that violate section 22 PCPNDT Act should be blocked. It noted: It is made clear that there is no need on the part of anyone to infer that it creates any kind of curtailment in his right to access information, knowledge and wisdom and his freedom of expression. What is stayed is only with regard to violation of Section 22 of the Act.112 However, it remains unclear how intermediaries can ensure that only illegitimate content will be blocked if content is blocked based on keywords and keyword strings. This is even more so as it is not clear how the word “advertisement” is to be interpreted by the intermediaries in this case: while the intermediaries are arguing for a narrow definition, the Solicitor-General has argued for a broad understanding, in which case the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate content becomes even more difficult to discern and a much wider range of content may be affected. The debate on what constitutes an “advertisement” in this case is still ongoing in court. In addition, in September 2016, the court ordered the three intermediaries to develop an “auto-block” mechanism: an in-house procedure or method to ensure that advertisements or searches that are introduced into the system but are violating the PCPNDT Act will not be shown in the results even when they are not included in the results for the keyword searches mentioned above. The intermediaries protested this interim order, arguing that it runs counter to section 79 of the IT Act and the Court’s judgement in Shreya Singal v. Union of India. 112 WP (Civil) 341 of 2008, order dated 13 April 2017. http:// supremecourtofindia.nic.in/pdf/cir/2017-04-13_1492086489.pdf Rather than rescinding its interim order, however, the Court further ordered the intermediaries, in February 2017, to appoint an “In-House Expert Body”, which will be responsible for ensuring that any words or keywords that are in violation of the PCPNDT Act will be deleted immediately. Where the Expert Body has any doubt, it can seek guidance from the Nodal Agency appointed by the Union of India on directions of the Court. The Nodal Agency will also intimate the intermediaries of any violating content that has been brought to its notice by the public. For the moment, the burden on intermediaries to proactively prevent violating content from appearing online remains. A second case in which intermediaries have been requested to prevent content from being uploaded is In Re: Prajwala Letter Dated 18.2.2015 Videos of Sexual Violence and Recommendation.113 The case concerns a request to the Supreme Court by NGO Prajwala to stop the circulation of videos depicting child sexual abuse, rape and gang rape. The report of a court-ordered Expert Committee to make recommendations on how to address this problem was put on record on 6 July 2017 and all recommendations on which there was consensus were subsequently adopted by the Court on 23 October 2017. This included a recommendation that content-hosting platforms, search engines and the government work together “in formulating [a] process for proactively verifying, identifying and initiating take down” of all such content. Though it was recognised that effective implementation of this recommendation requires further research, the Court also noted that in developing such mechanisms to enable real-time filtering at the time content is uploaded, techniques based on artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning should be used. The Court’s interim order contains no indication of what kind of safeguards will be used to prevent censorship that is overly broad when implementing these mechanisms, nor is there an explicit recognition that such safeguards are important. Seeing that, as explained earlier, legitimate sexual expression is controversial in India as well, this is cause for concern. Unless clear safeguards are put in place, this case, while laudable in its aims, might inadvertently end up undermining the progressive intermediary liability regime that Shreya Singhal v. Union of India had put into place. 113 SMW (Crl.) 3 of 2015. 72 / Unshackling Expression