Supreme Court Registrar to Supreme Court: Lack of infrastructure to live-stream hearings without third party support

The Secretary General of Supreme Court has informed the Apex court that registry and National Informatics Centre (NIC) do not have sufficient infrastructure at present to live-stream the top court’s proceedings without relying on third party applications.

In an affidavit filed before the top court the Secretary General submitted that the dependency on third party applications to offer the live streaming services to a larger audience is inevitable.

The affidavit said said that it would like to bring it into the notice of the court that court that not only the registry but NIC as well do not have sufficient technical and infrastructure at present.

The Secretary General also added that the Court is trying to figure out a solution for making live streaming smooth without the third party application.

The former RSS ideologue KN Govindacharya to safeguard copyright over live-streamed court proceedings, especially on YouTube had filed an affidavit in the court, when the Secretary General apprised the same.

In his plea the RSS ideologue said that a special agreement should be made with YouTube for safeguarding the copyright over live-streaming and archived judicial proceedings.

The affidavit by the Secretary General said that the registry is constrained to avail facilities of third parties in order to ensure compliance with directions in the case of Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India to uphold the principle of open courts.

The present system followed for live streaming is that the computer cell provides content through a live stream link to NIC, the URL of which is encoded and published through YouTube on NIC’s webcast portal.

The links are generated and shared on the Supreme Court website for live streaming.

In the last hearing counsel for Govindacharya had as per Article 145 of Constitution copyright cannot be surrendered.

The Bench had said that it is important to break the ice and if we thought about rules, we would not be able to take the step at all you see.’