It was quite the weekend for the Tamil film industry for it encountered one of the most unexpected scandals of all time in recent times. In case you didn't already know, a whistle-blower site by the name Savukku carried out a detailed report on Friday that put forth some serious allegations against actor cum TFPC President Vishal, production giant Lyca Productions and Studio Green's Gnanavel Raja. TL; DR Vishal and Gnanavel Raja were accused of being in the know-how that Lyca Productions' owned websites have been functioning as movie piracy websites for years and instead of taking action, the TFPC President converted it into a personally gainable deal with the banner.
Following this, a section of the Tamil producers' community asked for Vishal's stepping down, while throwing out a volley of several other accusations and the actor even retaliated to many of it. But what really caught our attention was that from the media to the producers to Vishal, no one seemed keen or curious about the fact that a well known firm like Lyca Productions had been accused of an act like movie piracy, a thing that has been haunting the Tamil movie industry for years now; so much so that we often hear celebrities requesting (sometimes threatening) viewers to refrain from it.
The Whistleblower's Claim
The Savukku article claims that a private investigative company that Vishal had hired to get to the bottom of Tamilrockers.com and Tamilgun.com found that they traced several websites including lycamovie.com and lycaestate.com registered with the same email id (tamilan@asia.com) as them.
The original report also claims that a reverse search by the private company found that the domain was registered under Lycatel Services' London Address in 2014 itself.
The Evidence
The web archive (evidence of the content viewed on that website) of lycamovie.com in 2014 confirmed that domain had been used as movie piracy site.
The discrepancy
However, when we decided to dig a little deeper into this aspect, this is what we found. The numerous WHOIS registries (method for checking information about ownership of a domain name) available, sometimes indicate details of the current domain owner in past activities and when we found a year-wise record the details for 2014 from one such Whois website we found that the records of 2014 were different from that of 2017, a year when Lyca productions is believed to have bought this domain.
Source: Domainhistory.net
As per the above records, the domain was created in the year 2014 with dummy details (Which is the period the domain was used for watching pirated movies) and it was about to expire by 2015, the next immediate record of the domain was found by 2017, which has complete information about the owner (Lyca Organization & its address) and the web archive of Lycamovie.com in the year 2017 has nothing other than a 301 redirect to Lycaproductions.in
Final Word
While we are not negating the claims made by the original report, we also could not ignore the discrepancies that we found in our research. However, it is also not to be ignored that the private company that came up with the original info are trained professionals (whose pending salary alone sums to Rs. 30 lakh) and would have certainly not ignored facts that popped up in our laymen minds.
Related Link https://www.moviecrow.com/News/20138/lyca-productions-respond-to-whistleblowers-allegations