Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who on Friday said his account was locked for some time over a copyright issue, moments later said he was "locked out again" while trying to explain the problem to Twitter

Just a short while after Congress leader raised the concern of Twitter locking him out over a copyright issue, the Thiruvananthapuram MP was apparently "locked out" again as he used a copyrighted video to explain the problem.

Terming the action by Twitter a "foolish response" to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA (DCMA) notice, Shashi Tharoor said that the microblogging site could have just disabled the video.

"And @Twitter locked me out again because to explain the problem, the first tweet in this thread included the offending copyrighted video. Locking is a foolish response to a DCMA notice; disabling the video [which they've now done] should be enough. @Twitter has a lot to learn," Tharoor tweeted.

It all started when Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on the Koo app that Twitter denied him access to his account for almost an hour on the alleged grounds that there was a "violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA"


Congress leader Shashi Tharoor then, moments after Ravi Shankar Prasad's tweet, said that the same thing happened with him too.

Shashi Tharoor took to Twitter and said: "Raviji, the same thing just happened to me. Clearly DMCA is getting hyperactive. This tweet has been deleted by @Twitter because its video includes the copyrighted BoneyM song Rasputin."

Shashi Tharoor, who is also the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, said that he will be seeking an explanation from Twitter India over the brief locking of his and Ravi Shankar Prasad's account.

"As Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, I can state that we will be seeking an explanation from @TwitterIndiafor the locking of @rsprasad's & my accounts & the rules & procedures they follow while operating in India," Tharoor said in the tweet.

The Congress MP, however, did not blame Twitter for the action, saying that the microblogging platform "clearly had no choice but to honour a DMCA takedown notice, however stupid and pointless the request was".

What Is DMCA?

Both Ravi Shankar Prasad and Shashi Tharoor's accounts were locked as they violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA that the company adheres to for its own copyright policy.

The DMCA, which Twitter and many other online platforms cite to suspend and ban accounts, is one of the old laws protecting intellectual property and copyright belonging to a person or an organisation.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act “criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works [commonly known as digital rights management or DRM].”

In simpler terms, DMCA is like a go-to law for almost all of the internet as over two decades ago, when the WWW started to take over the world, there was no one framework that could be used to manage copyright on it. The problem was even more acute because of the global and borderless nature of the internet.