The Madras High Court on Friday (May 22, 2026) refused to grant bail to six individuals who had watched and shared Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay starrer Jana Nayagan movie, after it got leaked online even before the grant of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) certificate.

Justice R. Sakthivel dismissed all the bail petitions after the prosecution vehemently opposed the grant of bail on the ground that it was a serious offence of a movie having been shared widely and viewed illegally by lakhs of people even before its official release and the issuance of CBFC certificate.

The court was told the cyber crime wing had registered a First Information Report (FIR) against 21 individuals on the basis of a complaint lodged by R. Udayakumar who was serving as production controller at KVN Productions which had produced the movie by spending crores of rupees.

The investigation conducted by the police so far had revealed that a freelance editor S. Prashanth (32) of Jaffarkhanpet in Chennai had been given access to an edit suite where he was editing actor Soori starrer Mandaadi. He had misused the access to steal Jana Nayagan footages in his hard drive.

After stealing the footage, he had watched the movie along with his brothers S. Selvam (second accused) who was serving as a driver in a popular textile showroom and S. Rajini (fourth accused) who was a lawyer. Thereafter, the second accused had shared the movie with his colleague who had been arrayed as the third accused.

“The third accused D. Uma Shankar, serving as purchase manager in the textile showroom, remains absconding till date despite his anticipatory bail having been dismissed by the High Court. His arrest may lead to the unearthing of new details and hence no other accused must be granted bail till then,” the government counsel argued.

He also told the court the movie was shared by one individual to another through a video-sharing app until it reached the seventh accused, Bala alias J. Balakrishnan (28) of Palavakkam, who had uploaded the footage on a Google Drive, leading to large-scale downloading of the movie from the drive.

Justice Sakthivel was further told that some of the accused had also sold the footage for commercial consideration to websites such as Tamil Rockers and Tamil Movies and that those details were yet to be collected by the police by accessing the bank accounts of the accused.

At present, though a nine accused had filed four bail petitions, the counsel representing the first, second and seventh accused chose not press for the relief since all three of them had been detained under the Goondas Act. The bail plea was sought only for the rest of the six accused.

Advocate Vijayan Subramanian, representing KVN Productions, filed an intervening petition and objected to the grant of bail. He said, the production firm had suffered huge monetary loss because of the crime and therefore, bail should not be granted just because the accused had been incarcerated for more than 40 days.

After hearing all of them, the judge decided not to grant bail to any of the petitioners since they had been accused of having shared the footage with others. He took note that some of the accused had also been found to have shared the footage on WhatsApp groups.