In early May 2026, Motorola Mobility's Indian subsidiary walked into the Delhi High Court with an ambitious ask: order X, Meta's family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), Google and YouTube not only to take down more than 360 user posts allegedly defaming its smartphones, but also to proactively block any future post that says something similar. The vehicle is a so-called 'dynamic+' injunction — an attempt to graft a doctrine developed in Indian copyright litigation onto a defamation dispute over consumer product reviews.
If the court grants it in the form sought, this is not a routine takedown order. It is a structural change to how intermediary liability works in India — and one that would happen without Parliament, without the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), and without the constitutional safeguards the Supreme Court built into the system a decade ago.
From copyright pirates to phone reviews
The 'dynamic injunction' was born in UTV Software Communications v. 1337x.to (Delhi High Court, 2019), where Justice Manmohan allowed rights-holders to extend an existing site-blocking order to newly discovered mirror domains of pirate sites without going back to court each time. The Delhi High Court extended the logic in Neetu Singh v. Telegram (2022), pushing platforms to act on near-duplicate uploads of pirated coaching material.
That doctrine was tightly bounded. It dealt with clearly defined IP — a film, a textbook, a known infringer — where the lawful/unlawful line could be drawn algorithmically. Critics already worried about over-blocking. But the harm was at least amenable to a hash match.
Defamation is a different animal. Whether a phone review is 'defamatory' depends on truth, opinion, fair comment, public interest, and context. None of that can be reliably resolved by an automated filter scanning for keywords like 'unsafe' or 'exploding battery.' Asking YouTube or X to pre-emptively suppress 'similar' posts about a named product is asking them to make defamation findings at scale, on speech that has not yet been written.
Section 79 and the Shreya Singhal firewall
India's intermediary safe harbour lives in Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, conditioned on the due-diligence obligations in the IT Rules, 2021. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) the Supreme Court read down Section 79(3)(b) to require actual knowledge through a court order or appropriate government notification before a platform's safe harbour is at risk. That was a deliberate constitutional choice: platforms should not be conscripted as private censors deciding what speech is unlawful.
A 'dynamic+' defamation injunction punches a hole through that firewall. The platform is told, on the strength of a civil suit brought by the very party that dislikes the speech, to filter unknown future content. The court order is real — but its operational meaning is delegated to a corporate moderation team applying a vague rubric to user uploads. That is not what Shreya Singhal envisioned.
The IT Rules 2021 already strain the system
The IT Rules, 2021 — and the 2022/2023 amendments creating Grievance Appellate Committees — already pull Indian intermediaries toward faster, broader takedowns. Rule 3(1)(d) sets a 36-hour window for acting on court orders; Rule 4(2)'s traceability mandate for significant social media intermediaries remains under challenge in the WhatsApp v. Union of India petition pending in the Delhi High Court. Layering a judge-made proactive filtering duty on top of this regime would compound, not clarify, the burden.
Why this matters beyond Motorola
Motorola is not a censorious state actor. It is a consumer electronics brand frustrated by viral claims of battery failures — a fact pattern most large manufacturers face. The temptation for Indian courts to give a sympathetic plaintiff a powerful new tool is real. But the precedent travels.
- Politicians will ask for dynamic+ orders against 'similar' criticism.
- Listed companies will ask for them against 'similar' short-seller commentary.
- Religious and caste-based litigants — historically the heaviest users of Indian defamation and Section 295A complaints — will follow.
Each of those plaintiffs will, quite reasonably, cite Motorola. The Delhi High Court would be designing a regime that scales far beyond product reviews.
A proportionate path
There is a better answer that protects Motorola's legitimate reputational interests without dismantling Section 79:
- Targeted, URL-specific takedowns for posts already adjudicated as defamatory, with reasoned orders identifying the offending statements.
- John Doe discovery against platforms for subscriber data on the worst actors, allowing Motorola to sue the actual speakers — the remedy defamation law actually contemplates.
- No standing duty on intermediaries to pre-screen lawful speech about a named company.
Indian courts have, over two decades, built one of the developing world's more thoughtful intermediary liability regimes — anchored in Shreya Singhal, refined through cases like Myspace Inc. v. Super Cassettes and Christian Louboutin v. Nakul Bajaj. That balance is part of why India has attracted the platform investment it has, and why Indian users still enjoy a relatively open speech environment compared with peers in the region.
The Motorola case is an opportunity for the Delhi High Court to say something unfashionable but important: dynamic injunctions are a copyright tool, not a defamation tool, and proactive filtering of opinion is not what Section 79 contemplates. If the company wants quieter reviews, the answer is better phones — not deputised platform censors.