This is a decision aid, not legal advice. It tells you which regime your release falls under and names the instrument, so you know what you are reading about and what to ask. It cannot tell you what to do about your film, because that turns on facts about your film, your contracts and how you operate.
If money is committed, a broadcaster or a distributor is involved, or the content is contentious, pay a media lawyer for an hour of their time before you release. It is the cheapest line item in the budget.
Not the Cinematograph Act 1952 — certification under it governs films exhibited publicly, which is to say in cinemas, and there is no certification route for an online release as such. A site where anyone posts their own videos is an intermediary, governed by Part II of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021. What is actually applied to your video day to day is the site’s own terms and community guidelines.
Not yours as a publisher, on the Rules’ own terms. What you uploaded is not online curated content as the Rules define it: rule 2(1)(q) requires a curated catalogue owned by, licensed to or contracted to be transmitted by the publisher, which is what a video-sharing site is not doing with your upload. Rule 2(1)(u) in any event leaves out an individual who is not transmitting such content in the course of a systematic business, professional or commercial activity. So the Part III publisher duties land on neither of you in that form, and the site’s terms and its age-restriction tools are what govern the video instead.
Less contested than the row below it, and worth keeping separate from it. The argument people are having is about someone who curates and sells access to their own films. An upload to a site that hosts what other people post is the part the Rules do answer, through the definitions rather than through any general exemption. What is left with you is the film itself: the rights in it, and whether the classification and the warnings you attach are honest. The site’s own policies change far more often than the Rules do, and they are what will actually be enforced against the video.
Where the film is shown decides which law applies; the film itself does not change. The row you picked is marked.
| Where it is shown | Certificate? | What governs it |
|---|---|---|
| Your answer: A video-sharing site | No | IT Rules 2021, Part II — the site is an intermediary; its own terms bind you |
| A site or app you run yourself | No | IT Rules 2021, Part III — if you are a publisher of online curated content (open) |
| A catalogue platform, ours included | No | IT Rules 2021, Part III — the Code of Ethics |
| An Indian film festival | It depends | Usually an exemption the organiser holds |
| A cinema or licensed public exhibition | Yes | Cinematograph Act 1952; CBFC certification |
| A hall, club or other venue | It depends | Cinematograph Act 1952, if the screening is a public exhibition |
| Cable or satellite television | Usually yes | Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995; the Programme Code |
| A private screener to named people | No | Your contracts and your rights |
A film going to more than one of these needs each row answered separately, and the strictest one usually sets your schedule. The two distinctions that cause most of the confusion — a channel you run is not somebody’s catalogue, and a festival exemption belongs to the organiser rather than to you — are worked through at length in the guide.
The answer above lives at its own address, so you can paste it into a reply and the person reading it sees exactly what you saw.
We have described the instruments as we understand them and said plainly where the answer is unsettled or turns on facts we cannot know. We are not lawyers, the rules change, and this page is correct as at the date printed below it and no later. Whether online releases ought to be certified is argued over periodically and is the claim here most likely to move.
Anything with money, a broadcaster or a distributor in it is worth an hour with a lawyer who works on media. Not a general practitioner and not a forum: someone who reads these instruments for a living and will read your contract. If you take one thing from this page, take that, and take the long version of the reasoning to the meeting with you.
Free to use, nothing to sign up for, and nothing you type here is stored or sent anywhere — the answer is computed from what is in the address bar. Last updated 2026-10-21.