Poonia had earlier denied that he had downloaded the curriculum from WhitHat Jr's servers and other allegations levelled by the firm.THE Delhi High Court on Monday passed a limited ad interim injunction in favour of Byju’s-owned edtech company WhiteHat Jr and its founder Karan Bajaj against one of its vocal critics,
Pradeep Poonia, and asked the latter to take down some of his tweets.
The court also restrained Poonia, an engineer, from displaying any information received in unauthorised fashion by accessing the company’s internal communication system.
The court restrained him from commenting on the number and the quality of teachers employed by WhiteHat Jr without sufficient or complete details about the number or their educational and other professional background. It asked him to take down certain videos from one of his YouTube channels and restrained him from using the name ‘WhiteHat Sr’ for his YouTube channel.
In the order, Justice Mukta Gupta also recorded an undertaking of Poonia, stating that he will not release any curriculum or material of WhiteHat Jr on which it has copyright, or through video on his channel or any third party channel for free to be used in public domain.
Poonia had earlier denied that he had downloaded the curriculum from WhitHat Jr’s servers and other allegations levelled by the firm.
In the suit, Bajaj and WhiteHat Jr, a platform which teaches coding to children, had accused him of continuously and incessantly posting false and defamatory content against them and hosting livestreams on Youtube channel for displaying contents of the company’s internal business communication. They also accuse him of hacking their system and putting videos to humiliate their teachers.
In response, Poonia, through his counsel, submitted that various newspapers and magazines have criticised the company’s way of working and their advertisements, including one based on a fictional child ‘Wolf Gupta’, and affecting the mental health of children.
Justice Gupta had earlier observed that a certain distinction exists between healthy discussions and personal attacks while taking an objection to Poonia’s alleged tweets regarding housewives in the context of comments made regarding WhiteHat Jr’s teachers and his alleged actions of making public certain confidential information including phone numbers. “There has to be a balance,” the court observed.