Suppression and Redaction Policy
This Policy forms part of our Terms and Conditions.
The short version
Court judgments are public documents. Some of the people named in them never chose to be public. This Policy is about the gap between those two facts.
We publish judgments as courts published them. We do not repeat protected identities in anything we write ourselves. And if you are named in a judgment and being harmed by it, there is a route to reach us.
1. Why a research service needs this policy
Two categories of material in the corpus carry restrictions that go beyond ordinary privacy:
- Identities protected by criminal statute. Publishing the identity of a victim of certain sexual offences is an offence under Section 228A of the Indian Penal Code, punishable with imprisonment up to two years. Comparable protections apply to children under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 and to juveniles under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015.
- Identities protected by court direction. Courts routinely direct anonymisation, masking of parties, or non-publication in specific matters, including matrimonial disputes, medical and mental health matters, and cases involving children.
Section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits reproduction of judgments unless the court has prohibited it. That closing condition is an ongoing obligation, not a one-time check.
2. The distinction that governs everything below
There are two kinds of text in this product and they carry different obligations.
Reproduced text. The judgment as the court issued it, quoted or displayed. Here we are carrying the court's document.
Generated text. Case summaries, answer prose, shortlist descriptions, enriched titles. These are our sentences. When Vitark writes rather than reproduces, we are the author and we are the publisher.
The protections available for publishing a court's judgment do not automatically extend to our own writing about it. So our controls are stricter on generated text than on reproduced text, and deliberately so.
3. What we do
3.1 Generated text
Protected identities are removed before generation, not after display.
Where a matter falls within a protected category, the identifying particulars are suppressed at the point the summary or answer is produced, so that no generated output contains them. Suppression covers the name and, so far as reasonably achievable, other particulars that would make the identity known, including the names of close relatives, precise addresses, and school or workplace identifiers where these appear together with the protected party.
Generated text refers to protected parties by their role, for example "the prosecutrix", "the minor child", "the appellant", following the convention courts themselves use.
3.2 Reproduced judgment text
Judgment text is displayed as issued by the court, save that:
- Where a court has directed anonymisation or non-publication in a matter, we honour that direction and do not display the judgment, or display it in the anonymised form the court permits.
- Where we become aware that a matter falls within Section 228A, the POCSO Act or the Juvenile Justice Act and the published text carries identifying particulars, we mask those particulars in the displayed text.
3.3 Search and indexing
Protected identities are excluded from search indexing so far as achievable, so that the product cannot be used as a lookup tool to find a person by name in a protected matter.
3.4 Access through our machine interface
The corpus is reachable by third-party applications through our machine interface. The same suppression standard applies there. A protected identity that is suppressed in the product but returned through the interface is not suppressed, and we treat that as the same defect class.
4. What we do not do
We do not remove judgments from the corpus because a party finds the outcome unflattering. A published judgment is a public act of a court, and a research corpus that quietly drops inconvenient decisions is not a research corpus.
We do not alter the substance, reasoning or outcome of any judgment.
We do not offer a general right to have a case delisted on request. See Section 5 for what we do offer.
5. If you are named in a judgment
You may write to us at ask@vitark.ai if you are named in material on the Platform and one of the following applies:
- You are a protected party under Section 228A of the Indian Penal Code, the POCSO Act, the Juvenile Justice Act, or an equivalent provision, and identifying particulars appear anywhere on the Platform.
- A court has directed anonymisation, masking or non-publication in your matter.
- You have obtained an order from a court or authority directing removal, de-indexing or masking.
- You believe publication is causing you serious and continuing harm and you wish to be considered on that basis.
What we need: the URL or query where the material appears, the case identifier, your relationship to the matter, and a copy of any court order you rely on.
What we do: acknowledge within 48 hours. For the first three categories, we suppress the identifying particulars immediately on receipt and verify afterwards, because the cost of erring toward suppression is far lower than the cost of erring the other way. For the fourth, we assess and respond within 15 days, which is deliberately shorter than the one month general grievance timeline in Clause 17 of the Terms, weighing the harm you describe against the public interest in an accurate and complete judicial record, and we give you our reasons in writing either way.
If we decline, we tell you why, and you retain every remedy you have in law, including approaching the court that issued the judgment.
6. Reporting a failure
If you find a protected identity anywhere on the Platform, in a generated summary or in reproduced text, report it to ask@vitark.ai with the location.
We treat this as our highest-priority defect class. Reports are actioned ahead of all other work.
7. Governing law and review
This Policy is governed by the law of India and is read alongside our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. It is reviewed every quarter and whenever a relevant statutory provision or line of court direction changes.
TLY SOFT PRIVATE LIMITED | CIN U62013DC2026PTC473011
Registered office: Innov8 Harsha Bhawan, 4th Floor, 13/29 E-Block, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110001
Vitark provides information, not legal advice.