Last November, Reuters published an extensive report — backed by interviews, internal communications and public documents — on Appin, an Indian cybersecurity training firm. The report revealed that Appin had gone well beyond its publicly stated mission to offer cyber “spies for hire” to clients around the world. A month later, an Indian court ruled in favor of a plaintiff for a preliminary injunction that claimed the article defamed not just the company in question, but was “derogatory to the entire Indian nation.”

The injunction forced Reuters to take the story down, despite the hundreds of pages of documentary evidence provided by the reporters Raphael Satter, Zeba Siddiqui and Chris Bing.

Now, after almost a year of legal wrangling, the Reuters story is back online with the injunction vacated, although the underlying litigation is still active. Mike Masnick at Techdirt has posted a copy of the court’s order vacating the injunction on DocumentCloud.

Despite the injunction applying only to Reuters and Google, legal threats were pointed at newsrooms around the globe, with many organizations removing articles that discussed or mentioned the Appin case, with Lawfare even extensively redacting passages of their report.

MuckRock’s DocumentCloud service was used by the reporters to host the material that supported the story, and we were targeted with legal threats as well. With support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented MuckRock and Techdirt pro bono, both organizations were able to keep the material and commentary on this article live and available.

Header image is from Appin’s presentation on its hacking capabilities.