Pranesh Prakash

The UK Government's Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office Team for Digital Engagement, Google India and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore are organizing a 'Civic Hacking Workshop' on Wednesday, July 28, 2010, bringing together civic-minded technologists who've been working with governmental data in India and Britain.

The workshop will discuss the problems of obtaining data, especially in India, the technological solutions that these various groups have encountered, the difficulties of technology as a mass-based civic solution, and the visions that these groups have for a more engaged civil society and the contributions they seek to make to the public.

The people attending are, from India (Bangalore):

1. Alok Singh (Akshara Foundation)
2. Shivangi Desai (Akshara Foundation)
3. Arun Ganesh (Geohackers / National Institute of Design)
4. A. Pandian (Mapunity)
5. Sridhar Raman (Mapunity)
6. S. Raghavan Kandala (Mapunity)
7. Thejesh GN (Janaagraha / Infosys)
8. Sushant Sinha (IndianKanoon.com / Yahoo)
9. Vijay Rasquinha (Mahiti)
10. P.G. Bhat (SmartVote.in)
    
11. Pranesh Prakash (CIS)
12. Raman Jit Singh Chima (Google)

And from Britain:

1. David McCandless (Information Is Beautiful)
2. Harry Metcalfe (TellThemWhatYouThink.org / Open Rights Group)
3. Tim Green (Democracy Club)
4. Edmund von der Burg (YourNextMP)
5. Rohan Silva (Special Adviser to the PM)

Project Timeline

From mid-April to mid-July.

Summary of Outputs

1. A 15-20 page paper surveying the online video environment in India and the opportunities it presents for creative expression, political participation, social justice, and other such concerns. The paper should deal with the structural limitations of the medium (e.g.: limited bandwidth, IP lobbies discourage re-appropriation of cultural materials, online video is inaccessible to the deaf, and so on) and how they can be addressed.  Recommendations should be bold but in touch with the real policy and business frameworks of present-day India.
2. Several 1-2 page briefs on specific policy matters like: where is jurisdiction being exercised? what are the policy inflections? and, what interventions are needed to solve the structural limitations of the medium?

Survey Paper

The survey paper should describe the online video scenario in India, and  three or more policy tensions. The paper should focus on areas of intellectual property rights, network issues, standards, device freedom and interoperability, accessibility, etc. The Open Video Alliance website[ova] for a complete list of relevant issues.

Overall, it should paint both a qualitative as well as a quantitative picture of online video in India, and in which structural improvements are needed (if any) to empower individuals.This paper should not be viewed as a recommendation to policymakers but instead as a general interest document which will inform and appeal to many audiences. While we expect the paper to span several distinct issues, there should be a prevailing narrative to weave them together.

Basic Assumptions

We want online video to be a participatory and collaborative social medium powered by open source. We also value the ability of individuals to express themselves using these tools, and the ability of new entrants to challenge incumbents and innovate on top of existing technologies. No time is needed to be spent establishing these values—instead, through this  paper we try to identify structural improvements to the online video medium. How do we get from the status quo to the ideal open video environment?  What investments must be made? What protections must be put into place for users, producers, etc.? Further, we should be able to make some broad recommendations to governments, foundations, and big institutions.

Because the network and IP enforcement environment in India are still malleable, we want to stress that there are many possible shapes that the online video medium could take. Our goal is to shine some light on how a medium that privileges the values outlined above could take shape.

Suggested Methodology

First, you would need to carry out a basic survey of the literature. Second, you should talk to various organizations using video, discover what they consider the structural limitations of online video, and what might be considered open video practices: some are legal, some are technical. You would use this data to direct original research and weave your findings into an engaging narrative.

Next Steps

• You send 2 writing samples, a CV, and letter of recommendation;
• We'll discuss the unifying themes and identify a more detailed timeline;
• We produce a contract;
• We Pick a regular time to meet every other week, to track progress.
  

Sir Tim Berners-Lee started the session with an address on various rights.  Rights, he noted can range from being things like the rights to air and water to the right not to have the data carrier you use determine which movie you watch.  Then, there are tensions between rights: the right to anonymity can clash with the right to know who posted information on making a bomb.  Berners-Lee stated that for 2009, he has chosen to pursue one particular right: the right to government-held data.  This data can include everything from where schools are to emergency services such as locations of hospitals.  Today, we are talking about standards. 

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a fifteen-year old body in which all kinds of people come together for purposes of setting standards around the World Wide Web.  Thus, everything from HTML, which is used to write Web pages to WCAG, which are guidelines to enable people with disabilities access websites through assistive technologies.  W3C conducts its discussions openly: anybody who has a good idea has a right to participate in its discussions -- it does not matter who one works for, who one represents -- what does matter are the ideas one brings to the table.  The kinds of standards that W3C deals with are of interest to an immensely wide-ranging group of people.  Even ten-year olds have actually expressed their opinions about standards like HTML.  All this openness of participation must be guaranteed while ensuring that the processes move forward.

Next spoke Renu Budhiraja of the Department of Information and Technology, which is a part of the Indian government.  She started off by hoping that this workshop would be not only a platform to share knowledge, but also to reach consensus on a few matters.  Next, she laid out why open standards are extremely important for the Indian government.  What citizens want in their interactions with the government are ease of interaction and efficiency.  For them it is immaterial whether a certain service is provided by Department A or Department B.  Thus we need to move towards a single-window government service for citizens, enabling them to interact easily with the government's various departments.  While such an initiative must be centralized for it to be effective, it is crucial that its implementation be decentralized and suited to each district or localities' needs.

There is, understandably, a huge institutional mechanism behind ensuring that these systems are based on open standards.  We have expert committees, consisting of academics and knowledgeable bureaucrats, and working groups, which include industry groups.  Through these, we have evolved a National Policy on Open Standards, which is currently in a draft stage, but shall be notified soon.  This policy outlines the principles based on which particular standards required for governmental functioning are to be chosen or evolved.  This document will ensure long-term accessibility to public documents and information, and seamless interoperability of various governmental services and departments.  It will also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in and reduce costs, and thus ensure long-term, sustainable, scalable and cost-effective solutions.

Ms. Budhiraja noted that there are a few aspects of the policy that bear discussion in a forum such as the IGF.  First is the issue of whether royalty-free is the only choice for innovation.  All other things equal, between royalty-free and reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) standards, of course royalty-free is to be preferred.  But what if a superior technology (JPEG200 vs. JPEG) is RAND?  What should the government's position be in such a case?  Further, what should the government's position be when in a particular domain a RAND standard is the only option? 

Next is the issue of single vs. multiple open standards.  When interoperability is what we are aiming at, can multiple standards be recommended as some in the industry are asking us to do?  And then is the issue of market maturity.  The government sometimes finds itself in a situation where a standard is available, but well-developed products around that standard aren't and there aren't sufficient vendors using that standard.  All these issues are of great practical importance when a government works on a policy document on standards.

Next up was Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society.  His presentation was on open standards as citizens' and consumers' rights.  He started off by citing the example of  the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Application (SCOSTA) standard, and the implications that the SCOSTA story has on large-scale projects such as the National Unique ID project currently under way in India.  SCOSTA, an open standard, was being written off as unimplementable by all the MNC smart card vendors who wished to push RAND standards.  IIT Kanpur helped the government develop a working implementation.  Within twenty days, the card manufacturers submitted modified cards for compliance testing by NIC.  Because of SCOSTA being an open standard, local companies also joined the tender.  The cost went down from Rs. 600 per card to Rs. 30 per card.  This shows the benefits of open standards as a means of curbing oligopolistic pricing, and working for the benefit of consumers.

From a rights-based perspective, access to the state machinery is a primary right.  Citizens should not be required to pirate or purchase software to interact with the state.  If e-governance solutions are based on proprietary standards, not all citizens would be equal.  The South African example or requiring a particular browser to access the election commission's website shows that in a rather drastic fashion.  When intellectual property interferes with governmental needs, governments have not been shy of issuing compulsory licences.  This was seen when during the Great War the United States government pooled various flight-related patents and compulsorily licensed them, as well as what we are currently seeing with many Aids-related drugs being compulsorily licensed in developing countries.  Thus, there are precedents for such licensing, and governments should explore them in the realm of e-governance.  Many countries now have statutes that guarantee the right to government-held information.  Government Interoperability Frameworks should take these into account, and mandate all government-to-citizen (G2C) information be transacted via open standards.  This must be backed up by a strong accessibility policy to ensure that the governments don't discriminate between their citizens.

Proprietary standards act like pseudo-intellectual property rights, just as DRMs do.  They add a layer on top of rights such as copyright, and can prevent the exercise of fair use and fair dealing rights because of an inability to legally negotiate the standards in which the content is encoded in a cost-free manner.  In guaranteeing this balance between copyrights and fair dealing rights, free software and alternative IP models play a crucial role.  Because of software patents being recognized in a few countries, development of free software which allows citizens to exercise their fair use rights is harmed in all countries.

Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft spoke next and placed the standards debate in a large context.  He noted that standards are a technicality that are only a small part of the large issue which is interoperability in e-governance and delivery to citizens.  The real challenges are organizational and semantic interoperability.  Frequently interoperability is not harmed by technical issues, but by legal and organizational issues. Governments used to work on paper; during the shift to electronic data, they didn't engage in any organizational changes.  Thus they continue to function with electronic data the same way that they did with paper-based data.  Governments often lack strong privacy policies regarding the data that each of their departments holds.  This harms governmental functioning.  Additionally, legacy hardware and software have to be catered to by the standards we are talking about: sometimes an open standard just will not work. 

Standards don't guarantee interoperability, and there is significant work done on this by noted academics ("Why Standards Are Not Enough To Guarantee End-to-End Interoperability" Lewis et al.; "Difficulties Implementing Standards" Egyedi & Dahanayake; "Standards Compliant, But Incompatible?" Egyedi et al.).  Mandated standards lists will not help address interoperability issues between different implementations of the same standard.  What would help?  Transparency of implementations; collaboration with community; active participation in maintenance of standards, etc., would help.  There is a need for continued public sector reform, with a focus on citizen-centric e-governance, and a need to engage with the question of whether government-mandated standards lists lead the market or follow the market.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, a senior researcher at UN University, Maastricht, spoke next.  He started by noting that technical standards are left to technical experts.  That needs to change, which is why discussing open standards at the IGF is important.  He next set off a hypothetical: imagine you go to the city council office in Sharm el Sheik, and at the parking lot there it says that your car has to be a Ford if you are to park there; or if the Dutch government insists that you have a Philips TV if you are to receive the national broadcaster's signal.  While these might seem absurd, situations like this arise all the time when it comes to the realm of software.  Thus, the social effects of open standards are of utmost importance, and not just their technical qualities.  Analysing the social effects of open standards takes us back to the economics of technology and technological standards.  Technological standards exhibit network externalities: their inherent value is less than the value of others using them.  Being the only person in the world with a telephone won't be very useful.  Technological standards also exhibit path dependence: once you go with one technological format, it is difficult to change over to another even if that other format is superior to the first.  Thus, clearly, standards benefit when there is a 'natural monopoly'.  The challenge really arises when faced with the question of how to ensure a monopoly in a technology without the supplier of that technology exhibiting monopolistic tendencies.  This can only be done when the technology is open and developed openly, of which the web standards and the W3C are excellent examples.  If the technology or the process are semi-open, then because of the few intellectual property rights attached to the technology, some would be better off than others.  Just as governments cannot insist on driving a particular make of cars as a prerequisite for access to them, they cannot insist on using a particular proprietary standard as a means of accessing them.

Many interesting questions arose when the floor was thrown open to the audience.  "Should governments only mandate a particular standard when it is certain that market maturity exists?"  Not really, since governmental decisions also give signals to the market and help direct attention to those standards.  It would be best if roadmaps were provided, with particular under-mature standards being designated as "preferred standards", thus helping push industry in a particular direction.  Examples where this strategy has borne fruit abound.  This is also the strategy found in the Australian GIF.  On the issue of multiplicity of standards, Sir Tim was very clear that they have to be avoided at all costs.  He gave the example of XSLT and CSS, which are both stylesheet formats.  He noted that their domain of operation was very different (with one being for servers and the other for clients), so having two standards with similar functions but different domains of operation does not make them multiple standards.  Multiple standards defeat the purpose of the standardization process.

It was noted that governmental choices are of practical importance to citizens.  During the Hurricane Katrina emergency, the federal emergency website only worked properly if Internet Explorer was used.   How do we move forward?  We must move forward by having policies that strike a balance between allowing for the natural evolution of standards and stability.  The Government Interoperability Frameworks must be dynamic documents, allowing for categorization between standards and having clear roadmaps to enable industry to provide solutions to the government in a timely fashion.  Governments must be strong in order to push industry towards openness, for the sake of its citizens, and not let industry dictate proprietary standards as the solution.  Some opined that since there are dozens of domains that governments function in, maintaining lists of standards is a time-consuming process that is not justified, but others rebutted that by noting that for enterprise architectures to work, governments have to maintain such lists internally.  Opening up that list to citizens and service providers would not entail greater overheads.

Sunil Abraham talking Open Standards at IGF09

(Video added on December 30, 2009)

CIS has been following the drafting of the national policy on open standards for e-governance with much interest.  Last year, we offered our comments on the first draft of the policy.  The policy has since gone through two more iterations (copies of which are kept on the Fosscomm site), labelled versions 1.15 and 2, and we have again offered comments on the latest version.  The evolution the draft policy has been mired in controversy, as documented by Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat.  It seems that the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has been trying to nullify the effect of the policy by pushing for recognition of proprietary standards within the policy, and that too without consultation with its members. 

We believe that proprietary standards go against the interests the government, which as the primary consumer of the standards would have to pay royalties and would face vendor lock-in, of small and medium enterprises, which provide direct and indirect services to the government, since they would be required to invest in those closed standards to service the government, and most of all, of the citizens of India.

Based on that view, we have noted four deficiencies in version 2 of the draft policy: the possibility of following the letter of policy while violating its spirit; the possibility of patenting and closed licensing of government-developed standards; that no framework provided for review or phasing out interim standards; and certain problematic definitions in the glossary to the policy.

All these points are elaborated upon in the comments we submitted to the Department of Information Technology.

The grip software vendors have over courses in technology (at both the school and the university levels) is a matter for concern. Due to what can be termed institutional inertia, educational institutions often don't realise that alternatives exist in the form of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source software), as proprietary software is entrenched in the system (and is sometimes the market leader in that tech sector). To further tighten their grip, software vendors enter into commercial deals with governments and universities in attempts to penetrate the crucial education sector. This often results in students being taught courses on how to use particular (usually proprietary) software instead of being taught standard technologies. In turn, this denies them the opportunity to learn the concepts behind the software effectively, and ties them to the particular software that they were taught. For software vendors, getting their products into the curricula is very important because the supply of students trained in particular software also affects the demand for that software.

Students should be taught technologies first and foremost, and these technologies should be taught via the vehicle of both free and proprietary software (this is much easier if the technology itself is an open technology). That would allow students the opportunity to understand different implementations of the same technology and make an informed decision as to what they wish to use. It would also offer them more opportunities and choices in their future careers. The importance of FLOSS in the education sector is highlighted in a guide brought out by the United Nations Development Programme's International Open Source Network.

Against this backdrop, when news reports appeared in the Hindu (19 November 2008) and the Deccan Herald (20 November 2008) about a curriculum tie-up between Microsoft and Visvesvaraya Technological University, we filed a Right to Information application to get more details about it. The response stated that this matter was still under discussion and no agreement had been signed.

To read the application, click here; to read the response, click here. You can download a scanned copy of the response here.

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This entry was originally posted on 30 March 2009 and was updated on 3 April 2009.

Mr. Rafee, after introducing the panellists, laid out the parameters of the discussion.  He noted that the discussion was not about "open standards" per se, but about the standardisation process.

Mr. Jolliffe noted that the main problems revolved around the question of legitimacy of the Standard Setting Organizations, which often arises from "standardisation by corporations" (a phrase coined by Martin Bryan), as shown by the representatives of the individual countries to the international bodies.  For the international standardization process to acquire legitimacy, the national bodies need to do so first.  A start can be made, Mr. Jolliffe noted, through simple steps like increase in stakeholder participation beyond vendors, full disclosure of institutional affiliations at the standardisation bodies, better streamlining of processes such as the fast-track system, and full and clear disclosures with regard to IP licensing terms would help in increasing accountability and legitimacy of standard setting organizations.

He also indicated that financial transparency, modernisation of processes (including remote participation), regulation of proportional influence of private interests, a code of best practices and innovation in patent searches, full interest disclosures, and clear display of IPR policies of committees would help in increasing the openness of standards.

Mr. Abraham chose to focus on the national standardization processes, and the lessons that can be learnt from those.  He highlighted that the discussions around open standards were really discussions about standards followed by public institutions.  He analogized the situation to private houses vs. the public road infrastructure, noting how the road infrastructure cannot be private.  Ensuring that the public infrastructure was open to all, he said, was the important role played by the standardisation process.  He went on to highlight the importance of open standards as a lever in the hands of governments which can be used to fix monopoly situations, as it was in the case of SCOSTA smart card standard, where the use of an open standard led to a drop in price from Rs.600 to Rs.30 and increased the number of vendors from 3 to 12.  He then narrated a number of "stories" from India, Pakistan and Malaysia to show the various forms of weaknesses within the national standard setting processes.  He further concluded that countries with weak institutions are the ones less likely to support open standards.

Mr. Abraham added the need to adopt common definitions of "open standards" and transparency of processes and encouragement of remote participation as suggestions for the standardization system.

Mr. Gautam from IBM India chose to talk about the standards principles that the company follows, and the need for reform of the standardization processes.

Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards (DCOS) Agreement on Procurement in Support of Interoperability and Open Standards 

Third Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

Hyderabad, India

6 December 2008

Preamble

The Contracting Parties,

Recalling  the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Declaration of Principles which states that "[i]nternational standards aim to create an environment where consumers can access services worldwide regardless of underlying technology,"

Recognizing that standards are increasingly global concerns, involving goods and services that move in international trade across borders,

Aware that current competition and legal remedies may not be enough to solve the inherent tensions that routinely arise in the realm of patents and standards,

Desirous of encouraging procurement policies that require evaluation of multiple, competing products based on open ICT standards in order to ensure a level playing field for vendors, governments and consumers,

Cognizant of the need for procurement policies for software programs that are predicated upon an open standard,

Open Standards

Given the multiplicity of interpretations of the term open standards, for the purpose of this document we endorse as an acceptable definition the position contained in the European Union's draft European Interoperability Framework:

1) The open standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
2) The open standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
3) The intellectual property - i.e., patents possibly present - of (parts of) the open standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis.
4) There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

(IDABC EIF v2 draft (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728))

As noted in the European Interoperability Framework cited above, open standards or technical specifications must allow all interested parties to implement the standards and to compete on quality and price. The goal is to have a competitive and innovative industry, not to protect market shares by raising obstacles to newcomers. Thus, open standards or technical specifications must be possible to implement in software distributed under the most commonly used open source licences, with no limitations arising from IPR associated with the standard in question.

In addition to the above requirements, it is recommended that there should be multiple independent implementations of the standard.

Governments, publicly funded and non-profit institutions agree to implement the following policies.

Governments, publicly funded and non-profit institutions

Hereby agree to the following measures in order to promote interoperability and accessibility through the use of open standards.

1. To create a policy statement on interoperability and open standards, to be available to employees and the public.

2. By 2010, procurement of all software should be vendor neutral and implement open standards

3. By 2010, tender specifications for hardware (including peripherals and mobile devices) should require that manufacturers provide the driver and interface information necessary to work with a reasonable range of proprietary and free operating system platforms.

4. By 2010, all public facing web pages should conform to W3C standards for structure, presentation and accessibility.

5. By 2010, tenders for the supply of web based services (for example, online reservations) must specify the requirements of point 4.

6. By 2010, agencies should implement policies regarding the storage and archiving of government data and records to ensure that data is stored in open data and document formats.

Signed by:

Aslam Raffee, Government IT Officers' Council, OSS Working Group, Republic of South Africa

Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

Bob Jolliffe, Freedom To Innovate, South Africa

Centre for Internet and Society, India

Hamid Rabiee, Sharif University of Technology, Iran

Knowledge Ecology International

Moving Republic, India

Shuttleworth Foundation, South Africa

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, India

Endorsed by:

ALIN Arid Lands Information Network, East Africa

Alternative Law Forum, India

Ars Aperta

AZUR Development, Congo

Bangladesh Friendship Education Society (BFES), Bangladesh

CECS (Community Education Computer Society), South Africa

Fantsuam Foundation, Nigeria

Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V.

Foundation for Media Alternatives, Philippines

Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), India

IT for Change, India

LaNeta, Mexico

OpenForum Europe

OpenForum France

Open Institute, Cambodia

RITS, Brazil

Schoolforge-UK, UK

SOLAR Software Libre Argentina, Argentina

Sou Java, Brazil

StrawberryNet, Romania

VOICE Voices for Interactive Choice & Empowerment, Bangladesh

WomensHub, Philippines

If you wish to endorse the statement, please send an e-mail to pranesh[at]cis-india.org or igf-dcos[at]keionline.org.

After introductions by Sunil Abraham of CIS, the discussions were kicked off by Sudhir Krishnaswamy (an Assistant Professor at National Law School), who spoke about typology of laws; principle-based arguments for excluding software from patenting; policy-based arguments for the same; and lastly, strategies for combating the patent manual.  About the rationale behind excepting software ("computer programmes per se") from patentability, he theorised that given the location of "computer programmes per se" in section 3(k) of the Act, surrounded as it is by "mathematical or business method" and "algorithms", the exception seems to be a principle-based one and not a policy-based one.  He also talked about what he saw as the practical realities of the Patent Office, and questioned the role the Draft Manual would actually play in the decisions of Patent Examiners.

He listed out economic arguments as:

1. Inapplicability of the incentive arguments.  The software industry does not need patents since copyright covers software, and even if incentives are required, that is incentive enough;
2. Return on investment.  Short shelf-life, and hence 17-year patent terms are irrelevant when the shelf-life is so small;
3. New intermediaries are created, who are neither producers nor consumers of software.  These intermediaries who help in price-discovery.  They discover value in patents which were previously thought neglected by the process known as patent trolling. 

Apart from these, he also briefly talked of the legal arguments around software patents, and argued that the question is not only about copyright vs. patent, but also about property vs. contract.  He asked questions such as: "What role does copyright play in the software industry, or is contract more important?", and pointed out that while this might have been addressed around a decade ago, those questions need to be revisited given the current scenario.  Further, he proposed that the strategies should not revolve solely around the Patent Act and Draft Manual, but around pre- and post-grant oppositions as well.

Prabir Purkayastha of the Delhi Science Forum and Knowledge Commons spoke next, giving a quick run-through of the history, both legal and philosophical, surrounding software patents in India and in the U.S.  and Europe (pointing out that most of the wordings of Draft Manual on this point are borrowed from a similar document in the U.K.).  He asked the question of why people are opposing software patents.  Is it because it is damaging to 'public interest', because it bad for Indian domestic software industry, or because it is an abstract idea which is sought to be patented in the guise of something else?  He concluded that ultimately it is not the manual that groups are opposing, but the notion of software patents themselves.  Thus, he focussed on how the phrase "per se" used in the Act ought to be interpreted by the Patent Office so as to give credence to the Indian Parliament's rejection (in 2005) of the 2004 patent ordinance (in which section 3(k) read: "a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware").  Lastly, he talked about the various strategies to be employed in the fight against software patents, including pre- and post-grant oppositions.

Dr. Nagarjuna G. of the Free Software Foundation of India focussed on what he termed "the absurdity of software patents".  He emphasised how software requires an interpreter or hardware, and hence talk of "software per se" often becomes meaningless.  Further, he underlined how embedding software in hardware was not innovation in itself, and stressed ont he changing notions of software and hardware as we evolve technologically.  His equation of software with abstract ideas gives us a glimpse into the foundation of his objection to software patents.

First up in the second session (which was more focussed on the manual, and the law in India) was Prashant Iyengar of the Bangalore-based Alternative Law Forum.  He first listed out the different kinds of objections to software patents, including the point that there are only limited ways of thinking about programming, as Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming shows.  Then he went on to go through the history of software patents in India, from the first software patent, granted in 1996, through the 2002 Amendment, the 2004 Ordinance, the 2005 Amendment, and the 2005 and 2008 Draft Manuals.  He looked at the vocabulary surrounding software patents, including the words "per se" and "as such", and the cases and legislations from which the language used in the Draft Manual might have been borrowed.  He also started a fruitful debate on the different ways to attack the implicit inclusion of that which is not "computer programmes per se" within the scope of patentable subject matter.

After Prashant was Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat.  He spoke on the practical benefits and harms of software patents, and spoke at length about the difference between legal protection of software in the form of patents and via copyright.  He pointed to data showing that lawyers are the ones who benefit most from software patents, and that software developers were the ones who suffered most.  Pointing to such practical issues such as how does one go about coding a simple e-commerce transaction when more than 4000 patents have already been granted in that area, he brought down the level of discussion from abstract notions of laws and legalities to practical experiences of software programmers.

Next, Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society made a presentation on a small sample of software patents that have been applied for in India, and pointed out the infirmities in both the patents that have been applied for, as well as the problems in uncovering these patents because of various errors on the Indian Patent Office website.  Going through a few of the patent applications, he showed how a great number applications have very badly worded abstracts, filled with weasel words, whose sole purpose is obfuscating the fact that what is being applied for is a software patent.  This, he pointed out, made it difficult to both determine the scope of the applications (subject matter) as well as the innovations contained in the invention (novelty and non-obviousness), and thus difficult to examine from the perspective of pre-grant oppositions.

After these presentations, the meeting continued with the Open House session which had many people making presentations, including Abhas Abhinav of DeepRoot Linux, Arun M. of FSF India, and Joseph C. Matthew, who is the IT Adviser to the Chief Minister, Kerala.  With the wrapping up of this session, the proceedings for the day came to a close.

Coverage in the press

• The Hindu (September 25, 2008) - World Day Against Software Patents
• Time Out Bengaluru (October 3, 2008) - Software Patenting
• The Hindu (October 5, 2008) - Software patenting will harm industry, consumer
  

Audio Recordings and Slides