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Pre-grant Opposition Filed for a Software Patent Application by Blackberry Manufacturers
A pre-grant opposition has been filed against a software patent application filed in the patent office by Certicom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturers of Blackberry. The opposition was filed on August 31, 2010 by the Software Freedom Law Centre which has recently expanded its operations to India. This exciting development was announced by Mishi Choudhary from SFLC on the lines of the seminar on “Software Patents and the Commons” organised on 1 September 2010 in Delhi jointly by SFLC, the Centre for Internet and Society, the Society for Knowledge Commons and Red Hat. Filing more such oppositions to software patents in India was in the pipeline and this is just the beginning of a movement to take on monopolisation of knowledge and ideas through patenting software, the organisers said.
Beyond Access as Inclusion
On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is coorganising in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting is to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet.
Privacy and the Indian Copyright Act
India's Copyright Act was established in 1957, and is in the process of being placed before the Parliament in 2010. Even though India currently is not a member of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the provisions in the proposed Bill will work to make the Act WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) compliant. When looking at privacy in the context of copyright four key questions arise, says Elonnai Hickock as she analyses privacy in the context of the Indian Copyright Act.
Summary of UID Public Meeting, August 25 2010
A summary of the "No UID" public meeting that took place on Aug. 25th at the Constitution Club, New Dehli.
No UID Campaign in New Delhi - A Report
The Unique Identification (UID) Bill is not pro-citizen. The scheme is deeply undemocratic, expensive and fraught with unforseen consequences. A public meeting on UID was held at the Constitution Club, Rafi Marg in New Delhi on 25 August, 2010. The said bill came under scrutiny at the meeting which was organised by civil society groups from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi campaigning under the banner of No UID. The speakers brought to light many concerns, unanswered questions and problems of the UID scheme.
