All Blogs
Healing self-inflicted wounds
A spate of dysfunctional actions and retrograde developments has led to an unimaginable mess for India. Can the damage to growth prospects be undone? Does it need to be? If so, how? Three areas are discussed below.
An Interview with Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada
Elonnai Hickok interviewed Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada. The full interview is reproduced below.
Learn it Yourself
The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011.
CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement
The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash intervened during the discussion of future work of the ACE with this comment.
CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes
Verbindingen/Jonctions (V/J), the bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant is taking place on December 1, 2011. Amateur scanning of books often raises a lot of questions, around the issue of copyright. For this V/J13 is scanning George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes. The essay is in public domain in Russia, India and South Africa, but not in Europe and America due to copyright issues. CIS is hosting the scanned pages of the essay in public domain.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting
The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of December 16, 2009' with this comment.
What is Dilligaf?
On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online. While SMS lingo – like TTYL (Talk To You Later) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud)– has endured and become a part of everyday language, new forms of speech are taking over.
In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives
This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world.
Statement of CIS on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty at the 23rd SCCR
The twenty-third session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is being held in Geneva from November 22, 2011 to December 2, 2011. Pranesh Prakash delivered this statement on a new proposal made by South Africa and Mexico (SCCR/23/6) on a treaty for broadcasters.
Mobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit
The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City.
The Case for Accessible Banking
Dinesh Kaushal examines the state of accessibility of banking services in India. By giving concrete examples of shortcomings in existing ATMs and net banking facilities which make it difficult for persons with disabilities to do electronic transactions, Dinesh urges banks to make a move to upgrade their ATMs and make their web services accessible.
Know your Users, Match their Needs!
As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. The following post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society.
Telecom Path-Breaker?
Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on November 3, 2011.
The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series — A Post-event Report
The Indian Journal of Law and Technology (IJLT) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), organised the 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series on the 21st and 22nd of May 2011 at the National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore. The main theme for this year was Emerging Issues in Privacy Law: Law, Policy and Practice.
Professor Balaram talks Open Access
Last week Tom Dane spoke with Professor P Balaram, Director of the Indian Institute of Science, about his thoughts on the Open Access movement. A podcast of the interview is available for download in the audio player within this post.
CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity
We from the Centre for Internet and Society had sent six open letters to the Parliamentary Finance Committee on the UID. The Committee responded through an email on 12 October 2011. Our response to the points raised is reproduced below.
Comments on the National Policy of Information Technology
The NPIT 2011 has the laudable goal of making India a ‘knowledge economy with a global role’ by developing and deploying ICT solutions in all sectors to foster development within India and at a global level. The policy identifies several praiseworthy goals such as the promotion of open standards and open technologies, accessibility for persons with disabilities, affordable ICT services, transparency, accountability, technology development for Indian languages, placing data in public domain for use and value addition, using social media to engage with citizens and investing in indigenous R&D and capacity building. We deeply appreciate this initiative of the Department of Information Technology and offer below brief comments to strengthen the draft.
TRAI urged to take action against P2P throttling and DNS hijacking
On 4 November 2010, Anand had sent a complaint letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) regarding unethical practices adopted by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), particularly Airtel. The letter was sent by post and through an e-mail. It was addressed to the Advisor, CN & IT, TRAI. Anand got no help from the ISP and the reply from TRAI (No. 340-1\2010-CA/VOLv) stated that he contact the nodal officer. We have reproduced below the complaint letter that Anand sent to TRAI.
Sources of CIS Funding
CIS's donors' names and the amount of the grants they've provided are being published in an effort to be absolutely transparent and to make it clear that our donors do not dictate the policy and research positions we espouse.
Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator
In this peer reviewed article, Nishant Shah explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The article was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2008. [1]
