Centre for Internet and Society

Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects

namita — 2011-08-02T08:35:20Z

In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.

The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book Imperial Leather (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies. The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment (iii) .

On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.

“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety.

McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.

Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.

The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.

Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.

For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn.

Soap in these strange days: fetish objects

“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”
Dana Polan (iv)

Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’.

Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone.

That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable.

Looking at MMS porn
“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”
Mace, Strange Days

When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie Strange Days, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.

Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)

In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same.

i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties.
ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.
iii. Ibid
iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20.

v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish

The Curious Incident of the People at the Mall

nishant — 2008-12-14T12:13:09Z

The first flash mob in India, in 2003, though short-lived and quickly declared illegal, brought to fore the idea that technology is constructing new sites of defining public participation and citizenship rights, forcing the State to recognise them as political collectives. As India emerges as an ICT enabled emerging economy, new questions of citizenship, participatory politics, social networking, citizenship, and governance are being posed. In the telling of the story of the flash-mob, doing a historical review of technology and access, and doing a symptomatic reading of the subsequent events that followed the ban, this paper evaluates the different ways in which the techno-narratives of an ‘India Shining’ campaign of prosperity and economic growth, are accompanied by various spaces of political contestation, mobilisation and engagement that determine the new public spheres of exclusion, marked by the aesthetics of cyberspatial matrices and technology enabled conditions of governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/the%20curious%20incident%20of%20the%20people%20at%20the%20mall%20%20ACS%20Crossroads.pdf

Report on Open Standards for GISW2008

pranesh — 2009-01-05T06:52:54Z

In this report, Sunil Abraham lays out the importance and the policy implications of Open Standards.

[PDF copy]

Most computer users today remain “digitally colonised” (Bhattacharya, 2008) due to our unquestioning use of proprietary standards. As users of proprietary standards we usually forget that we lose the right to access our own files the moment the licence for the associated software expires. For example, if I were to store data, information or knowledge in .doc, .xls or .ppt format, my ability to read my own files expires the moment the licence for my copy of Microsoft Office expires.

Definition

Unlike the terms “free software” or “open source software”, the term “open standard” does not have a universally accepted definition. The free and open source software (FOSS) community largely believes that an open standard is:

[S]ubject to full public assessment and use without constraints [royalty-free] in a manner equally available to all parties; without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an open standard themselves; free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model; managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties; available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties (Greve, 2007).

The controversy

Proprietary software manufacturers, vendors and their lobbyists often provide a definition of open standards that is not in line with the above definition on two counts (Nah, 2006).

One, they do not think it is necessary for an open standard to be available on a royalty-free basis as long as it is available under a “reasonable and non-discriminatory” (RAND) licence. This means that there are some patents associated with the standard and the owners of the patents have agreed to license them under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (W3C, 2002). One example is the audio format MP3, an ISO/IEC [International Organisation for Standardisation/International Electrotechnical Commission] standard where the associated patents are owned by Thomson Consumer Electronics and the Fraunhofer Society of Germany. A developer of a game with MP3 support would have to pay USD 2,500 as royalty for using the standard. While this may be reasonable in the United States (US), it is unthinkable for an entrepreneur from Bangladesh. Additionally, RAND licences are incompatible with most FOSS licensing requirements. Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems says that FOSS “serves as the canary in the coalmine for the word ‘open’. Standards are truly open when they can be implemented without fear as free software in an open source community” (Phipps, 2007). RAND licences also retard the growth of FOSS, since they are patented in a few countries. Despite the fact that software is not patentable in most parts of the world, the makers of various distributions of GNU/Linux do not include reverse-engineered drivers, codecs, etc., in the official builds for fear of being sued. Only the large corporation-backed distributions of GNU/Linux can afford to pay the royalties needed to include patented software in the official builds (in this way enabling an enhanced out-of-the-box experience). This has the effect of slowing the adoption of GNU/Linux, as less experienced users using community-backed distributions do not have access to the wide variety of drivers and codecs that users of other operating systems do (Disposable, 2004). This vicious circle effectively ensures negligible market presence of smaller community-driven projects by artificial reduction of competition.

Two, proprietary software promoters do not believe that open standards should be “managed and further developed independently of any single vendor,” as the following examples will demonstrate. This is equally applicable to both new and existing standards.

Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) is a relatively new standard which the FOSS community sees as a redundant alternative to the existing Open Document Format (ODF). During the OOXML process, delegates were unhappy with the fact that many components were specific to Microsoft technology, amongst other issues. By the end of a fast-track process at the ISO, Microsoft stands accused of committee stuffing: that is, using its corporate social responsibility wing to coax non-governmental organisations to send form letters to national standards committees, and haranguing those who opposed OOXML. Of the twelve new national board members that joined ISO after the OOXML process started, ten voted “yes” in the first ballot (Weir, 2007). The European Commission, which has already fined Microsoft USD 2.57 billion for anti-competitive behaviour, is currently investigating the allegations of committee stuffing (Calore, 2007). Microsoft was able to use its financial muscle and monopoly to fast-track the standard and get it approved. In this way it has managed to subvert the participatory nature of a standards-setting organisation. So even though Microsoft is ostensibly giving up control of its primary file format to the ISO, it still exerts enormous influence over the future of the standard.

HTML, on the other hand, is a relatively old standard which was initially promoted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international community of techies. However, in 2002, seven years after the birth of HTML 2.0, the US Department of Justice alleged that Microsoft used the strategy of “embrace, extend, and extinguish” (US DoJ, 1999) in an attempt to create a monopoly among web browsers. It said that Microsoft used its dominance in the desktop operating system market to achieve dominance in the web-authoring tool and browser market by introducing proprietary extensions to the HTML standard (Festa, 2002). In other words, financial and market muscle have been employed by proprietary software companies – in these instances, Microsoft – to hijack open standards.

The importance

There are many technical, social and ethical reasons for the adoption and use of open standards. Some of the reasons that should concern governments and other organisations utilising public money – such as multilaterals, bilaterals, civil society organisations, research organisations and educational institutions – are listed below.

Innovation/competitiveness: Open standards are the bases of most technological innovations, the best example of which would be the internet itself (Raymond, 2000). The building blocks of the internet and associated services like the world wide web are based on open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, POP3 and SMTP. Open standards create a level playing field that ensures greater competition between large and small, local and foreign, and new and old companies, resulting in innovative products and services. Instant messaging, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), wikis, blogging, file-sharing and many other applications with large-scale global adoption were invented by individuals and small and medium enterprises, and not by multinational corporations.
Greater interoperability: Open standards ensure the ubiquity of the internet experience by allowing different devices to interoperate seamlessly. It is only due to open standards that consumers are able to use products and services from competing vendors interchangeably and simultaneously in a seamless fashion, without having to learn additional skills or acquire converters. For instance, the mail standard IMAP can be used from a variety of operating systems (Mac, Linux and Windows), mail clients (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook Express) and web-based mail clients. Email would be a completely different experience if we were not able to use our friends’ computers, our mobile phones, or a cybercafé to check our mail.
Customer autonomy: Open standards also empower consumers and transform them into co-creators or “prosumers” (Toffler, 1980). Open standards prevent vendor lock-in by ensuring that the customer is able to shift easily from one product or service provider to another without significant efforts or costs resulting from migration.
Reduced cost: Open standards eliminate patent rents, resulting in a reduction of total cost of ownership. This helps civil society develop products and services for the poor.
Reduced obsolescence: Software companies can leverage their clients’ dependence on proprietary standards to engineer obsolescence into their products and force their clients to keep upgrading to newer versions of software. Open standards ensure that civil society, governments and others can continue to use old hardware and software, which can be quite handy for sectors that are strapped for financial resources.
Accessibility: Operating system-level accessibility infrastructure such as magnifiers, screen readers and text-to-voice engines require compliance to open standards. Open standards therefore ensure greater access by people with disabilities, the elderly, and neo-literate and illiterate users. Examples include the US government’s Section 508 standards, and the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) WAI-AA standards.
Free access to the state: Open standards enable access without forcing citizens to purchase or pirate software in order to interact with the state. This is critical given the right to information and the freedom of information legislations being enacted and implemented in many countries these days.
Privacy/security: Open standards enable the citizen to examine communications between personal and state-controlled devices and networks. For example, open standards allow users to see whether data from their media player and browser history are being transmitted along to government servers when they file their tax returns. Open standards also help prevent corporate surveillance.
Data longevity and archiving: Open standards ensure that the expiry of software licences does not prevent the state from accessing its own information and data. They also ensure that knowledge that has been passed on to our generation, and the knowledge generated by our generation, is safely transmitted to all generations to come.
Media monitoring: Open standards ensure that the voluntary sector, media monitoring services and public archives can keep track of the ever-increasing supply of text, audio, video and multimedia generated by the global news, entertainment and gaming industries. In democracies, watchdogs should be permitted to reverse-engineer proprietary standards and archive critical ephemeral media in open standards.

Policy implications

Corporations have a right to sell products based on proprietary standards just as consumers have a right to choose between products that use open standards, proprietary standards, or even a combination of such standards. Governments, however, have a responsibility to use open standards, especially for interactions with the public and where the data handled has a direct impact on democratic values and quality of citizenship. In developing countries, governments have greater responsibility because most often they account for over 50% of the revenues of proprietary software vendors. Therefore, by opting for open standards, governments can correct an imbalanced market situation without needing any additional resources. Unfortunately, many governments lack the expertise to counter the campaigns of fear, uncertainty and doubt unleashed by proprietary standards lobbyists with unlimited expense accounts.

Most governments from the developing world do not participate in international standard-setting bodies. On the other hand, proprietary software lobbyists like the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and Comptia attend all national meetings on standards. This has forced many governments to shun these forums and exacerbate the situation by creating more (totally new) standards. Therefore, governments need the support of academic and civil society organisations in order to protect the interests of the citizen. For example, the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IIT-K) helped the government of India develop the open standard Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications (SCOSTA) for smart card-based driving licences and vehicle registration documents. Proprietary vendors tried to jettison the move by saying that the standard was technically not feasible. IIT-K developed a reference implementation on FOSS to belie the vendor's claims. As a consequence, the government of India was able to increase the number of empanelled smart-card vendors from four to fifteen and reduce the price of a smart card by around USD 7 each (UNDP, 2007a). This will hopefully result in enormous savings during the implementation of a national multi-purpose identification card in India.

In some instances, proprietary standards are technically superior or more universally supported in comparison to open standards. In such cases the government may be forced to adopt proprietary and de facto standards in the short and medium term. But for long-term technical, financial and societal benefits, many governments across the world today are moving towards open standards. The most common policy instruments for implementation of open standards policy are government interoperability frameworks (GIFs). Governments that have published GIFs include the United Kingdom, Denmark, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Australia (UNDP, 2007b).

While challenges to the complete adoption of open standards in the public sector and civil society remain, one thing is certain: the global march towards openness, though slow, is irreversible and inevitable.

References

Bhattacharya, J. (2008) Technology Standards: A Route to Digital Colonization. Open Source, Open Standards and Technological Sovereignty. .
Available at:
knowledge.oscc.org.my/practice-areas/‌government‌/oss-seminar-putrajaya-2008/technology-standards-a-route-to-digital/at_download/file

Calore, M. (2007) Microsoft Allegedly Bullies and Bribes to Make Office an International Standard. Wired, 31 August.
Available at: www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/ooxml_vote

Disposable (2004) Ubuntu multimedia HOWTO.
Available at: www.oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/‌hack/‌ubuntu.txt

Festa, P. (2002) W3C members: Do as we say, not as we do. CNET News, 5 September.
Available at: news.cnet.com/2100-1023-956778.html

Greve, G. (2007) An emerging understanding of open standards.
.
Available at: www.fsfe.org/‌fellows‌/greve/freedom_bits/an_emerging_understanding_of_open_standards

Nah, S.H. (2006) FOSS Open Standards Primer. New Delhi: UNDP-APDIP.
Available at: www.iosn.net/open-standards/foss-open-standards-primer/foss-openstds-withnocover.pdf

Phipps, S. (2007) Roman Canaries..
Available at: blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/‌roman_canaries‌

Raymond, E.S. (2000) The Magic Cauldron.
Available at: www.catb.org/~esr/writings/‌cathedral-‌bazaar/‌magic-‌cauldron/‌index.html

Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave. New York: Bantam.

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (2007a) e-Government Interoperability: A Review of Government Interoperability Frameworks in Selected Countries.
Available at: www.apdip.net/projects/gif/gifeprimer

UNDP (2007b) e-Government Interoperability: Guide.
Available at: www.apdip.net/projects/gif/GIF-Guide.pdf

US DoJ (Department of Justice) (1999) Proposed Findings of Fact – Revised.
Available at: www.usdoj.gov/‌atr/‌cases/‌f2600/v-a.pdf

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) (2002) Current patent practice.
Available at: www.w3.org/TR/patent-practice#def-RAND

Weir, R. (2007) How to hack ISO.
Available at: www.robweir.com/blog/2007/09/how-to-hack-iso.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/report-on-open-standards-for-gisw2008

Report on Open Standards for GISW 2008

pranesh — 2011-08-23T02:57:53Z

A report on Open Standards prepared by Sunil Abraham, for the Global Information Society Watch 2008. As on their site, GISWatch focuses on monitoring progress made towards implementing the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) action agenda and other international and national commitments related to information and communications. It also provides analytical overviews of institutions involved in implementation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil/Open-Standards-GISW-2008.pdf

Once Upon a Flash

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:25:38Z

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Sarai%20turbulence.pdf

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:14:45Z

The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies in a special issue on Multimedia Narratives. Emerging as an epistemological category with the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies, the cyborg leads to a complex set of negotiations about the production of a cyborg identity. This paper looks at the cyborg as a translator, to see the new mechanics of translation that come into play as the cyborg straddles multiple systems of making meaning and producing itself. Analysing the new social networking systems that have emerged in the last few years, the paper posits the cyborg as not only an author of translated texts but also as produced in the processes of translation. Focusing on one particular instance of the production of a cyborg identity, exploring the various players involved in the process of cyborgification and the material consequences of imagining the cyborg, the paper seeks to analyse the new incomprehensibility or illegalities that the cyborg, in its role as a translator, gets produced within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/material%20cyborgs%20ejes.pdf

Design in urban democracy: A question of survival

admin — 2008-10-11T09:49:21Z

Urban dynamics dissected by John Thackara and Sunil Abraham; questions and answers on the anatomy of cities. An article from the August issue of Cluster Magazine.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil/Thackara.pdf

Piracy

royson — 2009-01-26T10:23:49Z

Context

Loss of civil liberties as a result of increased and indiscriminate enforcement activities by State and private bodies.
Conflation of piracy with concepts such as terrorism, child pornography and drug trafficking which prevents legitimate off-line and online sharing and growth of P2P technologies.
Long term social impact of sizable section of the citizenry that views themselves as operating outside the law.

Research Agenda

Analyse different acts that are considered piracy from legal, enforcement, corporate and general public perspectives. Document changes in the definition of piracy over time in different contexts. Interrogate the double standards employed by corporations, film industry using case-studies such as T-Series, YouTube/torrent leaks, etc.
Study the prevalence of piracy in different regions of the world, market segments, technologies and sections of society. Document the social, cultural, technological and economic repercussions of these increased levels of piracy. For example: a) understanding how piracy contribute to increased consumer choice; b) examining the correlation between P2P and piracy-based distribution and enhancement of reputation and growth in market share of individual artists, bands and small companies.
Document the contribution of pirates to the development of cutting edge technologies and pushing of the limits of end-user experience. Analysing different techniques for movie, book, television, software and music piracy employed by individuals and industries.
Identify and document various factors which contribute to high level of piracy in developing countries. Design and propose strategies and policy positions such as: parallel imports, compulsory licensing, media surcharge and open licenses to reduce levels of copyright infringement.
Document and analyze various methods and methodologies for studying and tracking piracy. For example aggregation and consolidation of P2P statistics by companies such as Big Champagne. Provide technical strategies for those engaged in legitimate sharing to protect their privacy and civil rights against surveillance technologies.
Studying national and regional laws that governs copyright infringement and propose changes that protect Access to Knowledge. Examining case law for trends, including analysis of the kinds of punishments which are prescribed for copyright infringement.
Documenting due procedure for enforcement against individuals and organizations? Analyzing the legal validity of evidence submitted by enforcement agencies for different forms of alleged off-line and online copyright infringement.
Document and analyse the attention paid by developing country policy makers to piracy in different markets and technologies. Identify and monitor state agencies engaged in tracking piracy and undertaking enforcement activities?
How do citizens justify acts of piracy? How do they view themselves and others as criminals?
Document the correlation between high speed Internet connections and peer-to-peer file sharing programmes and illegal and legal sharing of knowledge.

Resources

Music industry ‘should embrace illegal websites’

Causes of illegal music product’s existence

Creativity policy pits internet providers against pirates

Piracy is good?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/new-pedagogies/piracy

Intellectual Property Rights and Trade

royson — 2008-09-21T14:57:53Z

Context

Increasing expansion, propertisation and commoditisation of intellectual property rights, leading to a loss of balance that IPRs are meant to reflect.
Increasing instances where IPRs policies and practices conflict with innovation, equitable access, and freedom of speech.
Unrealistic and inappropriate application of traditional notions of IP to the digital world, where content and medium are often distinct, leading to transitory RAM copies being considered copies, etc.
Increasing tensions between IP and propagation of materials over the Internet, criminalization of every-day actions of ordinary citizens.
Increasing tendency of IP protectionists to call upon access and copy restriction technologies to intermediate digital consumption of IP, displacing notions of fair dealings, exceptions and limitations etc.
Lack of transparency in international negotiations on IP enforcement, and increasing pressures on developing countries to sign IP treaties by using strong-arm tactics (often as a precondition to trade).
Uncritical (or unwilling) adoption of maximalist IP regimes by developing nations as part of asymmetric negotiation for market access or subsidies.
Lack of critical understanding of the role IPR plays in different stages of an industry’s or nation's growth, and an unwillingness to look at deteriorative effects of IPR, such as chilling of technological advancement especially in industries with the incremental advancement model
Unwillingness of governments and industry to explore questions of “negative IP” spaces.
Lack of understanding in judges, lawmakers, and the general public of the meaning, purpose and impact of intellectual property rights.

Research Agenda

Questioning and re-imagination of the philosophical underpinnings of IPRs, to make them more consistent with a framework of equitable access to knowledge, more in line with actual practices of cultural production, and less restrictive of free speech.
Analysing the differences between digital and non-digital frameworks from the viewpoint of copyright, and examining the need and possibilities for a nuanced approach to “copying” in a world where everything is a copy.
Studying the forms of traditional knowledge protection being adopted by various countries, and especially the use of technology in doing so. Understanding the tensions between access to knowledge commons and protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.
Questioning the dominant IPR regime from a constitutional perspective of free speech, and seeing if there is any additional protection to be gained from that constitutional right.
Questioning the dominant IPR regime from the constitutional perspective of competition law and supporting the research agenda of competition commissions in developing countries.
Questioning the dominant IPR regime from the constitutional perspective of tax law and documenting the systemic avoidance of taxation by IP rights-holders.
Contributing to the research agenda of activists interested in a WIPO treaty on minimum exceptions and limitations to copyright law especially from the perspective of disabled, aged and illiterate citizens.
Monitoring the IP policies in various states (both written, like the TK policy in Kerala, and otherwise) and analysing them to see if they promote equitable access and innovation.
Researching issues rising from “common carrier” status for ISPs and online service providers in order to mitigate ISP liability, surveillance, bandwidth shaping, etc.
Collecting information on negative IP spaces, to understand what leads to such fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and raising questions as to whether such spaces (e.g., the fashion industry) are actually embracing IP.
Monitoring, analysing and articulating civil society responses to bilateral and multi-lateral trade agreements that would affect access to knowledge in developing countries.
Unpacking and analysing the Bayh-Dole model being adopted by various countries (and under consideration in India), to see whether it spurs innovation or results in public funds being used to enrich private parties.
Exploring issues of IP rights in personal data, such as that held in various networking sites, etc.

Resources

Copyright and Free Speech (Uma Suthersenan et al., eds., 2005)
EFF’s IP section. http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008)
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail
Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?
Madhavi Sunder, IP3, 59 Stanford L. Rev. 257 (2006)
Rethinking Commodification (Martha M. Ertman & Joan C. Williams eds., 2005)
Yochai Benkler, Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law, 76 New York U. L. Rev. 23 (2001)
Wendy J. Gordon, Copyright Norms and the Problem of Private Censorship, in Copyright and Free Speech: Comparative and International Analyses (Jonathan Griffiths & Uma Suthersanen, eds., 2005)
Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 New York U. L. Rev. 354 (1999)
Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 Yale L.J. 283 (1996)
Margaret Jane Radin & Madhavi Sunder, Foreword: The Subject and Object of Commodification, in Rethinking Commodification (Martha M. Ertman & Joan C. Williams eds., 2005)
Madhavi Sunder, The Invention of Traditional Knowledge (U.C. Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 75, 2006), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=890657

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/public-accountability/int-ellectural.-property-right-and-trade

Surveillance

royson — 2008-09-21T14:57:53Z

Context

Technology and Surveillance have always been comfortable bed-partners. Each new technology has led to new and more ubiquitous form of surveillance practices premised on intensive data-mining and centralisation of data. In the age of Information Technologies, where Information is the new capital, Surveillance, as a theoretical concept and as practice takes on an unprecedented everydayness. The experience of the urban is necessarily one of being an object of surveillance. Everyday practices are now structured around models of surveillance—from CCTV in areas of consumption to physical surveillance at areas of transit—such that surveillance has become almost value neutral in its presence around us.

This overwhelming sense of being watched has led to two distinct forms of manifestation in the last four decades. The first is the sense of paranoia—the Big Brother syndrome—which has found many proponents lamenting the loss of privacy and the abduction of the personal by the State and the market. The second is in the anti-surveillance stance which demands either for an abolishing of the surveillance practices or for an ethical use of the data. While both these forms have their own merits, the debate and the stakes change considerably once we enter the digital domains.

Especially within the digital spaces, where ‘presence’, a ‘record of the presence’, and an archiving of the records are inescapable, surveillance becomes more than just a practice; it becomes an inescapable condition of being online. To be online is to leave traces, physical and digital, personal and pseudonymous. In such a case, instead of taking an either-or position around surveillance, we are now looking at what surveillance enables and what are the ways in which it mediates the complex mechanics of urban survival.

Research Agenda

What are the various forms of surveillance that we encounter in the digital world? How do we understand being subject to surveillance as a part of being online?
What are the ways to negotiate, mediate, and surpass the various forms of surveillance that are a part of cyberspaces? Who are the agents of surveillance?
What does surveillance enable for the different actors within a given space? For example, for the agent conducting the surveillance, it might be a question of collecting data. For the actor being watched, it might be a narrative condition where s/he can manifest him/her self in the process of surveillance. For the audience that becomes witness to the surveillance, a new set of relationships might emerge with the object being manifest and the practice of surveillance.
How does surveillance become a threat when it is especially conducted in the promotion of safety and security? What are the paradoxes it generates and how do we negotiate with them?
With the proliferation of portable media capture devices, what is the value of surveillance? What are the new forms of authorship that it creates? Can we look upon surveillance—the process of being watched, the knowledge of being watched, and the incessant historicisation of the present—as an aesthetic paradigm?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/surveillance