Centre for Internet and Society

Copyright Enforcement and Privacy in India

Prashant Iyengar — 2012-12-14T10:27:12Z

Copyright can function contradictorily, as both the vehicle for the preservation of privacy as well as its abuse, writes Prashant Iyengar. The research examines the various ways in which privacy has been implicated in the shifting terrain of copyright enforcement in India and concludes by examining the notion of the private that emerges from a tapestry view of the relevant sections of Copyright Act.

Introduction

Copyright can function contradictorily, as both the vehicle for the preservation of privacy as well as its abuse. This paper examines the various ways in which privacy has been implicated in the shifting terrain of copyright enforcement in India. Chiefly, there are three kinds of situations that we will be discussing here: The first is straightforward and deals with the physical privacy intrusion caused by the execution of search and seizure orders during the investigation of infringement. The second situation involves the violation of privacy through the misappropriation of confidential information. The last situation involves the wrongful appropriation of a person’s persona or their ‘publicity’ – the photographs of celebrities, for instance – for private gain. Instances of each of these situations, and the manner in which the courts have negotiated the privacy claims that have arisen are described in the sections that follow. In addition, Copyright law, dealing as it does mainly with offences of the nature of unauthorised publicity/publication putatively inscribes certain spaces and activities as either public or private. The concluding section of this paper examines the notion of the private that emerges from a tapestry view of various sections of the Copyright Act.

Copyright Enforcement

Context setting

Over the past several decades there has been an increasing awareness globally – and within India – of the importance of 'knowledge societies' which, in contrast to earlier industrial or agrarian societies, leverage 'information' as the key raw material and output of a range of productive activity. As one UNESCO Report puts it "Knowledge is today recognized as the object of huge economic, political and cultural stakes"[1].

In this new paradigm, investment in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), the enactment of strong Intellectual Property laws, and their strict enforcement are prescribed as imperative in facilitating the transition away from the older economic modes. The promise of the knowledge society is particularly alluring for developing countries, like India, where it is viewed as a vehicle for achieving what Ravi Sundaram has termed 'temporally-accelerative' development[2], through which we would be able to transcend our "historical disabilities", and achieve parity with the incumbent masters of the world. [3]

In their eagerness to provide the best supportive conditions to usher in this coveted knowledge society, nations have been tightening their Intellectual Property regimes – including copyright law. This has entailed a two fold expansion, firstly, in the scope of copyright to include, for instance, ‘technological protection measures’ within their ambit and secondly, in the powers of investigation, search and seizure put at the disposal enforcement agencies. In addition, as we shall see, courts in India have enthusiastically bought into this vision of a knowledge economy, and this has fuelled their eagerness to craft innovative – if legally unsound – orders which put tremendously intrusive powers in the hands of copyright owners. Taken together, these developments have taken their toll on the privacy of individuals which this section will explore in further detail. We begin with a brief description of the statutory mechanism for copyright enforcement – both civil and criminal - under the Copyright Act. We then move on to the way courts have crafted new orders that magnify the powers of copyright owners to the detriment of the privacy of individuals.

Civil and Criminal Enforcement under the Copyright Act

The Copyright Act provides for both civil and criminal remedies for infringement. Section 55 provides for civil remedies and declares that, upon infringement, "the owner of the copyright shall be entitled to all such remedies by way of injunction, damages, accounts and otherwise as are or may be conferred by law for the infringement of a right." Civil suits are instituted at the appropriate district court having jurisdiction – including where the plaintiff resides.

Similarly, Chapter XIII (Sections 63-70) provides a range of criminal penalties for infringing copyrights which are typically punishable with terms of imprisonment that “may extend up to three years” along with a fine. These offences would be taken cognizance of and tried at the court of the Metropolitan Magistrate or Judicial Magistrate of the First class [Sec 70], in the same manner as all cognizable offences[4] in India i.e., by following the procedures under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. Section 64 of the Copyright Act dealing with police powers was amended in 1984 to give plenary powers to police officers, of the rank of a sub-inspector and above, to seize without warrant all infringing copies of works “if he is satisfied” that an offence of infringement under section 63, “has been, is being, or is likely to be, committed”. Prior to amendment, this power could only be exercised by a police officer when the matter had already been taken cognizance of by a Magistrate. Prima facie, this is a very sweeping power since its exercise is unsupervised by the judiciary and only depends on the “satisfaction” of a police officer. To put matters in perspective, under the Income Tax Act, dealing with the far more sensitive issue of tax evasion, a search and seizure can only be conducted based on information already in the possession of the investigating authority.[5]

In Girish Gandhi & Ors. v Union of India[6], a case before the Rajasthan High Court, the petitioner, who ran a video cassette rental business, challenged the constitutional validity of the wide powers granted to police officers under this section. Citing various instances of violations of privacy that the abuse of the section could occasion, the petitioner contended:

"The provisions of section 64 itself gives arbitrary and naked powers without any guidelines to the police officer to seize any material from the shop and thus, drag the video owners to the litigation. He has given instances in the petition that police officer usually demands for video cassettes to be given to them free of charge for viewing it at their homes and in case, on any reason either the video cassette is not available or it is not given free of charge, there is likelihood that police officer shall misuse his powers and try to seize the material for prosecution under the various provisions of the Act."

Although the High Court dismissed the petition on the grounds that it did not disclose any actual injury to the petitioner, it upheld the constitutionality of the section by reading the word "satisfaction" to mean that the "police officer will not act until and unless he has got some type of information on which information he is satisfied and his satisfaction shall be objective."

[Section 64] is also not arbitrary for the reason that guidelines and safeguards are provided under Sections 51, 52 and 52A and Section 64(2) of the Copyright Act, coupled with the fact that it is expected of the police officer that he would not act arbitrarily and his satisfaction shall always based on some material or knowledge and he shall only proceed for action under Section 64 in a bona fide manner and not for making a roving inquiry. (emphasis added)

Despite the pious hopes expressed in this decision, they do not appear to have influenced the actual behaviour of police officers. In May 2011, the Delhi High Court struck down a notification issued by the Commissioner of Police which had instructed all subordinate functionaries of the police to "attend to and provide assistance" whenever any complaint "in respect of violation of the provisions of Copyright Act, 1957" was received from three companies: Super Cassettes Industries Limited, Phonographic Performance Ltd and Indian Performance Right Society Ltd. This virtually amounted to the commandeering of the criminal enforcement system by a few private owners for their own private interests. In their suit, the petitioner — Event and Entertainment Management Association — had contended that the police machinery "cannot be made to act at the behest of certain privileged copyright owners". Striking the notification down, as unconstitutional, Justice Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court held:

"To the extent the impugned circular privileges the complaints from SCIL over other complaints from owners of copyright it is unsustainable in law for the simple reason that there has to be equal protection of the law in terms of Article 14 of the Constitution. The police are not expected to act differently depending on who the complainant is. All complaints under the Act require the same seriousness of response and the promptitude with which the police will take action, Likewise, the caution that the Police is required to exercise by making a preliminary inquiry and satisfying itself that prima facie there is an infringement of copyright will be no different as regards the complaints or information received under the Act[7]."

The Judge also issued some welcome remarks on the manner in which complaints under Section 64 were to be handled:

In order that the power to seize in terms of Section 64 of the Act is not exercised in an arbitrary and whimsical manner, it has to be hedged in with certain implied safeguards that constitute a check on such power. Consequently, prior to exercising the power of seizure under Section 64(1) of the Act the Police officer concerned has to necessarily be prima facie satisfied that there is an infringement of copyright in the manner complained of. In other words, merely on the receipt of the information or a complaint from the owner of a copyright about the infringement of the copyrighted work, the Police is not expected to straightway effect seizure. Section 52 of the Act enables the person against whom such complaint is made to show that one or more of the circumstances outlined in that provision exists and that therefore there is no infringement. During the preliminary inquiry by the Police, if such a defence is taken by the person against whom the complaint is made it will be incumbent on the Police to prima facie be satisfied that such defence is untenable before proceeding further with the seizure.(emphasis added)[8]

This decision significantly tempers the severity of possible searches and seizures conducted by the police under Copyright Law. It advances the cause of privacy by reining in the power of the state to arbitrarily intrude on citizens.

Parallel to the attempt at ‘hedging in’ of police powers in criminal enforcement by this High court, there has been a move to expand powers of investigative bodies in civil suits. The next sub-section looks at two innovations by courts – Anton Piller Orders and John Doe orders – which are mechanisms unwarranted by civil procedural law, but crafted by high courts specifically to deal with copyright investigation.

'Anton Piller' orders and 'John Doe' Orders

In addition to the extensive police powers under the Copyright Act mentioned above, plaintiffs have other, equally intrusive powers at their disposal. In the past decade it has become common for copyright owners and owners-associations to employ civil procedure to emulate the same kind of invasiveness. This is done via the mechanism of so-called ‘Anton Piller’ orders - orders obtained unilaterally ‘ex-parte’ (in the absence of the defendant) from civil courts which permit court-appointed officers, accompanied by representatives of the plaintiffs themselves, to search premises and seize evidence without prior warning to the defendant. Frequently, courts have also issued ‘John Doe’ orders[9] –orders to search and seize against unnamed/unknown defendants - which virtually translates into untrammelled powers in the hands of the plaintiffs, aided by court-appointed local commissioners, to raid any premises they set their eyes on.

Although the authority of the courts under Indian law to grant these orders is suspect[10], they have virtually been regularized in practice over the past decade through routine issual by the High Courts, especially the Delhi High Court. This has led to a widespread phenomenon of powerful copyright owning groups such as the Business Software Alliance and the Indian Performing Right Society Limited managing to successfully assume for themselves almost plenary powers of search and seizure as they go about knocking on the doors of small businesses and demanding to be allowed to audit their software. An anonymous post on the popular Indian Intellectual Property Weblog ‘Spicy IP’ graphically conveys the invasiveness inherent in the execution of these orders:

Ghost Post on IP (Software) Raids: Court Sponsored Extortion?[11]

Picture this:

You are working in your office one day, when all of a sudden, a group of people arrive unannounced brandishing a court order. The order allows them to walk into your office and conduct an audit of all your office computers to collect evidence of the use of unlicensed software in your office.

This group consists of a court-appointed commissioner, lawyers representing the plaintiff, and technical persons who will carry out the actual software audit.

Knowing that to disobey the order will amount to a contempt of court, you allow the group to carry out the audit.

The audit lasts several hours and continues well into the night. Needless to say, it is physically and emotionally draining on you as your work has come to a stand-still. Everyone around you knows there is some court proceeding going on. You have already lost face with your employees, and possibly even clients who have visited your office during the audit.

As you have several dozen computers purchased over a period of time, and the audit is conducted unannounced, you may not have the time to gather documentation and invoices demonstrating the purchase of licensed software.

While the court order allows you to back up your valuable client and business data, the plaintiff’s lawyers don’t allow you to do so, stating that documents/ data found on machines that contain any unlicensed software may not be backed up.

All computers found with copies of what the plaintiff’s lawyers are calling unlicensed software are seized and sealed. You do not have the time, presence of mind or legal representation to argue that such copies may be backup copies allowed under the law, or that therefore several, or all of the seized machines are not liable to be seized, or that such copies are actually allowed under the software license.

Even more importantly, your licensed servers are seized because they are found to contain back-up copies of software, allowed under the law, but deemed infringing by the plaintiff’s lawyers.

At the end of the audit, you are informed that your computers contain copies of unlicensed software to varying degrees. You are made to sign a report prepared by the commissioner, along with sheets that represent the software audit of each computer in your office.

Most of your computers and servers are seized and sealed. You are told that you cannot touch them till the court allows you to. You are not even allowed to separate the hard drives of those machines that contain the alleged unlicensed software, for the purpose of seizure, so as to enable you to continue using the rest of the machine, even though the court order clearly states that only storage media containing the unlicensed software is to be seized.

In a 2008 case, Autodesk Inc vs. AVT Shankardass[12], the Delhi High Court – which happens to be the most enthusiastic issuer of Anton Piller orders[13] –issued guidelines on the considerations which judges should weigh before granting such orders in software piracy cases. Worryingly, the guidelines stipulate that "The test of reasonable and credible information regarding the existence of pirated software or incriminating evidence should not be subjected to strict proof". Instead the court prescribes that "It has to be tested on the touchstone of pragmatism and the natural and normal course of conduct and practice in trade."

The Court also included a few guidelines meant to safeguard the defendant. These include the possibility of requiring the plaintiff to deposit costs in the court "so that in case pirated software or incriminating evidence is not found then the defendant can be suitably compensated for the obtrusion in his work or privacy." Although on the face of it, these guidelines threatened to open up the floodgates for the granting of Anton Pillar orders, in fact, these fears seem not to have been realized. The privacy-invasive ambitions of IP owners have been subverted by a combination of the security requirements stipulated in the Autodesk guidelines above, the judiciary’s own inefficiency/inconsistency and a greater assertiveness and defiance on the part of defendants. The following passage from the 2011 Special 301 India Country Report on Copyright Protection and Enforcement[14], prepared by the IIPA, records the industry’s frustrations in obtaining Anton Pillar orders from the courts over the past year:

Unfortunately, in 2010, such enforcement efforts have become much less effective due to judges imposing conditions on such orders.

With periodic changes to the roster of judges on the Original Side Jurisdiction of the Delhi High Court (which is done as a matter of routine and procedure where the roster changes every 6 months), BSA reports: 1) the imposition of security costs on Plaintiffs; 2) the grant of local commission orders without orders to seize and seal computer systems containing pirated/unlicensed software; 3) granting the right to Defendants to obtain back up copies of their proprietary data while at the same time ensuring that the evidence of infringement is preserved in electronic form; 4) assigning a low number of technical experts for large inspections, making carrying out orders more time-consuming and raising court commissioners’ fees; and 5) ineffective implementation and lack of deterrence from contempt proceedings against defendants who disrupt or defy Anton Pillar orders.[15]

Notwithstanding this temporary setback, Anton Piller orders and John Doe orders remain powerful weapons in the arsenal of large copyright owners who continue to use it in ways that are extremely intrusive. These orders exemplify an instance of how courts rarely reflect on the privacy implications of the orders that they themselves issue –similar action undertaken by the executive would have most likely invited the court’s consideration on whether they violate privacy.

In the next section we move on to private ‘technological’ measures of enforcing copyright which are likely to receive statutory sanction.

Technological Measures

In the light of the industry’s perception of a weakening of its enforcement options due to the judiciary’s waning enthusiasm, it remains to be seen what new manoeuvres they would make to strengthen enforcement. One foreseeable arena of conflict would be the new measures proposed to be included in the Copyright Act that criminalise the circumvention of ‘technological protection measures’ (TPMs) built into software by manufacturers. The proposed new Section 65A criminalises the circumvention of “an effective technological measure applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act," "with the intention of infringing such rights”. This is punishable with imprisonment up to two years and a fine. However the section also creates a vast list of exceptions including research, testing, national security etc which make it a comparatively soft tool in the hands of prosecutors. Among the list of exceptions is a clause that enables the circumvention of TPMs in order to facilitate purposes that are 'not expressly prohibited' – including, conceivably, to exercise fair dealing rights under Section 52. Although this is a welcome provision, it requires, as a condition of its exercise, that the person ‘facilitating the circumvention’ maintain a record of the persons for whose benefit this has been done. This has led to apprehensions of violations of privacy especially from disability rights groups, who would potentially be the biggest users of this section as it would enable them to make electronic content more widely accessible. However, the lawful exercise of this right would mean that each instance of use of electronic content – say an e-book – by a disabled person would be recorded, which could deter them from accessing content. It would also clearly amount to a violation of their privacy compared to other analog users who are not required to similarly maintain logs each time they share books, for instance.

On the whole, despite the effect these measures have of diminishing absolute control over our electronic resources, the fact that the IIPA - which has been one the most rapid ‘defenders’ of IP - has consistently complained about their inadequacy in its Special 301 Reports[16] gives us some cause for optimism that the privacy invasions it could occasion would not be too severe.

Meanwhile, in a first of its kind, in 2005 the High Court of Andhra Pradesh permitted the prosecution, under the Copyright Act, of persons accused of having circumvented technological protection measures in mobile devices.

In Syed Asifuddin and Ors. v The State of Andhra Pradesh [17] the accused had altered the software on the mobile handsets provided by one service provider (Reliance), so that the same handset could be used to access the network of a rival provider (Tata Indicom). The Court observed that "if a person alters computer programme of another person or another computer company, the same would be infringement of the copyright." The matter was then relegated to the trial court to receive evidence on whether in fact such alteration had occurred.

This ruling, if correct, effectively negates the need for any amendment to the law since circumvention of technological measures typically involves an unauthorized alteration of copyrighted code. Of course it would always be open to the defendant to assert his fair dealing rights in defence, but that issue was not deliberated upon by the High Court in this instance.

Portents

With the terrain of copyright infringement increasingly shifting from ‘street piracy’ to online piracy, it remains to be seen how innovations in copyright enforcement impact privacy. Three events are particularly interesting in this context.

In August 2007, a techie from Bangalore was arrested on charges of having posted incendiary images of a popular folk hero on a website. He had been traced based on the IP Address details provided by a leading ISP. It later turned out that the IP address information was incorrect. By the time the error was noticed, he had already been held in jail illegally for a period of 50 days.[19] Shocking as this incident is, it offers a portent of the gravity of the possible privacy abuses that we are likely to witness in the years to come as copyright owners begin to hunt down infringers on the Internet.
In 2006, the Delhi High Court the pioneer among the Indian Judiciary in issuing John Doe orders added another feather to its cap by permitting the filing of a suit against an IP address. In a case of defamation by email from an unknown sender, a company was able to successfully file a suit against the IP address and obtain an order against the ISP to track down the user who was later impleaded as a party to the suit. This case and the growing number of John Doe orders issued, indicates that the judiciary in India has been quite willing to partner with litigants in their fishing expeditions. While it cannot be gainsaid that this has aided the legitimate interests of litigants, this has come at the price of a callous disregard for the interests of consumer privacy in India, which, as the incident described above highlights, could easily descend into a full blown human rights violation.
With the arrest in November 2010 of a four-member gang from Hyderabad for uploading media content – including popular film titles - on Bittorrent, the popular online file sharing tool, the industry has signalled its capacity and willingness to take the battle over copyright to the Internet.[20] New rules notified under the Information Technology Act make it mandatory for 'intermediaries' (ISPs) to co-operate in locating and removing ‘infringing content’ that is stored or transmitted by them.[21] This will facilitate untrammelled access to users by copyright industries.

Although it is too early to predict the future for the Internet that these developments will result in, they are definitely a source of apprehension from the perspective of privacy.

Copyright and Confidential Information

Although the protection of 'confidential information' and 'copyright' occupy distinct realms in the law[22], they converge occasionally, and copyright has been used as an instrument by people and organisations to protect their confidential information. In fact it has become quite routine for written pleadings by plaintiffs in cases to assert the omnibus infringement of their ‘copyrights, confidential information, trade secrets, trademarks designs etc’ without specifying which of the claims is urged. For instance in Mr. M. Sivasamy v M/S. Vestergaard Frandsen[23] a case before the Delhi High Court, the plaintiffs claimed that. "Defendants are violating the trade secrets, confidential information and copyrights of the plaintiffs.”; Similarly in Dietrich Engineering Consultant v Schist India & Ors , before the Bombay High Court, the plaintiffs contended"..the suit is filed to prevent unauthorized and illegal use of the plaintiffs confidential information and infringement of the 1st plaintiffs Copyright".[24]

In one of the earliest cases of this kind, Zee Telefilms Ltd. v Sundial Communications Pvt. Ltd, the Bombay High Court delivered a ruling in favour of the plaintiffs on both grounds of copyright infringement and confidential information. Here the employees of the plaintiffs – a company engaged in the business of producing television serials - had developed the concept for a program which they had registered with the Film Writers Association. Subsequently, they made a confidential pitch of the concept to the representatives of the defendants, a well known TV channel. Although initially the defendants appeared reluctant to take the concept forward, they proceeded later on, without the authorization of the plaintiffs, to produce a TV serial that closely mirrored the ideas contained in the show conceived by the plaintiff. In an action seeking to restrain the defendants from proceeding with their production, the High Court agreed with the plaintiff’s claims both on the count of copyright infringement and confidentiality. Curiously, the determination of both issues turned on the similarities between the plaintiff’s and defendant’s concepts – which is traditionally a determination relevant only to copyright cases. On the issue of confidentiality, the court held "Keeping in view numerous striking similarities in two works and in the light of the material produced on record, it is impossible to accept that the similarities in two works were mere coincidence...the plaintiffs' business prospect and their goodwill would seriously suffer if the confidential information of this kind was allowed to be used against them in competition with them by the defendants."

Although a clear line is demarcated between the claims of confidentiality and copyright in this case, this distinction is less sharp in other cases of the same nature.

In a more recent case Diljeet Titus, Advocate v Mr. Alfred A. Adebare & Ors[25] four associates of the plaintiff’s law firm quit together to start their own practice. While leaving they took documents they had drafted including agreements, due diligence reports and a list of clients along with them. The plaintiff filed a suit for injunction, asserting both that this material was confidential and that he owned the copyrights over them. The Delhi High Court agreed and issued an injunction restraining the defendants from “utilizing the material of the plaintiff forming subject matter of the suit and from disseminating or otherwise exploiting the same including the data for their own benefit.” What is interesting in this case is the conflation of confidentiality and copyright – both in the allegations of the plaintiff and the rebuttals of the defendant who sought to resist claims of confidentialty on grounds that they had themselves authored the papers in question.

Curiously, where copyright and confidentiality claims coincide, it would appear that the parameters of determining copyright infringement end up determining the issue of confidentiality as well.

In the next section we move on to the last copyright/privacy issue that we had flagged in the introduction – the invocation of copyright in aid of the ‘right to publicity’ of individuals which can be read as a kind of privacy claim.

Copyright and Publicity

Do we have a copyright over our identities – our names, our appearances, our life histories, our reputation and our bodies - so that we have an actionable interest in preventing their deployment in public without our express authorization?

This question has arisen in a limited set of cases in India that raise interesting questions. As with the confidentiality cases discussed above, the lines separating ‘defamation’ actions from ‘copyright’ claims is not brightly drawn in these cases. Neither is the line linking copyright to the protection of privacy clearly evident. All one can say with confidence is that copyright and privacy are two words tossed into the plaints by the plaintiffs while asserting their claims.

In one of the most high-profile cases of its kind, Phoolan Devi v Shekhar Kapoor[26] the Delhi High Court was faced with the question of whether ‘public figures’ are entitled to any degree of control over the representation of their lives. Here the petitioner, Phoolan Devi, a reformed bandit, had 'licensed'[27] the production of a biopic on her life to the defendant, a film director of note, who was to consult the plaintiff’s own writings and those of her authorised biographer in making the film. However, the defendant – the director of the biopic – had exceeded this mandate and also depicted incidents that emerged from various newspaper accounts – including a graphic gang rape scene where the plaintiff was the victim, and a massacre which she had allegedly orchestrated. Although generally well-known, neither of these incidents were either admitted to by the plaintiff herself or mentioned in the plaintiff’s own writings and those of her biographer. Even worse, the film had not been shown to her even several months after it had been released to national and international audiences.[28] In Arundhati Roy’s moving words the producers of the film “[R]e-invent her life. Her loves. Her rapes. They implicate her in the murder of twenty-two men that she denies having committed. Then they try to slither out of showing her the film!”[29]

One of the contentions that the petitioner’s advocate had advanced was that the defendant had no right “to mutilate or distort the facts as based upon prison diaries” and that any such distortion would fall afoul of her right under Sec 57 of the Indian Copyright Act. This section confers certain ‘special rights’ on the author including the right to claim authorship and to restrain any distortion/mutilation or modification of the work that would be prejudicial to his/her honour or reputation.[30]

These rights survive any assignment of the copyright made by the author i.e. they can e asserted by the author above any contract entered into by her with third parties such as the producer in this case. The Court framed the question it was faced with in these terms:

[T]he question before me is whether such person like the plaintiff has no right to defend when someone enlarges the terrible facts, enters the realm of her private life, depicts in graphic details rape, sexual intercourse, exhibits nudity, portrays the living person which brings shame, humiliation and memories of events which haunts and will go on haunting the plaintiff, more so the person is still living. Whether the plaintiff has no right and her life can become an excuse for film makers and audience to participate in an exercise of legitimate violence with putting all inhibitions aside.

Ultimately, the High Court sided with the petitioner and issued an injunction restraining the defendant from exhibiting his film.[31] This decision was based more on a consideration of constitutional right to privacy principles than an evaluation of the plaintiff’s case under Copyright law. However, it does provide an interesting factual matrix for the exploration of the way in which protection of copyright and privacy might overlap.

In a contrasting case before the Bombay High Court, Manisha Koirala v Shashilal Nair & Ors [32] an injunction was sought against the release of a film in which the petitioner, a noted actress, was depicted in the nude through the device of a ‘body double’. Here the plot was entirely fictional and the plaintiff, a noted actress, had agreed to perform in the film with ‘substituted shots’ during the scenes in the story that involved nudity. Subsequently, she appears to have reconsidered this decision and objected to the very inclusion of these scenes in its final version. In her petition before the court, she alleged defamation and malicious injurious falsehood, arguing that the exhibition of the film would result in a violation her right to privacy "as the objectionable shots, attempt to expose the body of a female which is suggested to be that of the plaintiff". She contended that “the right to portray her on screen can only be exercised in a manner, which is subject to the fundamental principle that such portrayal can only be with her unconditional consent." "The present rendition" of her part in the film, she alleged was “an invasion of privacy as it is embarrassing and will cause irreparable damage to her reputation which remains untarnished thereby causing irreparable loss and injury”. Although Copyright is not invoked in this case by the petitioner, there is an audible echo of some of the reputational anxieties that had animated Phoolan Devi’s case mentioned above. The difference, however, is that in this case the petitioner’s claim was not grounded in a quest for control over her biography, but over the image of her body. Unlike the previous case, here the Court was unsympathetic to the petitioner’s claims. The court treated her previous ‘consents’ as determinative of all issues and dismissed her case holding:

"The Court ...cannot be a moral guardian in this context. ..It is.. clear to my mind that once having agreed to act in the film it will be too late for the plaintiff .. to hold that a case of defamation has been made out.. To maintain a case of malicious falsehood it must be held out that the statement was false. In the instant case what is sought to be contended is that the scenes involving the film artist would result in an action of malicious injurious falsehood or malicious falsehood by associating the plaintiff's with the scenes which she had not enacted.. The plaintiff was prima facie aware as earlier held and that the scenes formed part of the story board have been enacted by a double and consequently it cannot be said that in the present case the plaintiff has been able to establish a case of malicious falsehood."[33]

One of the facts that was relevant in the court’s decision was that the defendant, as the ‘holder of the copyright in the film’, had incurred vast expenditure in publicising its release. Here, in a reversal of the Phoolan Devi case, copyright is held up as a shield against a competing privacy claim. The issue of the extent of overlap between copyright and privacy however remains unsettled in law. In April 2007, the Madras High Court granted a temporary injunction against the publishers of an unauthorised biography of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha. In her petition she alleged that the biography “had been written without any verification of facts. Such a publication would spoil her image and damage her status in politics and public life.” Her petition contended that “No one has a right to publish anything concerning personal private matters without consent, whether truthful or otherwise, whether laudatory or critical.[34]

Although it does not reference Copyright law, this case is another illustration of the enduring relevance of the question of whether we are entitled to the exclusive authorship of our private life-stories.

The Private under the Copyright Act

In its various sections, the Copyright Act inscribes certain spaces and actions as either public or private. Specified activities are labelled public even though they are conducted within the domestic confines of one’s home. Similarly, activities that infringe copyright are nevertheless immunised from prosecution due to the fact that they are conducted for a ‘private’ purpose. In this concluding section of this paper, we try to piece together a narrative of privacy and the private domain that emerges from a combined reading of various sections and decisions under the Copyright Act.

We begin, here, by collating the Copyright Act’s various articulations of the ‘public’ and ‘private’. By treating them as intertwining, mutually constitutive terms, we proceed to analyse these various articulations in the Copyright Act with a view to seeing what account of the private realm may emerge.

Public/Publish

One of the key rights that most owners of copyrights enjoy is the exclusive right to "publish" or "communicate their work to the public".

The Act defines "publication" to mean “making a work available to the public by issue of copies or by communicating the work to the public”. Significantly, in case of dispute, if the issue of copies or communication to the public is “of an insignificant nature” it is deemed not to constitute a publication [Section 6]. This signals that the notions of publicity and publication under the Copyright Act are in some senses moored to the magnitude of the receiving public. The ‘private’ then is constituted, reciprocally, as the ‘insignificant public’.

Under the Indian Copyright Act, "communication to the public" occurs when a person makes any work “available for being seen or heard or otherwise enjoyed by the public directly or by any means of display or diffusion other than by issuing copies of such work”. Such communication occurs “regardless of whether any member of the public actually sees, hears or otherwise enjoys the work so made available.”[Section 2(ff)][35]

Private

The word ‘private’ is expressly referenced in four provisions of the Copyright Act.

Section 39 declares that “the making of any sound recording or visual recording for the private use of the person making such recording, or solely for purposes of bona fide teaching or research” would not violate the broadcast reproduction right or performer's right;
Section 51 which stipulates when copyrights are infringed declares that the “imports into India, any infringing copies of the work” would constitute an infringement except if it is only a single copy of any work that is imported “for the private and domestic use of the importer”.
Section 52(1) of the Copyright Act lists certain acts as not infringing of copyright. These include:

(a) a fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, not being a computer programme, for the purposes of private use, including research. A proposed amendment to this section seeks to extend this protection to all ‘personal’ uses in addition to ‘private uses including research[36]. ‘Personal use’ has been interpreted in non-copyright contexts to include the family members of the person living with him.[37] The definition of ‘person’ under the General Clauses Act includes a “company or association or body of individuals, whether incorporated or not”. Although the case law on the point is scant[38], it would be interesting to see if ‘personal use’ can be read to include the use by companies internally, thereby casting a shroud of privacy on corporations for the purpose of copyright.
(p) the reproduction, for the purpose of research or private study or with a view to publication, of an unpublished literary, dramatic or musical work kept in a library, museum or other institution to which the public has access.

In addition to the provisions listed above, Section 52 the Act also shields certain spaces and occasions as immune from the charge of copyright infringement (although they are not specially designated as ‘private’). These include educational institutions[39], non-profit clubs, societies[40], religious institutions[41] and religious ceremonies including marriages.[42]

Perhaps the most elaborate calibration of the boundaries between the 'private' and 'public' under the Indian Ccopyright Act by the judiciary occurs in the case Garware Plastics and Polyester vs Telelink & Ors[43]., decided by the Bombay High Court in 1989. The case called for the determination of whether films transmitted via neighbourhood cable networks and viewed in the privacy of customers’ homes would constitute an unauthorised ‘communication to the public’ under the Copyright Act. Here the defendants had purchased video tapes of popular films and begun transmitting them over cable networks owned by them. For this they charged a monthly maintenance fee from their customers. Under the Copyright Act then in force, ‘communication to the public’ was defined simply as "communication to the public in whatever manner, including communication through satellite.” After an extensive review of English law on the subject, the court ruled that this did constitute an unauthorised communication to the public:

"Whether a communication is to the public or whether it is a private communication depends essentially on the persons receiving the communication. If they can be characterized as the public or a protein of the public , the communication is to the public…From the authorities the principal criteria which emerge for determining the issue are(1) the character of audience and whether it can be described as a private or domestic audience consisting of family members or members of the household, (2) whether the audience in relation to the owner of the copyright can be so considered…Applying the test of the character of the audience watching these video films , can this audience be called a Section of the public or is this audience a private or domestic audience of the defendants ? In the present case it cannot be said that the audience which watches video films shown by the defendants consists of family members and guests of the defendants. The video film may be watched by a large Section of the public in the privacy of their homes. But this does not make it a private communication so as to take it our of the definition of "broadcast" under the Copyright Act, 1957.

It is true that the network operates through the connection of a cable to all these various apartments or houses. But this cannot in any way affect the character of the audience. The viewers are not members of one family or their guests. They do not have even the homogeneity of club members of one family or their guests. They do not have even the homogeneity of a club membership.[44] (emphasis added)

A central feature emerging from this case that distinguishes public form private in Copyright law is homogeneity or affiliation: that space is marked ‘private’ where a pre-affiliated group – united either by kinship or association in pursuit of a common goal – comes together in pursuit of a non-commercial common interest. Conversely, ‘Public’ is where the unaffiliated congregate. On the face, this accords with the spirit of the various fair dealing rights under the Copyright Act which carve out immunised spaces for institutions that correspond to these definitions – educational institutions, religious institutions and ceremonies, amateur clubs etc are immune from infringement actions because, one could say, their activities are ‘private’.

In 1994 the Copyright Act was amended to fortify this conclusion by expanding the definition of ‘communication to the public’ to include ‘communication through satellite or cable or any other means of simultaneous communication to more than one household or place of residence including residential rooms of any hotel or hostel shall be deemed to be communication to the public;” (Sec 2(ff), Explanation)

Conclusion

I would like to conclude this paper with some reflections on the assertion I made in the introduction about copyright law being both an instrument for the protection and violation of privacy. From the discussion in the previous sections, it follows:

Firstly, that 'property' – as embodied by copyright law – is, at best, an unreliable guarantor of privacy. It works when bussed along with dignity claims– for instance the Phoolan Devi case where the petitioner’s suffering underlay her property claim– but fails when asserted as ‘property’ per se (as in Manisha Koirala’s case[45]). One does not (under the Indian Copyright Act, at least) have a reliable ‘property’ interest in one’s life story, bodily representation, name etc. This stands in contrast with other regimes such as the US where several states have enacted ‘Right to publicity’ statutes or have recognised publicity rights through common law processes.[46]

These rights can be read to offer people a 'property' means for protecting their privacy (by preventing unauthorised publicity) in those jurisdictions. Analogous claims are unavailable in India.

Secondly, that ‘property’ operates frequently as a license for the violation of privacy with impunity. This emerges most clearly from the cases of copyright investigation that we examined in Section 1.2 above. Pecuniary copyright interests appear to completely overwhelm any regard for competing privacy concerns.

Thirdly, that, notwithstanding the preceding two points, the copyright act does protect privacy in limited ways. Chiefly these are a) By conferring limited copyright on 'unpublished works', it enables authors to restrict their publication except on terms acceptable to them. b) The Act grants a very wide “Performer’s right” to performers and no sound or visal recording may be made of them without their express consent. No such recording can broadcast or communicated to the public without their consent. This gives a very powerful weapon of control in the hands of performers to restrict the extent to which representations of them are publicised. C) As mentioned above in the penultimate section of this paper, various fair dealing exceptions carve out spaces of privacy where infringing acts are granted immunity – for instance private uses, uses in educational institutions and libraries, etc.

Lastly, with the arena of copyright infringement shifting gradually to the internet, it is foreseeable that the IT Act will be employed with greater frequency in the coming years to do the work of copyright enforcement. The legal regime already supports this change through provisions in the IT Act which preserve all existing rights available under the Copyright Act [Section 81 (proviso) of the IT Act] and put new powers of take-down [see Intermediary Guidelines] in the hands of Copyright Owners. Thus on the one hand, copyright owners would be able to lawfully hack into potential infringers’ computers while enjoying immunity under the IT Act. On the other hand, ‘intermediaries’ would be legally bound to co-operate in copyright enforcement including, conceivably, handing over a number of personal details of those accused of copyright infringement. In other jurisdictions, such as the EU, such ‘co-operation’ is heavily policed by judicial oversight where personally identifiable information is involved[47]. Contrastingly, in India, with its diminished concerns for privacy and limited awareness of how IP address data can seriously imperil privacy, there is a very real threat that these provision will license the wholesale violation of online privacy.

Notes

[1]Anon, 2005. Towards Knowledge Societies, Paris: UNESCO. Available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001418/141843e.pdf [Accessed April 20, 2011].

[2]Sundaram says "Temporal acceleration was a significant part of the imaginary of developmentalism - this was inherent in the logic of 'catching up' with the core areas of the world economy by privileging a certain strategy of growth that actively delegitimized local and 'traditional' practices."

[3]This aspiration underlies several of the policy documents prepared in India in the last decade – Illustratively, the report submitted by the National Task Force on Information Technology (NTFIT) in 1998 captures this sentiment well: “For India, the rise of Information Technology is an opportunity to overcome historical disabilities and once again become the master of one's own national destiny. IT is a tool that will enable India to achieve the goal of becoming a strong, prosperous and self-confident nation. In doing so, IT promises to compress the time it would otherwise take for India to advance rapidly in the march of development and occupy a position of honor and pride in the comity of nations” Tiwari, Ghanshyam et al. Government of India. Central Advisory Board of Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development .Report of the Central Advisory Board of Education Committee On Universalisation of Secondary Education. New Delhi: 2005

[4]There is some ambiguity on whether offences under the Copyright Act punishable with imprisonment “which may extend to three years” are 'cognizable' or not. The Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 classifies all offences which prescribe a penalty of three years and above as cognizable and non bailable [First Schedule]. Offences which are punishable with imprisonment of less than three years are classified as ‘non-cognizable’ and ‘bailable’. In the absence of a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court on this issue, different High Courts have offered conflicting interpretations. See Singh, S. & Aprajita, 2008. Insight into the nature of offence of Copyright Infringement. Journal of Intellectual Property Rights, 13(6), pp.583-589. Available at: http://nopr.niscair.res.in/bitstream/123456789/2433/1/JIPR%2013%286%29%20583-589.pdf [Accessed May 12, 2011]. See also Agarwal, D.K., 2010. Arrest under the customs act ? Bailable or non-bailable offence. Translation Interpreting Services. Available at: http://translation-tech.com/blog/213/arrest-under-the-customs-act-bailable-or-non-bailable-offence/ [Accessed May 12, 2011]. The determination of this issue would have wide ranging implications since the police have a wider assortment of powers with respect to interrogation, arrest, search and seizure in the course of investigating cognizable offences than they have with respect to non-cognizable offences.

[5]"Where Director of Inspection or Commissioner in consequence of information in his possession, has reason to believe that any person having in possession of any money, etc.." has not disclosed it for purposes of Income Tax.

[6]AIR 1997 Raj 78 < http://indiankanoon.org/doc/661363/>

[7]Event and Entertainment Management Association v. Union of India (Delhi HC) Order dated 2nd May 2011 <http://courtnic.nic.in/dhcorder/dhcqrydisp_o.asp?pn=84697&yr=2011>. Harkauli, S., 2011. HC nullifies police circular on copyright issue. The Pioneer. Available at: http://www.dailypioneer.com/336974/HC-nullifies-police-circular-on-copyright-issue.html [Accessed May 9, 2011].

[8]Ibid

[9]As recently as April 2011, the Delhi high court restrained “cable operators nationwide from telecasting matches of the Indian Premier League (IPL) without authorization from MSM Satellite (Singapore) Pte Ltd, which owns the broadcasting rights. See Bailay, R., 2011. Cable operators can’t telecast IPL without authorization, says HC. Livemint. Available at: http://www.livemint.com/articles/2011/04/27212449/Cable-operators-can8217t-te.html?atype=tp [Accessed May 13, 2011]. For an early history of John Doe orders in India, see Krishnamurthy, N. & Anand, P., 2003. India Trade marks in a state of change. Managing Intellectual Property. Available at: http://www.managingip.com/Article/1321770/India-Trade-marks-in-a-state-of-change.html [Accessed May 13, 2011].

[10]These orders are granted by the Court supposedly under Section 75 read with Order 26 of the Code of Civil Procedure which empowers the court to appoint “Local Commissioners” to record evidence in special cases. I have stated my opinions elsewhere on why I believe these powers may not be invoked for the purpose of effecting routine searches and seizures in the manner as is currently being practiced by the higher judiciary – especially the Delhi High Court. See Iyengar, P., 2009. BSA’s response on Spicy IP – in perspective. Original Fakes. Available at: http://originalfakes.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/bsas-response-on-spicy-ip-in-perspective/ [Accessed May 10, 2011].

[11]Anon, 2009. Ghost Post on IP (Software) Raids: Court Sponsored Extortion? SPICY IP. Available at: http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2009/03/ghost-post-on-ip-software-raids-court.html [Accessed May 10, 2011].

[12]Autodesk Inc Vs. AVT Shankardass, Available at: http://delhicourts.nic.in/Jul08/Autodesk%20Inc%20Vs.%20AVT%20Shankardass.pdf [Accessed May 10, 2011].

[13]The 2011 Special 301 Country Report on India prepared by the IIPA specifically cites the Delhi High Court in this context, statng “The industry enjoys a very high success rate with respect to the grant of such orders at the Delhi High Court”. According to this report, the Business Software Alliance was able to obtain 34 such orders in 2009.

[14]Anon, 2011. Special 301 Report on Copyright Protection and Enforcement: 2011 India Country Report, International Intellectual Property Alliance. Available at: http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2011/2011SPEC301INDIA.pdf [Accessed May 9, 2011].

[15]Ibid at. Pp 41-42.

[16]The 2010 Special 301 Country Report lists the following defects of the proposed Section 65A: “(a) does not cover access controls and is limited only to TPMs protecting the exercise of exclusive rights; (b) covers only the “act” of circumvention and does not also cover manufacturing, trafficking in, or distributing circumvention devices or services; (c) does not define an “effective technological measure”; (d) contains an exception which would appear to permit circumvention for any purpose that would not amount to infringement under the act (thereby almost completely eviscerating any protection); (e) creates other overbroad exceptions; and (f) provides for only criminal and not civil remedies."

[17]Syed Asifuddin And Ors. v The State Of Andhra Pradesh, 2005 CriLJ 4314 (Andhra Pradesh HC ).

[18]Ibid.

[19]Holla, A., 2009. Wronged, techie gets justice 2 yrs after being jailed. Mumbai Mirror. Available at: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?page=article&sectid=2&contentid=200906252009062503144578681037483 [Accessed March 23, 2011]. See also Nanjappa, V., 2008. “I have lost everything.” Rediff.com News. Available at: http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jan/21inter.htm [Accessed March 23, 2011].

[20]Pahwa, N., 2010. Hyderabad Police Arrests Torrent Uploaders - MediaNama. MediaNama. Available at: http://www.medianama.com/2010/11/223-hyderabad-police-arrests-torrent-uploaders/ [Accessed May 12, 2011].

[21]GSR 314(E) Dated 11 April 2011: Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011 http://www.mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR314E_10511(1).pdf [Accessed May 12, 2011].

[22]See Zee Telefilms Ltd. v Sundial Communications Pvt. Ltd., 2003 (5) BomCR 404 (Bombay High Court 2003).

[23]Mr. M. Sivasamy v M/S. Vestergaard Frandsen (Delhi High court 2009).< http://indiankanoon.org/doc/916718/>

[24]Dietrich Engineering Consultant v Schist India & Ors (Bombay High Court, 2009) < http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1634545/>

[25]Mr. Diljeet Titus, Advocate vs Mr. Alfred A. Adebare And Ors, 130 DLT 330 (Delhi High Court 2006).

[26]Phoolan Devi v Shekhar Kapoor And Ors. (1994). DLT (Vol. 57 (1995), p. 154). Retrieved from http://indiankanoon.org/doc/793946/

[27]The conditions under which this license were obtained speak eloquently to the ills of the current copyright system. According to Phoolan Devi’s lawyer, the noted advocate Indira Jaisingh, the contract was signed by Phoolan Devi while she was behind prison bars. She did not speak or understand Hindi or English and only spoke in a local dialect. The copyright contract was written entirely in English and gave her a paltry sum or Rs. 2 lakh – which was a pittance considering the budget and projected returns from the film. Jaisingh, I., 2001. Supreme Court lawyer Indira Jaisingh pays tribute to Phoolan Devi. Available at: http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/jul/26spec.htm [Accessed June 10, 2011]. Arundhati Roy’s two superb critiques of the film and its director movingly capture why this is not a simple case of copyright assignment. See Roy, A., 1994. The Great Indian Rape Trick - I. Sawnet. Available at: http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq1.html [Accessed June 10, 2011].; Roy, A., 1994. The Great Indian Rape Trick - II. Sawnet. Available at: http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/roy_bq2.html [Accessed June 10, 2011].

[28]Ibid, Roy, A., 1994. The Great Indian Rape Trick - I.

[29]Ibid, Roy, A., 1994. The Great Indian Rape Trick - II

[30]Section 57 of the Act reads “Author’s Special Rights: ‘Independently of the author's copyright and even after the assignment either wholly or partially of the said copyright, the author of a work shall have the right-

(a) to claim authorship of the work; and
(b) to restrain or claim damages in respect of any distortion, mutilation, modification or other act in relation to the said work which is done before the expiration of the term of copyright if such distortion, mutilation, modification or other act would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation:”

[31]The case was later settled out of court with Phoolan Devi being able to secure a substantially higher compensation. Ultimately, the case was not about the depiction of rape generally, but primarily about Phoolan Devi’s sovereign right to decide the terms on which her own life would be represented.

[32]Manisha Koirala v Shashilal Nair & Ors. (2002). BomCR (Vol. 2003 (2), p. 136). Retrieved from http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1913646/

[33]Ibid

[34]Anon, 2011. High Court Grants Injunction Till June 7 Against Publishing Book on Jayalalithaa. The Hindu, p.01. Available at: http://www.hindu.com/2011/04/27/stories/2011042762360100.htm [Accessed May 12, 2011].

[35]For a more dispersed account on the concept of the ‘public’ under Indian law, See Iyengar, P, ‘Where the private and the public collide’, iCommons Lab Report, September- October 2007, pp. 7-8, Icommons.org, < http://archive.icommons.org/articles/what-is-public> last visited May 2011

[36]Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2010 http://prsindia.org/uploads/media/Copyright%20Act/Copyright%20Bill%202010.pdf

[37]See Sivasubramania Iyer v. S.H. Krishnaswamy AIR 1981 Ker 57 , a case under Kerala Buildings (Lease & Rent Control) Act 1965.

[38]Goods purchased for the private use of a corporation would be goods purchased for the ”personal use” of the corporation. 158 IC 703.

[39]52(1)(g), (h) and (i)

[40]52(1)(k) and (l)

[41]52(1)(l)

[42]52(1)(za)

[43]AIR 1989 Bom 331, 1989 (2) BomCR 433, (1989) 91 BOMLR 139 <http://indiankanoon.org/doc/858705/>

[44]Ibid.

[45]At first glance this distinction may seem facile since even Manisha Koirala invoked ‘reputational harm’ as a prop to buttress her property claim. However, I believe this case was complicated by the fact that the court had to consider whether the display of someone else’s body could have implicated Manisha Koirala’s privacy/dignity. Koirala was, in effect, arguing that she had absolute ‘proprietorial’ control over all representations of her body – a property argument which the court was unwilling to concede.

[46]See Footnote 90 and accompanying text in Samuelson, P., 2000. Privacy as Intellectual Property? SSRN eLibrary; Stanford Law Review. Available at: http://ssrn.com/paper=239412 [Accessed on June 14, 2011].

[47]Lebatard, F.-R., Copyright Enforcement and the Protection of Privacy in France. Translegal. Available at: http://www.translegal.com/feature-articles/copyright-enforcement-and-the-protection-of-privacy-in-france [Accessed June 14, 2011].

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy/copyright-enforcement

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation

praskrishna — 2011-07-21T06:00:39Z

Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08; When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011; Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad; Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.

LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.

Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.

Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop

LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.

Bridging the Gap: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.
Paradigms of Practice:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.
Feet on the Ground: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.

Workshop Outcomes

The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.

Participation Guidelines

LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:

Name:
Institutional affiliation and title:
Address:
Email address:
Phone number:
A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)
Statement of interest (max. 350 words)
Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)
Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)
Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)
Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)

Notes:

Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at locatingInternets@cis-india.org
Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation.
Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.
Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.
A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.

Chairs: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;

Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University

Supported by: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad

Experts:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop

NTP 2011 Objective: Broadband

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-07-26T10:09:17Z

The Indian government has to choose between accessible, affordable services and short-term revenue, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on June 2, 2011.

Apart from the scams, confused ideas are roiling India’s telecom sector. One instance is the finance ministry urging spectrum auctions to collect Rs 30,000 crore to help bridge the fiscal deficit. Another is the Ashok Chawla committee recommending spectrum auctions for transparency, making transparency the criterion for managing spectrum. The committee apparently does not mention the disastrous US auction, and attributes the UK fiasco to extraneous reasons; presumably, they knew the facts. Such issues need logical and systematic remedies. Otherwise, the success of the telecom sector will degenerate into yet another failure.

Objectives: the transaction should be structured in the public interest;
A life-cycle analysis of costs and benefits, and not just windfall revenues (since short-term cash drives the finance ministry’s concerns, it is important for the ministry and the government to step back and consider alternatives, such as the sale of BSNL’s vast real estate. If the goal is ubiquitous and affordable broadband, this would be much less damaging to the public interest than spectrum auctions); and
End-to-end solutions are required from an integrated systems perspective.

The New Telecom Policy ’11

For the New Telecom Policy 2011 (NTP ’11), the first requirement is to define convergent goals. We could take a leaf from countries with excellent broadband that built high-quality next generation networks. While the US and UK have strong initiatives, Japan, Sweden, South Korea and Finland have highly rated broadband. Australia and Singapore are now building next-generation networks. Both are common-access, open-to-all service providers.

Spectrum Management

In India we must begin with unravelling the mess of spectrum management. There are two separate skeins. Legacy issues of irregularities and scams form one stream, to be dealt with by the process of law. On the other hand, policies for next-generation networks need a process of stakeholder workouts to deliver services. Broadly, there are two ways of approaching spectrum management. One is to allocate specified bands for exclusive use, as was customary until now. An alternative is to create a common spectrum pool for use by all service providers. In other words, any provider can dynamically access spectrum for carrying voice, image and/or data. This method of dynamic spectrum access is now feasible, and the US is starting off with TV white space. The Federal Communications Commission has appointed nine companies including Spectrum Bridge and Google as database administrators; a tenth, Microsoft, is under consideration. India could start out on this if the government chooses the objective of accessible and affordable services.

Network vs Revenue

The choice is between building/configuring a high-quality, least-cost network and high short-term government collections. Over a longer period, a restrained approach emphasising networks and services is likely to be superior to aggressive government fees, as we found with NTP ’99 — revenue sharing resulted in explosive growth together with higher collections than the amount foregone from licence fees (see data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General2).

How can the government evaluate this trade-off? The diagram below outlines alternative approaches to spectrum allocation and the likely outcomes. The outcomes should be evaluated as public interest costs and benefits.

The first step is to choose between exclusive spectrum use and common access. Exclusive use entails allocation through auctions; methods like first come, first served (FCFS); or “beauty contests”, for example, the evaluation of stipulated criteria such as technology, financial capacity and so on. Auctions are transparent. Common access, too, is completely transparent, provided the usage and payment systems have integrity.

If there are few operators (three or four), each can be allocated 20 MHz or more for exclusive use. In such circumstances, the relative merits are not obvious. However, in an emerging economy like India – without a ubiquitous network and with too little spectrum distributed among many operators – the logical choice for efficient spectrum management is common access.

Auctions often lead to service deprivation because of high costs (the “winner’s curse”). However, there are exceptions, where bidding is kept reasonable, as in Finland, or France because of its timing, after the fiasco of the European auctions. The other alternatives, FCFS or beauty contests, can result in low or high costs depending on government policies. High fees ratchet up costs with windfall gains to government in the short term, but users are deprived of these funds for networks and services. For example, in India, while the government collected nearly Rs 1,03,000 crore for 3G and broadband wireless access auctions, new facilities and services have been slow. Instead, this spectrum is largely used to support 2G users.

Low fees would have improved the odds of high-quality and low-cost facilities, affordable pricing, and better coverage. The government, however, would have lost its short-term windfall gains.

Once the government sets the objective of affordable, high-quality services, the next steps will be:

Spectrum allocation and management

The decision criteria are:

Technology: The rationale for optimal channel width is that with lower capital cost there is greater throughput with a 20 MHz band than with several smaller bands.
Economics: The capital cost of shared facilities through common access is far lower than if each operator invested in separate access networks.
Practical results: High-quality broadband in countries like Japan, Sweden and South Korea was built without spectrum auctions.
Carbon footprint and resources: Both are minimised with shared facilities, such as towers and equipment.

These reasons make common spectrum the logical choice, as against auctions for exclusive allocations.

Common network

A common network is, therefore, a logical and environmentally sound choice. The question is how best to own and operate it.

Notes

E.g. see: "Winner’s Curse", Chris Anderson, Wired, May ’02:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/change.html
Trai’s estimate of foregone revenues by March ’07: under Rs 20,000 crore: “Indicators for Telecom Growth”, Trai, ’05: http://www.trai.gov.in/trai/upload/StudyPapers/2/ir30june.pdf
Revenue share collections by March ’07: Rs 40,000 crore; by March ’10: Rs 80,000 crore: "Performance Audit Report on the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology", http://saiindia.gov.in/cag/union-audit/report-no-19-performance-audit-issue-licences-and-allocation-2g-spectrum-department-tele

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/ntp-2011-objective

Comments on the draft National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

pranesh — 2011-08-24T06:32:55Z

A draft of the 'National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy', which some hope will be the open data policy of India, was made available for public comments in early May. This is what the Centre for Internet and Society submitted.

These are the comments that we at the Centre for Internet and Society submitted to the National Spatial Data Infrastructure on the draft National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy.

Comments on the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy by the Centre for Internet and Society

We would like to begin by noting our appreciation for the forward-thinking nature of the government that is displayed by its pursuit of a policy on sharing of governmental data and enabling its use by citizens. We believe such a policy is a necessity in all administratively and technologically mature democracies. In particular, we applaud the efforts to make this applicable through a negative list of data that shall not be shared rather than a positive list of data that shall be shared, hence making sharing the default position. However, we believe that there are many ways in which this policy can be made even better than it already is.

1. Name

We believe that nomenclature of the policy must accurately reflect both the content of the policy as well as prevailing usage of terms. Given that 'accessibility' is generally used to mean accessibility for persons with disabilities, it is advisable to change the name of the policy.

Recommendation:

A. We would recommend calling this the "National Open Data Policy" to reflect the nomenclature already established for similar policies in other nations like the UK. In the alternative, it could be called a "National Public Sector Information Reuse Policy". If neither of those are acceptable, then it could be re-titled the "National Data Sharing and Access Policy".

2. Scope and Enforceability

It is unclear from the policy what all departments it covers, and whether it is enforceable.

Recommendation:

A. This policy should cover the same scope as the Right to Information (RTI) Act: all 'public authorities' as defined under the RTI Act should be covered by this policy.

B. Its enforceability should be made clear by including provisions on consequences of non-compliance.

3. Categorization

The rationale for the three-fold categorization is unclear. In particular, it is unclear why the category of 'registered access' exists, and on what basis the categorization into 'open access' and 'registered access' is to be done. If the purpose of registration is to track usage, there are many better ways of doing so without requiring registration.

Recommendation:

A. Having three categories of:

Open data
Partially restricted data
Restricted data

B. Data that is classified as non-shareable (as per a reading of s.8 and s.9 of RTI Act as informed by the decisions of the Central Information Commission) should be classified as ‘restricted’.

C. The rationale for classifying data as 'open' or 'partially restricted' should be how the data collection body is funded. If it depends primarily on public funds, then the data it outputs should necessarily be made fully open. If it is funded primarily through private fees, then the data may be classified as 'partially restricted'. 'Partially restricted' data may be restricted for non-commercial usage, with registration and/or a licence being required for commercial usage.

4. Licence

No licence has been prescribed in the policy for the data. Despite India not allowing for database rights, it still allows for copyright over original literary works, which includes original databases. All governmental works are copyrighted by default in India, just as they are in the UK. To ensure that this policy goes beyond merely providing access to data to ensure that people are able to use that data, it must provide for a conducive copyright licence.

Recommendation:

A. The licence that has been created by the UK government (another country in which all governmental works are copyrighted by default) may be referred to: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/

B. However, the UK needed to draft its own licence because the concept of database rights are recognized in the EU, which is not an issue here in India. Thus, it would be preferable to use the Open Data Commons - Attribution licence:

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/

The UK licence is compatible with both the above-mentioned licence as well as with the Creative Commons - Attribution licence, and includes many aspects that are common with Indian law, e.g., bits on usage of governmental emblems, etc.

5. Integrity of the data

Currently, there is no way of ensuring that the data that is put out by the data provider is indeed the data that has been downloaded by a citizen.

Recommendation:

It is imperative to require data providers to provide integrity checks (via an MD5 hash of the data files, for instance) to ensure that technological corruption of the data can be detected.

6. Authenticity of the data

Currently, there is no way of ensuring that the data that is put out by the data provider indeed comes from the data provider.

Recommendation:

It is preferable to require data providers to authenticate the data by using a digital signature.

7. Archival and versioning

The policy is silent on how long data must be made available.

Recommendation:

There must be a system of archival that is prescribed to enable citizens to access older data. Further, a versioning and nomenclature system is required alongside the metadata to ensure that citizens know the period that the data pertains to, and have access to the latest data by default.

8. Open standards

While the document does mention standards-compliance, it is preferable to require open standards to the greatest extent possible, and require that the data that is put out be compliant with the Interoperability Framework for e-Governance (IFEG) that the government is currently in the process of drafting and finalizing.

Recommendation:

A. The policy should reference the National Open Standards Policy that was finalised by the Department of Information Technology in November 2010, as well as to the IFEG.

B. The data should be made available, insofar as possible, in structured documents with semantic markup, which allows for intelligent querying of the content of the document itself. Before settling upon a usage-specific semantic markup schema, well-established XML schemas should be examined for their suitability and used wherever appropriate. It must be ensured that the metadata are also in a standardized and documented format.

9. Citizen interaction

One of the most notable failings of other governments' data stores has been the fact that they don't have adequate interaction with the citizen projects that emerge from that data. For instance, it is sometimes seen that citizens may point out flaws in the data put out by the government. At other times, citizens may create very useful and interesting projects on the basis of the data made public by the government.

Recommendation:

A. The government's primary datastore (data.gov.in) should catalogue such citizen projects, including open and documented APIs that the have been made available for easy access to that data.

B. Additionally the primary datastore should act as a conduit for citizen's comments and corrections to the data provider. Data providers should be required to take efforts to keep the data up-to-date.

C. Multiple forms of access should preferably be provided to data, to allow non-technical users interactive use of the data through the Web.

10. Principles, including 'Protection of Intellectual Property'

It is unclear why ‘protection of intellectual property’ is one of the guiding principles of this policy. Only those ideals which are promoted by this policy should be designated as ‘principles’. This policy, insofar as we can see, has no relation whatsoever with protection of intellectual property. The government is not seeking to enforce copyright over the data through this policy. Indeed, it is seeking to encourage the use of public data. Indeed, the RTI Act makes it clear in s.9 that government copyright shall not act as a barrier to access to information.

Given that, it makes no sense to include ‘protection of intellectual property’ amongst the principles guiding this policy. Further, there are some other principles that may be removed without affecting the purpose or aim of this document: ‘legal conformity’ (this is a given since a policy wouldn’t wish to violate laws); ‘formal responsibility’ (‘accountability’ encapsulates this); ‘professionalism’ (‘accountability’ encapsulates this); ‘security’ (this policy isn’t about promoting security, though it needs to take into account security concerns).

Recommendation:

A. Remove ‘protection of intellectual property’, ‘legal conformity’, ‘formal responsibility’, ‘professionalism’, and ‘security’ from the list of principles in para 1.2.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/draft-ndsap-comments

Your cyber space is a hackers paradise

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T00:58:21Z

It Looks like hackers are having a ball targeting all kinds of websites — gaming, news, government, personal email and even those run by terror networks, writes Shayan Ghosh. The article was published in Mail Today on June 6, 2011.

After Sony PlayStation Network and Gmail breaches this week, the latest is an attack on Sony Pictures.

The hackers who broke into the Sony Pictures website have collected private information such as passwords and email identities.

"A group of criminal hackers known as LulzSec claimed to have breached some of our websites," CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Michael Lynton said.

LulzSec, involved in the hacking of several leading US media firms last month, however, has another story to tell. The group blamed Sony Pictures for carelessness.

"Every bit of data we took wasnt encrypted. Sony stored over 10 lakh passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it is just a matter of taking it." "We broke into SonyPictures. com and compromised over 10 lakh users personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony data associated with their accounts.

Among other things, we also compromised all administration details of Sony Pictures ( including passwords) along with 75,000 music codes and 3.5 million coupons", the group said in a post on Pastebin. com . Google mail, too, was breached this week and the hackers gained access to email accounts of hundreds of people, including senior US government officials and journalists. Google confirmed that Gmail accounts were hacked." We recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing,” the search, cloud and net tech giant said on its blog.

Asked about reports that Gmail accounts of some Indian diplomats based in China had been hacked, Google declined to comment, saying it had no data of any specific people whose accounts have been hacked.

But the company pointed fingers at China.

"This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan in China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users, including senior US government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries ( predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists, among others," a posting on the companys official blog said.

Indian experts, too, blame Chinese hackers. "China poses a serious threat to our national security as these hacking issues dont just seem to stop," Ahmedabadbased cybercrime consultant Sunny Vaghela said.

The hackers probably targeted Gmail because of the number of users they have, Vaghela added.

All regimes have now started implementing surveillance mechanisms on the Internet. This is a disturbing trend all over the world.

China has supremacy on it mainly because they are an early adopter of Internet surveillance and content filtering mechanisms,” a software consultant based in Bangalore, Anivar Aravind, said.

"Its become more about proving a point. Hackers want to tell people that I can hack into your system and show its vulnerability," Center for Internet and Society director of research in Bangalore Nishant Shah said.

But LulzSec has its own logic: "Our goal here is not to come across as master hackers… Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?"

Online Safety Measures

Secure your Email:

Change passwords often
Use the Gmail feature to check your “ last account activity”. It shows the IP address ( denoting a specific computer) used to access your email
Do not open unknown email attachments
Do not store sensitive and personal data in email accounts

Things to Avoid

Do not visit unknown sites; Use different passwords for different accounts
Do not divulge credit card numbers over emails or on social networks
Keep track of your credit/ debit card account
For online transactions use encrypted websites. Look for SSL certificate or padlock icon

Read the original published by Mail Today here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/cyber-space-hackers-paradise

Technology, Transparency and Accountability: A Bar-Camp in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-06-06T06:30:09Z

Accountability Initiative (AI) held a bar-camp on “Technology, Transparency and Accountability” on 5th June at Google office in Gurgaon. Pranesh Prakash participated in this bar-camp.

The camp brought together technology enthusiasts, coders, hackers and policy-thinkers together in a collaborative environment to develop innovative solutions to accountability and transparency challenges in India.

Agenda

10:00 AM - Introduction
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Combined sessions at the cafe
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM - Breakout sessions in the various rooms and demo sessions in the cafe
1:30 PM - Lunch
2:30 - 5:30 PM - Breakout sessions in the various rooms and demo session in the cafe
5:30 - 6:30 PM - Deciding the future of the camp and creating blueprints for further collaboration
6:30 PM - Ending session

Some of the topics being talked about thus far

Social accountability tools and how can technology be used for this?

Public finance tracking and PAISA
Participatory budgeting
Participatory research for tracking outcomes
Citizen report cards
Social audits

Open Data and why it is important for transparency

Where can you find government data
Scraping government data using Needle Base
Why is visualization important?
Some examples of how open Data is changing the world
Akshara's work at the Karnataka Learning Partnership and the need for open educational data.
Data-mashups
The draft policy on open data in India
One stop govt ports

Technology innovations for improving the Right to Information

A wishlist
Shouldn't the replies to RTI be in the public domain?
Filing an RTI: Problems and Prospects
RTI Question and Answer Portal
How do you file an RTI though an SMS?

Egovernance initiatives that are leading to greater accountability and transparency

Mahima Kaul - Digital Empowerment Foundation

Making the links between politics and businesses transparent

Rohit Chandra

Electoral accountability

‘Improving and Strengthening Democracy in India’ - Lessons from Election Watch Process

Crowd-sourcing actionable data

An example of crowd-sourcing - Powercuts.in

Transparency in diplomacy

Using online tools to engage and be engaged by the public.

How should we look at technology when dealing with grassroots situations?

How can programmers help in making governance more transparent?

Perspectives from the Government

Perspectives from the NIC
Perspectives from the NEGP
Perspectives from the Office of Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations.

Making conversation: citizens and their government

Making visual sense of Data and Policy

Policy to Practice: From the lab and to the people

How can legislators and parliamentarians and MPs be tracked by citizens?

Research Tools to work with large amounts of data

Other interesting ideas that have come up

Panini Keypad - Mr Abhijit Bhattacharjee
How Ashok Leyland dealt with its problems of too many layers between the customer on the ground and the top management - Its implications for the government

The Speakers

Nikhil Dey - Nikhil Dey has done more to fight for the rights of people than he will ever allow the world to find out. Always far from the spotlight, he has worked quietly to shape legislation, lobby governments and politicians and build grassroots campaigns.Born in 1963 in the city of Bangalore, Nikhil was educated in India and the US. Before the formal completion of his graduate course at the George Mason University, he left to ‘follow his bliss' and came to India. His initial work was with the Kheduth Mazdoor Chetna Sangathan in Madhya Pradesh. He then joined Aruna Roy and Shankar Singh in 1987 to go to a village called Devdungri in Rajsamand district, Rajasthan. Devdungri was soon to become the head office of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a peasants-workers-women organisation founded by the trio in 1990. He currently is the Convener of the National Campaign for People's Right to Information.

Shri Sailesh Gandhi - Shailesh Gandhi is one among the handful of people whose dogged perseverance has demonstrated that the Right to Information Act is a valuable tool that can be used by ordinary people to resolve issues and to clean up public life. Currently one of the Information Commissioners of India, Mr Gandhi is a graduate from IIT-Mumbai and first-generation entrepreneur.

Prof Trilochan Sastry - Prof Trilochan Sastry has a Bachelors in Technology from IIT, Delhi, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA. He taught for several years at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad after which he moved to IIM, Bangalore. He is currently Dean at IIM Bangalore. He has taught in other Universities in India, Japan, Hong Kong and United States and has published several academic papers in Indian and International journals. Has received national award for research and teaching. He was part of the cofounding team of ADR India in 1999.

GVL Narasimha Rao: Rao is a well known Psephologist who has been predicting Indian elections for two decades for various leading media organisations in the country. He is the founder of Development & Research Services Pvt. Ltd., a leading research organisation offering professional research services for various governmental, international and commercial organisations. Formerly, he was a Columnist for MINT newspaper and regularly writes in various newspapers on politics and elections.

Rao is presently Media Adviser to Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh in the rank of a state minister. He is also a member of the BJP’s National Committee on Electoral Reforms under the guidance of BJP’s senior Leader Mr. L.K. Advani.

Rao is President of VeTA (Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability) and has organised various efforts in highlighting the lack of transparency and verifiability in Indian EVMs. He has authored a book titled “Democracy at Risk! Can We Trust Our EVMs?” which became the intellectual basis for the campaign for EVM reform. He had highlighted the vulnerabilities of India’s EVMs in a round table international Electronic Voting Workshop in Washington D.C. last year which was also attended by the Election Commission of India. Rao has blogged extensively on the vulnerabilities of EVMs at www.indianEVM.com which exerted huge pressure on the Election Commission of India and even served as an eye opener for laying bare hitherto unknown vulnerabilities (brought out by the research of Hari Prasad et al.) and raising uncomfortable questions regarding the pitfalls in EVM procurement, storage and field administration.

Mahima Kaul - Mahima Kaul is a writer/journalist and has worked with different formats - print, video and online. She has written for The Indian Express, Sunday Guardian, PBS World Focus and also worked on video programming for Al Jazeera and PBS. She was the India producer for PBS's special coverage on the Mumbai Terror Attacks, which was nominated for an Emmy Award. She has a blog that has been picked up by (among others) OpenDemocracy, Global Voices, Huffington Post and Ground Report.

She is deeply involved in ICT4D -- Information and Communication Technologies for Development -- sector. She has worked with Video Volunteers, a community media organization, and helped launch India's first community TV channel, India Unheard. She is a consultant with the Digital Empowerment Foundation where she manages the Digital Knowledge Center, the first information portal in India on best practices in ICT4D. Mahima has also established The Open Communication Foundation as a multidisciplinary platform devoted to ICT4D.

Rohit Chandra - Rohit Chandra is an engineering graduate currently doing research in the areas of power, energy and natural resources at the Centre for Policy Research. He will be discussing a nascent idea at the Accountability Initiative which hopes to map the links between businesses and politicians.

Sukhman Randhawa - Sukhman has completed her Masters in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK and has obtained a BA in English Literature (Hons.) from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University. She is also an honorary fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. She has worked as a Research Associate at the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), a high level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India, on the focus areas of Higher Education, Libraries, National Portal for Teachers, National Environment Portal, National Biodiversity Portal, Quality of Life, and worked on compiling the final report of the Commission. At NKC, she also worked with State Governments for implementation of NKC recommendations and preparing blueprints for action. She has also worked with IL&FS Education and Technology Services Ltd in Delhi. Currently she is working at the Office of Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations.

Gautam John - Gautam used to be a lawyer with a focus on copyright laws and has also been an entrepreneur. He is passionate about education, equality and equity and focuses on 'access' as a way to achieve these. Gautam was a TED India Fellow in 2009 and is a Creative Commons supporter. He works with the Akshara Foundation where he manages the Karnataka Learning Partnership project, Pratham Books and is an advisor to Inclusive Planet. He is a founder member of Wikimedia Chapter (India) and currently serves as Secretary on the Executive Committee.

The Karnataka Learning Partnership is a multi-party, multi-stakeholder platform to bring transparency in the public preschool and primary education space. Karnataka Learning Partnership is also a public space where citizens can contribute to the cause of ensuring better schools and schooling for our children.

Raman Jit Singh Chima - is a senior analyst, Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google, India.

Pranesh Prakash - Pranesh Prakash is a programme manager with the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit research and advocacy organization. He is a lawyer by training who's comfortable at a bash prompt. He works mostly around issues of intellectual property rights reform, promoting IP alternatives and transparency through different kinds of 'opennesses'—open standards, free/open source software, open government data, open access to law—as well as issues of freedom of speech and expression and privacy that relate to the Internet.

Last year, Pranesh along with Glover Wright, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah, prepared a report around open government data (OGD) in India as part of a series of studies commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative . In that report they looked at the existing ecosystem in terms of data practices, the policy environment (RTI, copyright, standards, NeGP, NKC's recommendations, etc.) , and specific OGD case studies of governmental organizations, civil society organizations, public-private partnerships, and civic hackers. The report then charts out challenges any campaign for OGD in India must address, as well as observations on how the very conceptualization of OGD must be different in India, and strategic recommendations on how to grow the OGD movement in India.

Rishabh Verma - A Python enthusiast, FOSS contributor,loves data mining and is always upto finding unusual patterns in large datasets. Organizer of Tech & Entrepreneurial events, he digs data-contextualization books when he should rather be preparing for his board exams.

Thejesh N - Thejesh GN is a Technologist. His area of interests are web, Open Data and Open Source technologies. He moonlights visualizing public data. He loves blogging and hacking open source software. You can find more about him here.

Chakshu Roy - Chakshu is a lawyer who specialised in real estate law and commercial agreements before joining PRS. He has earlier worked in corporate law with the Chamber of Law, New Delhi. He holds bachelors degrees in Commerce and Law from Delhi University. Chakshu Roy heads technology initiatives at PRS Legislative research, developing a comprehensive technology strategy to engage large sections of the Indian population in policy making.

Vinay Kumar - Vinay Kumar is the chief strategist at Digital Greens. He currently manage operations of Digital Green and contribute to its organizational development. He is also a consultant to Translational Health Science & Technology Institute (THSTI) at Department of Biotechnology. Prior to this he was at India Operations Director at PATH and Regional Operations Manager for Asia / Near East with IntraHealth International. Earlier he was with the Reserve Bank of India. I have an MA in Political Science and M. Phil. in International Relations from JNU and MBA from FMS.

Manu Srivastava - Manu Srivastava works as Vice President - Delivery at eGovernment Foundation, a not-for-profit trust that was founded in Feb 2003 by Nandan Nilekani & Srikanth Nadhamuni with a goal of creating an eGovernance system to improve the functioning of City Municipalities leading to better delivery of services to their citizens. He has been in the field of Municipal Governance for the last 7 years and focusses on supply side, with the Municipal Governments, to create sustainable, efficient, transparent and accountable Municipalities. eGovernments Solutions have been deployed in more than 250 municipalities across the country.

Dinesh Shenoy - Dinesh Shenoy is a business developer at Palantir. Palantir is a firm believer in the fact that well-informed citizens lead to better government, and making government data available is certainly an important first step. In practice, however, information is scattered across countless domains, and combining such widely dispersed knowledge in a meaningful way is a technical challenge beyond any private citizen's capabilities. Palantir has eliminated this barrier, democratizing the data and providing the tools to place a new world of analysis at your fingertips.

Palantir has developed AnalyzeThe.US which allows anyone to to explore vast amounts of data, including key datasets from www.data.gov. It brings critical knowledge together on a single stage, while providing rich analytical applications that enable anyone to develop an intuitive picture of the complex flow of resources, money, and influence that affect how our government functions. Ultimately, by allowing citizens to analyze our democracy, AnalyzeThe.US democratizes analysis.

Paul Culmsee - Paul Culmsee is a dialog mapper based in Perth, Australia. He has faciliated a number of meetings and done lot of dialog mapping particularly for the public sector in the areas of urban planning and health. He is the only certified dialog-mapper in the Southern hemisphere. He has also dialog-mapped politicians. His work has culminated in soon to be released book called "Beyond Best Practices", which outlines IBIS based techniques - a radically inclusive approach to knowledge management that allows groups to capture and make sense of unstructured knowledge during project meetings. and case studies. The book goes beyond the tool of mapping and the concept of wicked problems to look at what is needed to create and maintain a "holding environment".

Frederick Noronha - Frederick Noronha is a journalist, writer, publisher and photographer from Goa, India. He is known for online community building, and for promoting the cause of Free Software in India. Among the other campaigns he has been actively associated with are the successful community radio campaign, right to information initiatives, sharable content (including the information commons, Creative Commons, Wikipedia). He has been active in mailing lists within India, and has undertaken blogging assignments in Uganda, Malaysia and Thailand. He is on twitter at @fn and shares his links via Facebook and del.icio.us (fredericknoronha)

Nikhil Pahwa - Nikhil Pahwa is a media junkie, journalist and a blogger. He has covered the digital media business for more than 3 years. He has helped bringing a pan-media perspective to digital media reportage, highlighting industry issues, identifying opportunities and problems, and questioning the efficacy of decisions being made by some large media companies. Nikhil Pahwa undoubtedly is one of the popular names in the business of digital media coverage. Companies referMedianama for the latest breaking news in the digital media industry.

Kohl Singh Gill - Dr. Kohl S. Gill is the President and founder of LaborVoices, Inc. Dr. Gill served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow for the U.S. Departments of Energy and State, most recently as the South Asia and Middle East Labor Affairs Officer for the Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Prior to federal service, Dr. Gill was an Indicorps Fellow in the slum areas of Delhi, India, serving as a volunteer paralegal with local residents, using transparency legislation to fight both petty and grand corruption at the local level. Dr. Gill is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, for his work in quantum computing and semiconductor physics.

Aaditya Dar, Dhruv Suri and Ritwik Agrawal - Aaditya, Dhruv and Ritwik are interested in exploring and evolving innovative interventions to improve governance in India. They have varied backgrounds - economics, policy research, law, advocacy [and even math!] and have worked together in the past on education and governance related issues as part of United Students.

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya is a development professional with hands-on experience in institution development, development research, communication systems and grassroots networking. He has considerable experience in developing systems and platforms for enabling enterprise support. Vijay is an Electrical Engineering Graduate with a Post-Graduation in Management from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, M.P., India. Vijay is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ekgaon.

The other speakers were:

Vivek Joshi
Siddhant
Mudit Tuli
Ankit Rastogi
Nirmesh Singh
Manish Shekhar
Shashank S
Mandira
Tonushree
Shomikho Raha

The rationale behind the camp

Founded in 2008, AI is a research initiative that aims to improve the quality of public services in India by promoting informed and accountable governance. To this end, one of AI's key efforts is to develop innovative models for tracking government led social sector programs in India. The Centre for Policy Research, an independent and non-partisan research institute and think-tank, is the institutional anchor for this initiative.

It is now widely accepted that greater transparency – access to information and data on the day to day functioning of government – is key to creating accountable and effective governance systems. The Right to Information Act (2005) has played a significant role in strengthening transparency by committing the government to both proactively providing citizens with information and also responding to specific information requests. While the Act has met much success – RTI applications are growing by the day - there remain concerns related to quality, and reliability of information and data provided. Moreover, there are still many gaps in the Government’s efforts to proactively disclose information and data of public relevance.

Technology is one of many tools that can help address these gaps. There are some incredible initiatives taking place across the world on opening government data and on getting data to work for ordinary citizens. [See below for a sample of initiatives] Through the bar camp, we hope to create a platform for technologists to share these technologies and contribute to the debate on strengthening accountability and transparency.

Equally, we believe that technology solutions can be significantly enhanced if they are developed in consultation with people working on the ground, people who deal with the challenges of our current governance systems in India. By organizing a bar camp, we at AI want to initiate a conversation between technology specialists and people working on the ground. Through the bar camp, we intend to create a space where people can share their knowledge about how best to use new technologies to make our government really work for the people.

Online conversations

To faciliate conversations between interested people and for people who are interested in being a part of the planning process, we created a Google-Group. To send in your suggestions for the camp, both on what you would like to hear, and on what sessions you would like to take, you can use the google-group or send in your entries through our Facebookpage, our Twitter handle or through comments on this blog post. Our entry on the official bar-camp page is here. To tweet about us please use the hash-tag #TAC1.

Do you need more ideas?

To spark your thought processes, we consolidated a list of websites which deal with "Technology, Accountabilty and Transparency". Have fun!

A compendium of ideas from across the world can be found here.
The Sunlight Foundation does some excellent work on technology and transparency issues.
The technology for transparency network maps technology initiatives across the world.
Code for America brings together techies from across the world to use their skills for the greater common good.
Civics Common is another organization working on using technology for common good, and this involves a lot of transparent data.

For any other information, please contact lemmanuel @ accountabilityindia.org.

See the entire details on the Accountability Initiative website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/notices/technology-transparency-accountability

The Present — and Future — Dangers of India's Draconian New Internet Regulations

anja — 2011-08-02T07:22:24Z

The uproar surrounding India's Internet Control Rules makes clear that in the Internet age, as before, the active chilling of freedom of expression by the state is unacceptable in a democracy. Yet if India's old censorship regimes are to be maintained in this new context, the state will have little choice but to do just that. Are we ready to rethink the ways in which we deal with free speech and censorship as a society? Asks Anja Kovacs in this article, published in Caravan, 1 June 2011.

WHAT ACTUALLY DEFINES A DEMOCRACY? It is a trickier question than it first seems, and yet it is worthwhile, at least every now and then, to remind ourselves of what constitutes the political system we hold so dear. Free and fair elections; an independent legislative, executive and judiciary; and freedom of the press—these are all vital ingredients. But what may be democracy’s defining element, or at least its sine qua non, is the right to freedom of opinion and expression: without this equal right to “seek, receive and impart information”, as the universal declaration of Human Rights frames it, a system of governance of the people, for the people and by the people simply remains meaningless. Without a free flow of information, democracy does not exist.

It is with good reason, then, that bloggers, tech enthusiasts and watchdogs from civil society have been up in arms over two new sets of rules, notified in April 2011, that will impact every Indian’s Internet use. Formulated by the Central Government under powers conferred to it by the IT (Amendment) Act 2008, one set governs what is known as the liability of intermediaries. This determines in which cases, and to what extent, companies ranging from Google and Facebook to local Internet service providers (ISPs) are legally responsible for the content that you upload.

The second set of rules pertains to cybercafes. In a manner reminiscent of the licence Raj, there are new registration standards for these establishments, which go beyond the usual requirements for commercial enterprises and include detailed procedures to identify all users. Cybercafes will be required to maintain and submit, on a monthly basis, logs that detail the use of all computers in the cafe and to keep backups of all users’ browser histories, to be maintained for at least one year.

There is much that is wrong with these rules, but what makes them such a particular threat to freedom of expression? Some effects are likely to be indirect: for example, the Internet has the potential to emerge as an important avenue for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to express and discuss concerns so rarely taken into account by the mainstream media. But by putting into place stringent identification requirements for cybercafe users, who are likely to be less well-off, the access of underprivileged users in particular will be further constrained. Moreover, the combination of the need for identification with the requirement for cybercafes to keep a log of every user’s browser history means that anonymity online is now effectively made impossible in India. For whistleblowers, artists, writers or anyone desiring anonymity, there is no longer a place in Indian cyberspace.

But the most troubling impact on freedom of expression of the new mandates remains direct: in their attempt to delineate the liability of Internet providers and websites, the new rules for “intermediary due diligence” actually add important new curbs on freedom of expression to Indian law. India’s Constitution recognises a fairly extensive list of so-called “reasonable restrictions” and these are more or less replicated in the Rules: “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”. But the Rules, which were never vetted by Parliament, do not limit themselves to these Constitutional provisions. Rather surprisingly, they add a whole new slew of qualifications, many of which are so vague, moreover, that they leave the door wide open to abuse. Thus, for example, the Rules impose a blanket ban on impersonation and make it illegal to share any information that is “grossly harmful”, “harassing”, “blasphemous”, “disparaging” or “insulting any other nation”. None of these terms have been explained or defined.

Lacking the precision that would allow citizens to precisely regulate their behaviour in line with the law, overly broad regulations such as these are widely believed to have a chilling effect: in order not to violate the law, people begin to censor themselves—to keep quiet rather than protesting or engaging. But in this particular case, the effects are likely to be particularly pernicious because of a second provision made by the Rules: wherever an intermediary receives a complaint claiming that any information they store, host or publish contravenes the provisions of the Rules, the intermediary is required to take down this information within 36 hours. Censorship, in other words, will effectively be privatised.

The prospect is all the more depressing because the intermediaries have little incentive to resist participating in such censorship. Given the restrictions on free speech that are effectively enforced within Indian society by vigilante groups, especially in the last two decades, the possible impact of these rules is even more frightening. If Facebook has little reason to uphold your right to maintain a page that is critical of say, Gandhiji, what prevents vigilante groups from policing our lives online even more than they do offline? The only recourse available to the owner of the confiscated information will be going to court—meaning that defending one’s own freedom of speech online will require endless litigation.

These are worrying omens, in other words, for those who believe that freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy. But to what extent do these new provisions represent a radical break with India’s existing restrictions on free speech? Since its founding, the independent Indian nation-state has wielded censorship as a tool to both contain the conflicts that emanate from India’s tremendous diversity and to ensure its homogeneous social, moral and political development. If the list of reasonable restrictions in the Constitution is fairly long, this is because the country’s lawmakers were clear at the time of Independence that freedom of expression would need to be subordinated to the social reforms necessary to put the country on Nehru’s path to development. India’s far-reaching anti-hate speech laws, too, derive from the desire to combat ill will and disharmony. Since the Internet now makes it so much easier to publish opinions that are hurtful, or indeed “grossly harmful” or “disparaging”, the new Rules can in many ways be seen as an attempt to continue this strategy in the Internet age.

The problem, however, is that irrespective of the merits of such a strategy in the past, within the radically altered communicative context of the Internet, it is simply no longer feasible. As the Internet guru Clay Shirky has argued, earlier systems of media and communication worked on a “filter, then publish” principle. Because publishing a newspaper, for example, is expensive, editors and journalists take upon themselves the role of filtering out the “worthwhile” from the “not-so-worthwhile”. Without them making that vital differentiation between “news” and “information” on the one hand and “drivel” on the other, newspapers would simply not be viable. In the Internet age, however, this principle has been reversed. The arrival of social media especially has made it so easy and cheap for anyone to share their opinions that the mantra now is: first publish, then filter. The gatekeeper role of the traditional media stands much reduced.

For the Indian government’s strategy of using censorship as a tool to mitigate social conflict, this shift has two important consequences. The first one is quantitative: it means that there are now far more speech acts to police. That undoubtedly has made the state’s task much more difficult. But there is also a second, qualitative difference: it also means that whether the government approves of this or not, there will now be a far wider range of people who will make their voices heard, and thus, a far wider range of opinions that will be expressed in the public sphere. And it is precisely to stop such a diversity from emerging that much censorship in India has been justified over the years. As a 1980 report of the Working Group on National Film Policy argued: “if the overall objective of censorship is to safeguard generally accepted standards of morality and decency, in addition to the well recognised interests of the State, the standards of censorship applicable to freedom of expression cannot be very much ahead of the standards of behaviour commonly accepted in society. Censorship can become liberal only to the extent society itself becomes genuinely liberal”.

What such statements conveniently elide, of course, is the enormous diversity within Indian society itself. Whose standards of behaviour are they thinking of? Kashmiri, Manipuri, Chhattisgarhi? Gandhian, feminist, communist? Adivasi, Muslim, Dalit? Who represents this community of the nation? Censorship always benefits the status quo, and the Indian case has been no different. The rise of the Internet has merely revealed, with increasing frequency, cracks in the supposedly uniform moral, social and political development of India that the government envisioned. If the old censorship regime is to nevertheless be maintained in this new context, it will therefore increasingly require the active chilling of freedom of expression on the part of the state. What the uproar surrounding the Internet Control Rules makes clear is that in the Internet age, as before, this is an unacceptable route for a modern democracy. A new model to deal with diversity and dissent is urgently required.

What makes our democracy? With the undeniable challenges that the Internet throws to our established ways of operating, it is time to reopen this debate as a society, rather than leaving it to politicians and bureaucrats. The open forum of the Internet may often offend, or rattle our sensibilities and beliefs, but it also presents new possibilities for engagement and debate. Will we take this opportunity?

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-present-and-future-dangers-of-indias-draconian-new-internet-regulations

India Weighing Looser Web Rules

praskrishna — 2011-05-31T12:23:22Z

Indian authorities are considering revisions to new Internet regulations after criticism from free-speech advocates and companies like Google Inc. that fear they could be exposed to liability under the regime. This article by Amol Sharma was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 30, 2011.

The rules, which took effect in April, require Internet companies to remove objectionable content from their sites, including anything "grossly harmful" or "harassing," within 36 hours of being notified by authorities. Executives could thereafter face penalties, including stiff fines or even jail time, say lawyers who have reviewed the regulations.

The rules may soon be revised to add greater liability protections for Internet companies, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal said in an interview.

Mr. Sibal said it is fair for the government to ask Internet companies to put in place codes of conduct that restrain users from posting certain material online, as the regulations do. But he said it is "relatively unfair" to expect Internet companies—which are referred to in the rules as "intermediaries"—to be responsible for third-party content. "To make the intermediary liable for the user violating that code would, I think, not serve the larger interests of the market," Mr. Sibal said.The backlash after the rules were enacted has been growing. Civil-liberties groups are expressing fears the rules are too open to interpretation and could be used by the government to restrict free speech on the Web. The regulations represent an effort by India to get a grip on the Web without the kind of direct censorship or website-blocking practiced in countries like Iran, China and Saudi Arabia.

He said ministry officials are trying to "apply our minds and see if the regime can be made more rational."

In its defense earlier this month, India's ministry said the restrictions rightly require that Internet companies observe due diligence in order to enjoy exemption from liability for content posted by third parties. "These due diligence practices are the best practices followed internationally by well-known mega corporations operating on the Internet," the statement said.

Google was among the companies and nonprofit organizations that offered feedback on the rules before they went into effect. The Web giant unsuccessfully sought changes to limit its potential liability for third-party content and to scale back a list of banned material that it said was "too prescriptive."

The rules also require removal of content that is "ethnically objectionable," "disparaging," or that "harm[s] minors in any way."

On Monday, a Google India spokeswoman referred to a previously issued statement on the matter. "If Internet platforms are held liable for third party content, it would lead to self-censorship and reduce the free flow of information. The regulatory framework should ideally help protect Internet platforms and people's abilities to access information," the statement said. Google has faced requests in many countries to take down content including social-networking profiles and YouTube videos that foreign governments or users find objectionable.

India is one of the world's largest Internet markets, with a user base estimated at more than 80 million. That represents only a slice of its 1.2 billion-strong population, leaving room for growth.

Mr. Sibal, who wasn't the telecom minister when the act was passed, is trying various efforts to boost Web usage. He plans to bring 500,000 villages online within a few years by laying a massive fiber-optic backbone and using wireless devices to let Web traffic travel the "last mile" to rural households.

He said the government has to be careful not to get in the way of Internet companies trying to build up the market. "We need to ensure that we don't put conditions which are adverse to the efficient functioning of the intermediaries," he said. Despite his interest in relaxing the new rules, however, Mr. Sibal said Internet companies must "take into account the sensitivities of the countries in which they're operating."

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said his organization and other civil liberties groups are preparing legal challenges to the regulations on constitutional grounds.

He said the groups will broadly argue that the rules have put in place arbitrary and unclear restrictions on speech and have gone beyond the scope of the Information Technology Act of 2008, the law on which they are based.

Mr. Abraham welcomed Mr. Sibal's interest in potentially revising the regulations. "If Kapil Sibal gives this his personal time...there's a good chance the next version would be more robust in terms of constitutionality," he said.

Read the original published by the Wall Street Journal here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/looser-web-rules

May 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T10:23:01Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

New Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Digital Natives Coordinator in CIS. He has written the following blog entry:

What Scare a Digital Native Blogathon?

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

New Blog Entry

Universal Service — An Instrument for Accessibility

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software. Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

Column in Indian Express

Nishant Shah, Director-Research will be writing a series of columns on Internet and Society issues. His first column on transparency, technology and NGOs in India came out on Sunday:

Power to the People [Indian Express, May 15, 2011]

New Blog Entries

Killing the Internet Softly with Its Rules [By Pranesh Prakash in Indian Express, May 9, 2011]
Rebuttal of DIT's Misleading Statements on New Internet Rules
CDT Provides Answers to Questions on Internet Neutrality

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Featured Research

Limits to Privacy

Conference Report

Privacy By Design — Conference Report

Workshop

Second IJLT-CIS Lecture Series, National Law School [National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore, May 21-22, 2011]

Upcoming Conferences

Panel Discussion on UID – Its Feasibility, Utility and Legality [May 26, 2011]
Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Hyderabad [The English and Foreign Languages University (TBC), Hyderabad, June 18, 2011]

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Spectrum reforms - Good & Bad news [published in the Business Standard on May 5, 2011]

Miscellaneous

Public Lecture

The Task of the Translator after Google [CIS, April 30, 2011]

News & Media Coverage

Sunil Abraham, CIS : "Avec l’e-G8, Nicolas Sarkozy veut promouvoir de nouvelles restrictions à la liberté d’expression" [LE MAG IT, May 24, 2011]
As Simple as a Tweet [Deccan Chronicle, May 24, 2011]
A Network of Chains [Outlook, Issue of May 30, 2011]
Bangalore-based NGO files RTI query asking list of websites blocked by Indian govt [Daily News & Analysis, May 18, 2011]
IT Act if enforced will leave internet use in India no freer than in China [Daily News & Analysis, May 15, 2011]
Your Privacy is Public Property [Mail Today, May 15, 2011]
Point By Point Rebuttal Of Indian Government’s Statement On Internet Control Rules [Medianama, May 13, 2011]
New rules to ensure due diligence: IT dept [Times of India, May 11, 2011]
Indian civil liberties groups are now geared to fight the draconian IT Rules [Weekend Leader.com, Vol 2 Issue 18, 6 - 12 May, 2011]
New Internet rule: 'Objectionable' content can be removed without notifying users [dailybhaskar.com, May 11, 2011]
India Chills Online Speech [digitalcommunities, May 3, 2011]
Consumers International World Congress - Day 3 roundup [Consumer's International Blog, May 5, 2011]
Digerati See Censorship in New Web Rules [Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2011]
Free expression [Watertown Daily Times, May 2, 2011]
India curbs on Bloggers and Internet [TruthDrive, April 29, 2011]
Bright lights, geek city [Hindu, April 28, 2011]
India Cracks Down on Internet Free Speech [April 28, 2011]
India's cyber cafes going porn-free [msnbc.com, April 28, 2011]
Thousands queue for iPad 2 across Asia [AFP, April 28, 2011] [News hosted by Google]
New internet rules open to arbitrary interpretation [Times of India, April 27, 2011]
India Puts Tight Leash on Internet Free Speech [New York Times, April 27, 2011]
India Can Restrict 'Objectionable' Web Content under New Rules [TMCnet Legal, April 27, 2011]
Iraqi Minister meets Secretary, Indian Ministry of Panchayat Raj [Karnataka News Network, April 27, 2011]
The world is your oyster, by invitation only [Livemint, April 26, 2011]
No access to pornography in cyber cafes, declare new rules [Times of India, April 26, 2011]
India Proposes Restrictions on Tapping Telephone Calls [PC World, TechWorld and CIO, April 26, 2011]

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/may-2011-bulletin

Mobile education comes to villages

praskrishna — 2011-05-30T05:49:27Z

PEOPLE living in remote villages, trekking many miles to schools and colleges before dropping out, can now look forward to a tech option — mobile education. Education over mobile phones is vital in India, where the literacy rate according to 2011 census is 74.04 per cent, observers note. This article by Shayan Ghosh was published in Mail Today on May 27, 2011.

India has 791 million mobile subscribers according to regulatory body TRAI with a significant share in villages. That is the target group several start- ups and educational institutions are looking at.

Indira Gandhi National Open University ( IGNOU) based in New Delhi, is taking a lead in the matter. “ The technology is pretty new in India and we are planning to implement things like SMS alerts to students and coursespecific databases,” K. R. Srivathsan, pro vice- chancellor, IGNOU, said.

"It will definitely change the scenario of education in rural India," noted Srivathsan.

"All possible components required in a learning cycle including auditory, visual, reading, writing, collaboration, interaction, recording and computing," Amit Zaveri, CEO, EnableM, a company that delivers education through mobile devices, said.

"In rural areas the challenges for delivery of learning content & services are many including physical distances ( to institutes etc.), lack of teachers, no or limited access to standardised & branded content, time & cost constraints, limited capability for peer assessments, lack of skills development facilities for employability," Zaveri added.

Mig33, a Singapore- based mobile social network is hopeful that the mobile revolution could actually mean impart education to all.

"Mobile phones have moved from being phone devices to communication devices. With the advent of 3G, this is going to become bigger and better.

Also tablets are expected to play very effective role in this," Mohit Gundecha, India operations head, Mig33, said.

"With 3G the video clips can help educate, smart apps can help people learn, good sms apps can engage audiences about education concepts. We already see a host of companies coming in to take care of the hardware aspects and digital content to match the need," Gundecha explained.

According to Vikram Nagaich, director and founder, InnovateEdu, on one side, with mobile phones the content the reach of the content could be very wide. However, the efficacy would have to be delivered through extremely innovative and sophisticated content.

"Mobiles can penetrate better as they have things in favour like better battery life and people do not need any training to operate it. This gives it an upper hand over computers," Sunil Abraham, ED, Center for Internet and Society, said.

The Tech Option

Education over mobile phones is vital in India, where the literacy rate according to the 2011 census is 74.04 per cent, observers note.

With a significant share in villages, this is the target group several start- ups and educational institutions are looking at Indira Gandhi National Open University ( IGNOU) based in New Delhi, is taking a lead in the matter.

In rural areas, challenges regarding delivery of learning content & services are many and include physical distances, lack of teachers, limited access to standardised content.

Mobile phones have moved from being phone devices to communication devices. With 3G, this is going to become better.

Read the original story here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/mobile-education-villages

Announcing the Asia Pacific Google Policy Fellows

praskrishna — 2011-05-30T09:26:19Z

Posted by Ross LaJeunesse, Head of Public Policy and Government Affairs, Asia Pacific

There are now more than 2 billion people online, with approximately 850 million of them in Asia Pacific.

Given Asia Pacific’s importance, we're excited to announce the extension of the Google Policy Fellowship program to this part of the world. The goal of the program is to assist public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on important Internet policy issues, and to support talented young advocates and scholars. Since its inception in 2007, the Google Policy Fellowship has provided a platform for students interested in technology policy to contribute to the public dialogue on these issues, and to explore future academic and professional interests.

The Asia Pacific program for 2011 includes one Fellow each in Australia, Hong Kong and India. The University of New South Wales, the City University of Hong Kong, and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore will be serving as the respective host institutions.

In this region, we see many policy challenges concerning access to information online. The 2011 Asia Pacific Fellows will therefore focus on legal and policy issues related to the open Internet.

Congratulations to our first class of Asia Pacific Google Policy Fellows:

Lauren Loz, University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law Australia
Henry Hu Ling, University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, Hong Kong
Rishabh Dara, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India

We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who applied. If this pilot program proves to be a success, we hope to expand the Policy Fellowship for 2012.

Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/asia-pacific-google-policy-fellows

Take charge of Facebook

praskrishna — 2011-06-06T08:16:19Z

Want to take control of your data and the way you use your Facebook account? Then try these tricks, writes Shweta Taneja.

When Tejas Pande, a 23-year-old Bangalore-based information technology professional, heard about a workshop called Facebook Resistances at the Centre for Internet and Society (www.cis-india.org) in the city, he signed up without thinking twice. "I spend almost 10 hours every day logged in to my Facebook account. Its fixed rituals were getting to me. So I wanted to find out how I can take more control of my account and make it more personal."

The workshop, which was conducted by Marc Stumpel, a new media researcher and privacy advocate from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, had the same concerns. Stumpel’s workshop, which has travelled across the world from Barcelona and Berlin to Bangalore, is a research initiative that looks at changing the rules and functionality of Facebook. "We want to change your experience of the site and make it more personal," he says, adding, “We also want you to safeguard your privacy in the Facebook world." All this, he says, is possible through add-ons to your Internet browser. “People just need to know what these cracks are."

With more than 600 million active users, Facebook has become prone to attacks from hackers. Problems such as identity theft and malicious bot messages or status update worms are becoming common. Other than that, privacy concerns which have wracked Facebook since its inception continue to be controversial despite the "controls" it now offers.

The main reason for this is that the social networking mammoth keeps on pushing new features or changes constantly and rapidly, even before we can understand the ones that already exist. "Most often we don’t get a chance to opt in to new features, and can only opt out if they get our attention," explains Stumpel. This leads to a loss of control over personal data and what Facebook can do with it.

To prevent this, it’s necessary to keep going back to those account settings and make full use of whatever control Facebook offers at any point. Here are some of the latest ways you can protect your online identity.

Log out of multiple sessions

How many times have you logged into Facebook from an Internet café or a friend’s mobile phone and forgotten to log out? Every time you do that, even though you close the browsing window or application at the end, Facebook keeps your session open, making you vulnerable to mischief. Now you can log into your account and see a list of active sessions with their details, which include the login time, device name, the approximate location of the login based on IP address, and browser and operating system. If some of them are unauthorized or you are unaware of these activities, shut them immediately and reset your password.

Take control now: In your Facebook account, go to Account > Account Settings > Account Security > Account Activity > Also Active. Facebook lists all your active, open browsers in the Also Active list. Click on End Activity on the unwanted ones. You can also take control of which gadgets you log on from with the Login Approvals feature that comes under Account Security. This feature lets you put a code alert, which can then be SMSed to your mobile phone as soon as you log in from an unrecognized computer. This will alert you in case there’s been a login from a source you don’t know about.

Avoid the unwanted photo tag

Did a friend just put your drunk as hell photograph, wearing a "I hate my boss" T-shirt and making an obscene gesture, online? And did your boss and wife see it and blast you for irresponsibility? Other than the embarrassment, you may get into trouble at home or at work because of friends tagging inane photographs they clicked somewhere you don’t remember.If it’s not photographs, it’s minor irritants such as social or festive messages that you unexpectedly get tagged in. Avoid such irritants with a simple click.

Take control now: Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Sharing on Facebook. Click on ‘Customize settings’. In the page that pops up, choose in each option who can see and comment on things you share, things on your Wall and things you’re tagged in.

Secure your account

Hacking is increasingly a problem on Facebook. The reason is that on most of the networks, Facebook (unlike email clients) works on an unsecured connection (http) and not a secure one (https). Now the social networking site gives you an option to choose a secure site for logging and browsing. You can also choose one-time passwords when logging into Facebook from a public connection.

Take control now: Go to Account > Account Settings> Account Security > Secure Browsing. Tick on Browse Facebook on a Secure Connection (https) whenever possible. In case you are using a public computer, take the option of Facebook One-time Passwords. Text "OTP" to 32665 on your mobile phone and you will get a new one-time password which expires within 20 minutes.

Stop Facebook from haunting you online

Baffled when your Facebook profile image pops up every time you are reading a news site or a travel website online asking you to "Like" a news or review since another friend from Facebook does? Or surprised when you are browsing a travel website and your friends’ photographs pop up suddenly, saying they have been there and "Recommend" a hotel or site? Facebook has partnered with some websites to, as it delicately puts it, "provide you with great, personalized experiences the moment you arrive, such as immediately playing the music you like or displaying friends’ reviews”. Basically if you are logged in to Facebook, these sites can take information from your account and display it and also tell you which of your friends have visited that particular city earlier. If you wish to stop Facebook from haunting you everywhere you go online on your browser, act now.

Take control now: To block a third party, go to Account > Privacy Settings > Apps and Websites> Instant Personalization. Deselect Enable Instant Personalization to stop getting these subtle suggestions from Facebook.

Cut off the ads

A Facebook friend, Mr-I-Like-Everything, "Likes" yet another page and it pops up as a suggestion on the right side of your profile. If you have been on Facebook long enough, chances are one of the "Sponsored" pages has been shoved under your nose at least once. These little ad blurbs which keep popping up on the right-hand side corner, or underneath your apps on the left side of your page, are a mix of advertisements as well as Facebook’s way of further profiling you. Facebook calls them “Suggestions” that add to your social personality, but they are just ads. The good news is that you can now block these permanently.

Take control now: What you need is an ad-blocking add-on for your browser. The best in the market is GreaseMonkey, which works as an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer. Run it and you will be able to customize the way your Facebook page is displayed or behaves by using small bits of JavaScript. On your browser, go to Tools > Add-ons > GreaseMonkey. Click install. Once the basic add-on is installed, it will direct you to http://userscripts.org, which is an open-source, online space for free scripts that can be installed into GreaseMonkey. Find Remove All Facebook Ads in the list and install it. Google Chrome has a basic extension which is called Hide Facebook Ads, which effectively blocks the ads on your Facebook page.

Customize your Facebook page

Bored to death with the classic Facebook blue and white? There’s help at hand to see your Facebook page in a new, stylized version.

Take control now: Download and install an add-on called Stylish in Mozilla Firefox. Then go to Userstyles.org and choose a theme you want to install. Click on Load Into Stylish. Once the theme is successfully loaded, choose it from a small icon on the right corner and activate the theme. Refresh and enjoy the new look.

Block unwanted applications

How does an application you haven’t given access to know your birth date? The answer is your friends. Even though your settings might be sealed and set, you are vulnerable if your friends don’t care who’s accessing their information—and most of them don’t. Applications on Facebook can harvest not only a person’s birth of date or city of residence, but also that of their friends. As Facebook writes, the applications "may access any information you have made visible to Everyone as well as your publicly available information". Publicly available information "includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages". Facebook offers a way for you to control what your friends can share about you with these applications. It’s a well-hidden section under Accounts called Facebook Ads.

Take control now: To check which applications are using what from your profile, go to Account > Privacy Settings > Apps and Websites. Block any of the apps you haven’t used for a couple of months and don’t remember when you gave access to. Cut down the information accessible to other applications through your friends by unmarking under "Info accessible through your friends". If you don’t want the "suggestions" that Facebook makes about the pages that your friends "Like", go to Account > Account Settings > Facebook Ads. Choose "No one" for both “Ads shown by third Parties" as well as "Ads and friends".

Remove yourself from Facebook & Google Search

Now you can avoid unwanted attention from generic Google and Facebook name searches with a simple privacy setting to turn off your public visibility.

Take control now: Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Connecting on Facebook. Click on View Settings and under it, and in the options under "Search for you on Facebook", select Friends or Friends of Friends.

Add a dislike button

Tired of no option but to "Like" comments, links and silly photos on Facebook? Now you can install a Dislike button to show your hatred of everything inane that people put on your wall.

Take control now: The Dislike button comes with an add-on called Facebook Dislike 1.2.3 by Thomas Moquet. It works on both Google Chrome and Firefox. Remember that you are the only one who will see that button. For your friends to see what you dislike, they need to install it too.

Illustration by Raajan/Mint

Write to us at businessoflife@livemint.com

This article first appeared in the Business of Life, Mint. The copyright of this article rests with Mint and no part of can be reproduced without prior permission. Please log on to http://www.livemint.com/articles/2011/05/24210434/Take-charge-of-Facebook.html.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/take-charge-of-facebook

A Network of Chains

praskrishna — 2011-05-23T06:50:28Z

New infotech rules infringe on freedom of expression, make net use near-impossible, writes Arindam Mukherjee. The article was published in the latest issue (May 30, 2011) of Outlook Magazine.

If all goes according to plan, internet users may not be able to put up a strong message or comment about, say, the Congress on the BJP’s website. A simple complaint from a Congress worker or, for that matter, any Indian citizen, can get the comment removed—it could even lead to the website being blocked by the host. Similarly, forceful comments on networking sites like Twitter and Facebook about individuals and on issues of national interest could soon also be history. If anyone wants, a simple complaint can get the comments—or even a user—removed from that network without informing him or her about it.

The new set of rules gives any citizen the right to complain against any content on any website that they consider objectionable. The new guidelines redefine the rules of the game for online intermediaries—Internet Service Providers, a website, a blog or a blog host, or the online edition of a media company with space for letters to the editor. These intermediaries, who are protected by the government against harmful content generated by third parties, stand to lose their protection if they do not comply and take off the objectionable comments within 36 hours.

As expected, there is a huge outcry in the online community and in civil society on the implications. Pranesh Prakash, programme manager, Centre for Internet and Society, says, "We are concerned about the overreach of the IT Act. These rules are unconstitutional and violative of Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. It is harmful to freedom of speech and does not go by the basic principles of natural justice because only the complainant is heard and not the user."

"These rules violate the Constitution, harm freedom of speech, go against the principles of natural justice."
Pranesh Prakash
Manager, CIS

The new rules provide that anyone can complain against any online content if he thinks it is objectionable and breaches any of the keywords provided under the rules (see graphic). Chakshu Roy of prs Legislative Research, an independent group, says, "The keywords provided under the rules are rather too open to interpretation. This might lead to potential legal complications for internet companies who derive value by allowing people to interact online."

The tricky part is that the government has said that all disputes over interpretation of the keywords can only be adjudicated by a court of law and that the government or its agencies cannot interpret it. So if your website or content is blocked, the only recourse before you is to knock at the court’s doors. In sum, under the new rules, it would be absolutely impossible for any online entity to carry any comment without getting into some infringement under the new rules. "If internet platforms are held liable for third-party content, it would lead to self-censorship and reduce the free flow of information," says a spokesperson for Google.

Despite the government arguing otherwise, this is being construed as an indirect way to control the internet and online activity. The new laws will suppress public opinion at a time when the internet is developing into a primary medium to mould as well as express public opinion. Nikhil Pahwa, an avid blogger and editor of Medianama, says, "National security is one thing, but what about civil liberty? Isn’t that being violated here? This is a veiled move to block all public opinion."

In recent times, 11 websites and search results have been blocked on the government’s order, apart from over 1,400 requests to Google for removal or blocking of content. Soon, many more websites and portals could be in the firing line and face a block, censure or even closure under the new set of rules.

Online protagonists also feel that enough thinking has not gone into the framing of the rules. Subho Ray, president, Internet and Mobile Association of India (iamai), says, "The new rules are arbitrary as it is protecting the interest of one set of citizens while compromising upon that of others." Also, there is ambiguity in the rules on bulk sms carriers and telecom-based content, which should technically fall under user-generated content reaching the masses.

Perhaps the most bizarre are the rules regarding cyber cafes, which seek to define not just how the cafes conduct their business but also how a cyber cafe should look and even arrange its furniture. The new guidelines mandate that cyber cafes keep a photo ID record of all users apart from maintaining usage data of individuals—including logs of all websites surfed by them—for one year. The rules even go on to define the physical layout of the cyber cafes.

"Today a third of India’s internet usage comes from cyber cafes. If you are putting requirements of photo ID and maintenance of logs of usage of every user, the crowd going to these cafes will move away," says Ray. He also feels that cyber cafes, which are already subject to harassment by local authorities, may find it even more difficult to survive under the new rules. Also, there are serious online security concerns over the functioning of cyber cafes under the new rules. "If you require all cyber cafes to maintain history of all websites visited by a user, including bank accounts and credit card transactions, it will be naive to think that such information will not be misused," says Prakash.

Significantly, the new rules also allow the government to access personal data and intercept any conversation or communication without judicial intervention. This, at a time when telephone intercepts by government agencies are being questioned, could lead to further complications. The government asserts that the new rules have been put in place looking at the “best practices" from across the world. But looking at the discontent—and the real danger of misuse—it needs to rethink these strategies.

Read the original published in the Outlook here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/network-of-chains

Bangalore-based NGO files RTI query asking list of websites blocked by Indian govt

praskrishna — 2011-05-23T08:39:58Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO, recently filed an RTI query with the Department of Information Technology (DIT), asking for a list of websites blocked by the Indian government under the IT Act. This article by R Krishna was published in the Daily News & Analysis on May 18, 2011.

The department handed them a list of 11 websites. It was just one department’s list, but this was the first time such a list was being made public. "The information given was not comprehensive. For instance, we still don’t know who ordered these blocks," says Sunil Abraham, executive director, CIS, "We will file another RTI application to get those details out."

As of now, Indians enjoy considerably free access to information online, and the right to freedom of expression is protected by the Constitution. But you run into a veil of secrecy when trying to find out what sort of information is being blocked online, who is doing it, and for what reason. The list of 11 revealed by the DIT is only representative — no one can even guess the real number because, well, there is no way of knowing when a website gets blocked.

What is more disturbing is that the government has formulated a set of rules that can block content considered "disparaging", "harassing", or "blasphemous", besides a whole range of other labels that are vague and hence open to interpretation. The rules put the onus of removing such material on intermediaries such as ISPs (Internet service providers) and websites that host the content — within 36 hours of a complaint being filed. And just about anyone can request that the content be taken down — all they have to do is write a letter or an email with an electronic signature. There is no provision for the intermediary to challenge the complainant’s assessment of the content in question.

Users will be afraid

In other words, censorship will now be a free-for-all exercise. Protests, such as the one we saw during the Jan Lokpal agitation, can be nipped in the bud since anyone, including politicians, can claim that they are being "harassed". Information revealed by websites like WikiLeaks can be blocked because they may "threaten friendly relations with foreign states".

There is a sense of shock among the handful of netizens who are aware of these rules and the potential for their misuse. "What are we, Saudi Arabia? We don’t expect this from India. This is something very serious," Pushkar Raj, general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, has been quoted as saying. MediaNama, a website reporting on the media industry, points out, "Who defines 'blasphemous'?... India doesn’t even have a blasphemy law, so who interprets what is blasphemous or not?" Media watchdog The Hoot’s Geeta Seshu says, "This is chilling. Websites will be wary of putting up content. How can one appeal? How can one have a free discussion on anything at all online?"

Vishal Anand, product manager at Burrp, an online startup that hosts user-generated reviews of restaurants, is worried about the impact it will have on the discussions happening on the website. "I hope the ecosystem is not impacted. Users may be more afraid to respond, and businesses will be afraid about the content they host."

Guilty until proven innocent

The fundamental issue is that the onus is on the carrier or host to prove that the content is inoffensive, if any objection is raised. "The regulation is placing the burden on the intermediary so that there is no need to go to court (to get content blocked). This is going to lead to a lot of private intervention. You will have to go to court to get the content back up online, rather than the other way around," says Delhi-based lawyer Apar Gupta.

In fact, intermediary liability is a contentious topic globally, and this is not the first time it has caused a controversy in India. Back in 2004, eBay India’s CEO Avinash Bajaj was arrested because a user tried to sell a pornographic CD on its website. This set off a furious debate on the issue, with the government finally agreeing to amend the IT Act. Gupta notes on his blog, "Even after the IT Act was amended, the government failed to make any rules… In the absence of rules, intermediaries continued to be dragged to court and to the police station. This includes a recent incident where an FIR was registered against Facebook."

Checks and balances exist

These developments lend credence to a recent report on Internet freedom released by US-based NGO Freedom House, which ranks India 14th out of the 37 countries surveyed. Stating that the Internet in India is only "partly free", the report notes, “Pressure on private intermediaries to remove certain information in compliance with administrative censorship orders has increased since late 2009, with the implementation of the amended IT Act.

The revised law grants (the government) the authority to block Internet material that is perceived to endanger public order or national security… and assigns up to seven years’ imprisonment for representatives of a wide range of private service providers… if they fail to comply with government blocking requests." What is even more troubling is that the current rules weren’t even in place when this report was being prepared.

The new rules could worsen India’s Internet freedom rankings. Responding to DNA, Sarah Cook, Asia research analyst and assistant editor, Freedom House, said, "We would have concerns over some of the rules and how they came about. This includes broad and vaguely worded censorship criteria, apparent initiation of the regulations "quietly" without significant consultation with key stakeholders, and absence of an appeals process for those who might disagree with censorship decisions."

Legal experts in India too are puzzled by the new restrictions when there are already reasonable restrictions on freedom of expression that the Constitution defines. "There are anti-defamation provisions in the law. Then why include 'disparaging' in the new rules? Why is impersonating being made illegal? For example, on online dating websites for gays, users may not feel comfortable revealing their identities straightaway. And if somebody is impersonating to commit fraud, there are laws that already exist that deal with it. Instead of incorporating existing offences, the scope of what may be considered illegal is being broadened," says CIS’s Abraham.

The new rules are so broad-based that anyone can claim they are offended and demand that content be taken down, even out of business rivalry.

For example, Zone-H.org, run by Italy-based Roberto Preatoni, was one of the 11 websites blocked by the Department of Information Technology. This was done after the Delhi High Court passed an ex-parte interim order (where the other party is not present) in the E2 Labs versus Zone-H case to block the website. "This seems unnecessary since it is some kind of private business battle between E2 Labs and Zone H. Where was the need for the Indian government to get involved?" asks Abraham.

Bangalore-based cyber law expert N Vijayashankar agrees. "Websites are being blocked using interim orders. There is no national interest involved in some of these cases. Plus, there is no need to block the entire website, just a particular page could be blocked."

In fact, one of the webpages blocked was an opinion piece Vijayashankar had written about the Zone-H case on BloggerNews.net. "I had no intimation that the webpage was being blocked," says Vijayashankar, who got to know about the blockage only after CIS published the DIT’s response.

Learn from the world

Globally, excessive regulation of online discussions, particularly those related to political and social issues, can kill the open exchange of information. "In many countries, we saw that new laws, prosecutions, or proactive government censorship contributed to greater self-censorship among users. This is particularly pernicious when it affects discussions that relate to public interest or that affect people’s well-being — such as an Indonesian housewife facing high fines for circulating critical comments about a local hospital, the Chinese authorities censoring content on torture in police custody, or the Korean government prosecuting a blogger who posted pessimistic predictions about the country’s economy," says Cook. Cook acknowledges that balancing the right to freedom of expression against security threats, hate speech or child pornography is quite difficult — even for nations that rank high in their study. But there are a few best practices that India could learn from.

"Examples of good practices would include no criminal defamation provisions (though criminal penalties for inciting violence would be appropriate), immunity for online content providers from being held liable for the information posted by their users (there is such a law in the United States), and multi-stakeholder consultations prior to the passing of regulations related to the Internet/digital media."

The new rules India has come up with fly in the face of such best practices. Authorities and netizens alike should be on the guard, lest we go the China way.

Read the original published by DNA here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/rti-query-filed

Consumers International IP Watchlist 2011 — India Report

pranesh — 2014-05-29T05:52:28Z

Pranesh Prakash prepared the India Report for the Consumers International IP Watchlist 2011. The report was published on the A2K Network website.

The report says:

India's Copyright Act is a relatively balanced instrument that recognises the interests of consumers through its broad private use exception, and by facilitating the compulsory licensing of works that would otherwise be unavailable. However, the compulsory licensing provision have not been utilized so far, because of both a lack of knowledge and more importantly because of the stringent conditions attached to them. Currently, the Indian law is also a bit out of sync with general practices as the exceptions and limitations allowed for literary, artistic and musical works are often not available with sound recordings and cinematograph films. There are numerous other such inconsistencies.

While India has not acceded to the WIPO [23] Copyright Treaty or the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty, yet a set of amendments have been proposed which would bring the Indian law in compliance with both the WCT and the WPPT. These amendments would expose India's consumers to the same problems experienced in other jurisdictions which have prohibited the use of circumvention devices to gain access to legally-acquired copyright material. These amendments also propose a substantial increase in the copyright term for photographs (from 50 years to life plus 60 years), and a conditional increase of ten years for cinematograph films to 70 years if a special agreement is entered into by the producer with the director. It is true that copyright infringement, particularly in the form of physical media, is widespread in India. However this must be taken in the context that India, although fast-growing, remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Although India's knowledge and cultural productivity over the centuries and to the present day has been rich and prodigious, its citizens are economically disadvantaged as consumers of that same knowledge and culture. Indeed, most students, even in the so-called elite institutions, need to employ photocopying and other such means to be able to afford the requisite study materials. Physically challenged persons have no option but to disobey the law that does not grant them equal access to copyrighted works.

Legitimate operating systems (with the notable exception of most free and open source OSes) add a very high overhead to the purchase of cheap computers, thus driving users to pirated software. Thus, these phenomena need to be addressed not at the level of enforcement, but at the level of supply of affordable works in a suitable format.

Over the last year, the Standing Committee tasked with review of the Copyright Amendment Bill has held hearings and presented its findings and recommendations to the HRD Ministry. However, not a single consumer rights organization was called by the Standing Committee, and no civil society engagement was sought except for the issue of access for persons with disabilities. This was despite a number of civil society organizations sending in written submissions to the Standing Committee. The government is going to re-table the Bill in this session of Parliament (February-April).

Click to download the full report [PDF, 150 kb]
Read the report published by A2K Network here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ip-watch-list-2011

Centre for Internet and Society

Copyright Enforcement and Privacy in India

Introduction

Copyright Enforcement

Context setting

Civil and Criminal Enforcement under the Copyright Act

'Anton Piller' orders and 'John Doe' Orders

Technological Measures

Portents

Copyright and Confidential Information

Copyright and Publicity

The Private under the Copyright Act

Public/Publish

Private

Conclusion

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation

Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop

Workshop Outcomes

Participation Guidelines

NTP 2011 Objective: Broadband

The New Telecom Policy ’11

Spectrum Management

Network vs Revenue

Comments on the draft National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Comments on the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy by the Centre for Internet and Society

1. Name

Recommendation:

2. Scope and Enforceability

Recommendation:

3. Categorization

Recommendation:

4. Licence

Recommendation:

5. Integrity of the data

Recommendation:

6. Authenticity of the data

Recommendation:

7. Archival and versioning

Recommendation:

8. Open standards

Recommendation:

9. Citizen interaction

Recommendation:

10. Principles, including 'Protection of Intellectual Property'

Recommendation:

Your cyber space is a hackers paradise

Technology, Transparency and Accountability: A Bar-Camp in Delhi

Agenda

The Speakers

The rationale behind the camp

Online conversations

Do you need more ideas?

The Present — and Future — Dangers of India's Draconian New Internet Regulations

India Weighing Looser Web Rules

May 2011 Bulletin

Digital Natives with a Cause?

New Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Accessibility

New Blog Entry

Openness

Featured Research

Comments

Interview

Internet Governance

Column in Indian Express

New Blog Entries

Featured Research

Conference Report

Workshop

Upcoming Conferences

Telecom

Column

Miscellaneous

News & Media Coverage

Follow us elsewhere

Mobile education comes to villages

The Tech Option

Announcing the Asia Pacific Google Policy Fellows

Take charge of Facebook

Log out of multiple sessions