Centre for Internet and Society

Report on Open Standards for GISW2008

pranesh — 2009-01-05T06:52:54Z

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

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

Definition

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

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

The controversy

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

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

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

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

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

The importance

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

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

Policy implications

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agreement on Procurement

pranesh — 2008-12-08T06:08:19Z

On December 6, 2008, at the closing of the third Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India, the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards (DCOS) released an agreement entitled the "Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards (DCOS) Agreement on Procurement in Support of Interoperability and Open Standards".

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

Third Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

Hyderabad, India

6 December 2008

Preamble

The Contracting Parties,

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

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

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

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

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

Open Standards

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governments, publicly funded and non-profit institutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signed by:

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

Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

Bob Jolliffe, Freedom To Innovate, South Africa

Centre for Internet and Society, India

Hamid Rabiee, Sharif University of Technology, Iran

Knowledge Ecology International

Moving Republic, India

Shuttleworth Foundation, South Africa

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, India

Endorsed by:

Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, Bangladesh

Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), India

Foundation for Media Alternatives, Philippines

OpenForum Europe

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/dynamic-coalition-on-open-standards-dcos-agreement-on-procurement

Report on Open Standards for GISW 2008

pranesh — 2011-08-23T02:57:53Z

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

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

Photos

pranesh — 2008-12-01T13:17:32Z

Photographs of Open Access Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/photos

An Open Letter on Internet Governance to the UN Internet Governance Forum

sachia — 2011-08-02T07:40:02Z

This open letter brings up concerns of democratic deficit in internet governance worldwide, and is addressed to the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF). It is to be delivered at the IGF's 3rd Annual Meeting at Hyderabad, India, from 3rd to 6th December, 2008. The signatories are Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, Delhi Science Forum, New Delhi, Free Software Foundation - India, IT for Change, Bangalore, and Knowledge Commons, New Delhi.

This open letter brings up concerns of democratic deficit in internet governance worldwide, and is addressed to the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF). It will be delivered at the IGF's 3rd Annual Meeting at Hyderabad, India, from 3rd to 6th December, 2008.

The letter includes an information sheet exemplifying some of the problems of democratic deficit in internet governance.

The text of the letter is as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------------

The IGF must ACT NOW against the threat to the public-ness and the egalitarian nature of the Internet

The undersigned wish to express their deep concern that the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), created by the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005 as an Internet ‘policy dialogue’ forum, is largely failing to address key public interest and policy issues in global Internet governance – including that of democratic deficit.

Who shapes the Internet, as the Internet shapes our new social context?

The Internet represents the single most important technical advance of our society in a long time, so much so that it defines a new emerging social paradigm. The basic characteristics of the Internet determine the contours of the emerging social order in many important ways. The Internet was conceived as, and still largely is, an extensive communication system which is democratizing, and has little respect for established social hierarchies. Interactions and associations built over this new ‘techno-social’ system have, therefore, held the promise of a more egalitarian society.

The era of innocence of the Internet however appears to be fast approaching its end. Today, the Internet of the future – the very near future – is being shaped insidiously by dominant forces to further their interests. (See the fact-sheet on the following page for some illustrations of this.) Unfortunately, global policy forums have largely failed to articulate, much less act on, crucial Internet policy issues, which concern the democratic possibilities for our societies.

The IGF needs to act now!

As the Internet Governance Forum convenes for its third annual meeting, between 3rd and 6th December, 2008, in Hyderabad, India, it must take immediate steps to anchor and discuss important global public interest and policy issues involved in Internet governance. If it does not act now, it may get seen as a space that only provides an illusion of a public policy dialogue, and, consequently, as being co-opted in furthering the agenda of dominant forces that are shaping the Internet as per their narrow interests. We therefore strongly urge the IGF to directly address the following key global public interest and policy issues:

Increasing corporatisation of the Internet
Increasing proprietisation of standards and code that go into building the Internet
Increasing points of control being embedded into the Internet in the name of security and intellectual property violations
Huge democratic deficit in global Internet governance

We exhort the IGF to adopt clear directions for engaging with these crucial public policy issues. The IGF should come out with a clear work plan at its forthcoming meeting in Hyderabad to address the four key areas listed above.

The global community – comprising not only people who currently have access to the Internet, but also the un-connected billions who are being impacted by it nevertheless – will judge the meaningfulness and legitimacy of the IGF in terms of what progress it is able to make on these issues.

Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Delhi Science Forum, New Delhi
Free Software Foundation - India
IT for Change, Bangalore
Knowledge Commons, New Delhi

Information Sheet
How the Public-ness and Egalitarian Nature of the Internet is Threatened
– Some Examples

Corporatisation of the Internet
Largely unsuspected by most of its users, the Internet is rapidly changing from being a vast ‘public sphere’, with a fully public ownership and a non-proprietary nature, to a set of corporatised privately-owned networks.

On the one hand, telecom companies are carving out the Internet into privately-owned networks – controlling the nature of transactions over these networks. They seek to differentially charge content providers, while also building wholly private networks offering exclusive content relay services. Developments like video/TV over Internet Protocol and the provision of controlled and selective Internet services over mobiles are contributing to increasing network-operators’ control over the Internet, with a corresponding erosion of its public-ness.

On the other hand, the commons of the Internet is also being overwhelmed and squeezed out by a complete domination of a few privately owned mega-applications such as Google, Facebook, Youtube etc.

Proprietarisation of standards and code that build the Internet

One of the main ways of appropriating the commons of the Internet is through the increasing use of proprietary and closed standards and code in building the Internet system. Such appropriation allows the extortion of illegitimate rent out of the many new forms of commons-based activities that are being made possible through the Internet.

Embedding control points in the Internet

A growing confluence of corporatist and statist interests has led to the embedding of more and more means of control into the Internet in a manner that greatly compromises citizens’ rights and freedoms. Whether it is the pressure on Internet
Service Providers to examine Internet traffic for ‘intellectual property’ violations; or imposition of cultural and political controls on the Internet by states within their boundaries; or ITU’s work on IP trace-back mechanisms; or the tightening of US
control over the global Internet infrastructure in the name of securing the root zone file and the domain name system, these new forms of controlling the Internet are being negotiated among dominant interests away from public scrutiny and wider public interest-based engagements.

Democratic deficit in global Internet governance
The current global Internet governance regime – a new-age privatized governance system professing allegiance mostly to a single country, the US – has proven to be an active instrument of perpetuation of dominant commercial and geo-political interests. Lately, OECD countries have begun some work on developing public policy principles that, due to the inherently global nature of the Internet, can be expected to become globally applicable. It is quite unacceptable that OECD countries shirk from discussing the same public policy issues at global public policy forums like the IGF that they discuss among themselves at OECD meetings. Apparently, developing countries are expected to focus on finding ways to reach connectivity to their people, and not burden themselves with higher-level Internet governance issues!

People’s and communities’ right to self-determination and participation in governance of issues that impact their lives should underpin global Internet governance.

---------------------------------------------

You can download the letter here (.pdf format).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/an-open-letter-on-internet-governance-to-the-un-internet-governance-forum

Berlin 6 Open Access Conference

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:16:16Z

The Berlin 6 Open Access conference was attended by Subbiah Arunachalam, Centre for Internet and Society Distinguished Fellow.

Subbiah Arunachalam, Centre for Internet and Society Distinguished Fellow, attended the Berlin 6 Open Access conference (www.berlin6.org), held in Dusseldorf from 11 to 13 November 2008. Berlin 6 is the fifth follow-up conference to the drafting sessions for the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

Subbiah Arunachalam is a member of the Programme Committee of the Berlin series of conferences, and this year chaired the session on Open Access for Development, which looked at the status of open access in developing countries and the factors inhibiting progress in this area. The speakers at this session were Dev Kumar Sahu (MedKnow, India), Eve Gray (Eve Gray & Associates/Open Society Institute, South Africa), Solange M Santos (BIREME/PAHO/SciELO, Brazil) and Subbiah Arunachalam himself. Their presentations are available on the conference website (http://www.berlin6.org/?page_id=70).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/berlin-6-open-access-conference

First Meeting on a National Policy for Web Accessibility

nirmita — 2011-08-25T08:38:03Z

The first meeting to discuss having a national policy for web accessibility to ensure universal and inclusive participation was held at the Centre for Internet and Society's office on 7 November 2008. It was aimed at formulating an action plan to work with the government and other private and public bodies to ensure conformity to accessibility standards for web sites.

The first meeting to discuss making compliance with web accessibility standards a part of the national policy agenda was held today (7 November 2008) at the CIS office. Fifteen participants representing organizations from the disability sector, media and law firms came together to discuss the why, what and how of mandatory compliance with web accessibility standards for Indian government web sites.

The meeting started off with brief introductions of the participants, followed by a presentation by Rahul Gonsalves introducing the concept of and need for web accessibility standards amongst web developers. In his presentation, Rahul gave some examples of the kinds of problems faced by different users of the net and simple solutions to solve these problems. Speaking from the perspective of a web designer, he pointed out that while the total cost of creating an accessible web site is merely about 2-3% more than a normal web site, revamping an existing web site to make it conform to accessibility standards is a more complicated and expensive task. He further clarified that for a website to be accessible, it is not merely enough that it is created in accordance with accessibility standards; all future additions and modifications must be made with accessibility in mind. Hence, persons working on the web site should be initiated into creating accessible web pages.

The second presentation of the day was by Jayna Kothari of Ashira Law Services. Jayna, a lawyer who is well known for taking up disability related cases in Bangalore, talked about the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act 1995 (PWD Act) and highlighted provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which came into force in May 2008. She began by talking about the right to access information being a fundamental right guaranteed by Article 19 of our constitution and gave references to various sections in the PWD Act. The Act calls for the setting up of Central and State Co-ordination Committees to ensure that action is taken to give effect to the provisions of the PWD Act and that an accessible, barrier free and inclusive environment is created for persons with disabilities in all spheres such as health, education, employment, transportation, etc. Jayna also highlighted that article 9 of the UNCRPD called for persons with disabilities to have an equal right to access to information and communication. Hence the mandate was not restricted to government web sites only. She opined that we could potentially work with the State and Central Co-ordination Committees to include web accessibility on their agenda of urgent requirements.

Mr Ganesh of Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled talked about intervention at the level of educational organizations and training institutes. He said that instead of merely discussing strategies which are designed to target the Government and get its attention, we also need to work on building awareness amongst the coming generation of web site developers and appeal to schools, training institutes like the NIIT and other educational organizations and centres of learning to disseminate awareness about accessibility right from the beginning. The approach, in other words, has to be both top-down and bottom-up. Ushajee Peri from the Alternative Law Forum (ALF) talked briefly about the Right to Information Act (2005) and said that since the right to information is a fundamental right, we need to carefully analyse provisions of the Act under which we could push for web accessibility.

Mr. L. Subramani from the Deccan Herald talked in brief about media strategy and about how publications could help in creating awareness and pressure. Finally, Meenu Bambani from MPhasiS talked about the 11th Five Year Plan and cited various provisions from it which called for specific measures for disabled persons. After an entire chapter devoted to disability, nothing has as yet been achieved in the year since the plan came into force, even though India has ratified the UNCRPD. Meenu called for immediate action to push the Government for implementation of the chapter on disability in the 11th Five Year Plan. As per the plan, each Government department was to allocate 3% of its funds for supporting disabled persons; this has not been done so far. Meenu believes that 3 December, which is usually celebrated as the World Disabilities Day, should this year be spent in introspection on what we have not achieved and on how we can push the state and government authorities to take their international and national commitments with respect to disabled persons seriously.

There was also a brief discussion on how laws in different countries accommodated web accessibility. For instance in the USA, Section 508 requires web sites of all federal agencies to comply with web accessibility guidelines. In the UK, the Code of Conduct which was brought out by the Disabilities Rights Commission (DRC) under the Disabilities Discrimination Act 2002 (DDA) mandates that persons with disabilities should have the right to access goods, services, facilities and premises on an equal basis as others. Section 2.14 lists the different kinds of services and 2.17 specifically says that a website is a provision of service and hence should be accessible. PAS 78 lays down guidelines for web developers for creating accessible web sites. While some participants expressed curiosity about the actual number of disabled persons using the internet in India, it was generally understood that only by making web sites more accessible could we widen the net of disabled users and enhance universal access and participation.

Another area for intervention was presented by Sunil Abraham in the form of a discussion on the national policy for Open Standards. Sunil said that CIS had given an addendum to the response to the draft national policy on open standards which specifically dealt with web accessibility for disabled and elderly persons. By ensuring that WCAG compliance is inserted in the presentation layer of the Government Interoperability Framework (GIF), which the Government is shortly expected to release, we could make a definite and substantial intervention.

The final conclusions of the meeting were that there were different areas and scopes for intervention and they all had to be simultaneously pursued by different groups. Everyone agreed that we should try and work with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to make all government web sites accessible. Almost all participants felt that while it was not possible to impose web accessibility standards on private entities, we need not restrict ourselves to government web sites in our recommendations and should include at least public listed companies as well. Mr. Subramani felt that working with NASSCOM might be useful for that. Finally it was also decided that an appeal for web accessibility would be put out by CIS at the Walkathon to be organized by Samarthanam on 6 December, since it would be a good platform for spreading awareness and gaining support amongst disabled users, public authorities, organizations and the public at large.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/first-meeting-on-a-national-policy-for-web-access-for-all

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

Open Access Day celebrated in India

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:06:01Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance co-organised joint celebrations of Open Access Day in Jamia Millia Islamia campus on the 14th of October 2008. Around 50 people attended the event from different departments in Jamia there were also some participants from the Indian Linux Users Group. CIS also published an Open Access flyer on this day featuring quotations from Sam Pitroda, MS Swaminathan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, Frederick Noronha, Barbara Kirsop and Samir Brahmachari.

Speaking at Tagore Hall at Jamia Millia Islamia, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, pointed out that “there are over 25,000 scientific journals published in the world today but even the richest university in India cannot afford to subscribe to more than 1,200 journals. It is as though, Indian scientists and students are competing in a race with their legs bound.” Prof. Arunachalam called upon the student community to lobby for Open Access mandates for research outputs funded by tax-payers.Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. October 14, 2008 was the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, USA. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals.

Speaking at the celebrations at Jamia, Dr. Zakir Thomas of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) traced the limited historical role that IPR has played in the development for drugs for Tuberculosis. Dr. Thomas is the project director of Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), a project of CSIR. The government of India has already committed Rs. 150 crores to the OSDD project which is targeting neglected diseases from developing countries. Dr. Thomas also introduced the OSDD project and spoke about alternative systems of incentives that are more appropriate in the academic community such as attribution, citation and collaboration – all closely linked career growth in an academic or university context.

Dr. Lynn, a professor at the Department of Bio-informatics at JNU and Dr. Bhardwaj Scientist CSIR introduced the OSDD web platform and pointed out to various improvements over existing methods of research. While in peer-reviewed papers readers are only provided with reference number when experiments are discussed – on the OSDD platform readers can access the complete experiment details, including data even for failed experiments. This is critical in reducing wastage of valuable resources and efforts in attempting to re-invent the wheel.

Dr. Bhardwaj pointed out that she was already collaborating with students from the Jamia Millia Islamia campus on her projects hosted on OSDD. She said that the open access and open source models gives rise to many new collaborations both at the local and international level. Dr. Bhardwaj also announced that two CSIR open access journals were being launched by Dr. Samir Brahmachari - Director General on the occasion of World Open Access day.

Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia who presided over the meeting spoke of the challenges faced by faculty and students in the Indian context. Some international journals demand Rs. 40,000 from the authors in spite of assigning copyright. He predicted that the open access movement will lead to more Indian authors being published and cited. He also hoped that open access would become a norm instead of a novelty.

Download Open Access Flyer

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india

ALF's Note before 2005 Amendment

pranesh — 2008-09-30T15:19:30Z

Briefing note on the impact of software patents on the software industry in India

Prepared by

Lawrence Liang

Anuranjan Sethi

Prashant Iyengar

Background

While there has been a lot of discussion on the impact that the latest amendment to the Indian Patent Act will have on public health and the pharmaceutical sector in India, there has been a disturbing silence about the impact that the amendment has on the software industry.

After the patents (second amendment) in 2002, the scope of non patentable subject matter in the Act was amended to include the following: “a mathematical method or a business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms”.

The important phrase that was added was ‘per se’, and with the amendment we effectively included Software patents into Indian Law. The latest amendment seeks to expand the scope of software patents, and states “a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms”.

This briefing note will not address the technical and legal implication of this amendment but instead pose the larger question of why we should be concerned about software patents, and the impact that it will have on the software industry in India.

I. Conceptual difference between Copyright and Patent

The first thing to note is that software is already protected under Copyright law, so what then is the motivation and the implication of a move from copyright protection to patent protection?

Software has traditionally been protected under copyright law since code fits quite easily into the description of a literary work. Software Patenting has recently emerged (if only in the US, Japan and Europe) as an alternative that software companies are increasingly employing to, in order to protect their products.

The issues involved in conferring patent rights to software are, however, a lot more complex than taking out copyrights on them. Specifically, there are two challenges that one encounters when dealing with software patents. The first is about the instrument of patent itself and whether the manner of protection it confers is suited to the software industry. The second is the nature of software, and whether it should be subject to patenting.

a) Different Subject Matters

Copyright protection extends to all original literary works (among them, computer programs), dramatic, musical and artistic works, including films. Under copyright, protection is given only to the particular expression of an idea that was adopted and not the idea itself. (For instance, a program to add numbers written in two different computer languages would count as two different expressions of one idea) Effectively, independent rendering of a copyrighted work by a third party would not infringe the copyright.

Generally patents are conferred on any ‘new’ and ‘useful’ art, process, method or manner of manufacture, machines, appliances or other articles or substances produced by manufacture. Worldwide, the attitude towards patentability of software has been skeptical. The Indian Patent Act, as modified in 2002 had made non-patentable the following:

“…a mathematical method or a business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms”.

However, the recent amendment ordnance states instead:

“…a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware;

a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms.”

b) Who may claim the right to a patent/copyright?

Generally, the author of a literary, artistic, musical or dramatic work automatically becomes the owner of its copyright.

Software developers are perfectly protected without patents. Everyone who writes a computer program automatically owns the copyright in it. It's copyright law that made Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and the entire software industry so very big. It's the same legal concept that also protects books, music, movies, paintings, even architecture.

Many of the world's richest people owe their wealth to copyright law. Some examples are: Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft); Larry Ellison (Oracle); Hasso Plattner and the other founders of SAP; Paul McCartney (Beatles); JK Rowling (Harry Potter).

The patent, on the other hand is granted to the first to apply for it, regardless of who the first to invent it was. Patents cost a lot of money. They cost even more paying the lawyers to write the application than they cost to actually apply. It takes typically some years for the application to get considered, even though patent offices do an extremely sloppy job of considering.

c) Rights conferred

Copyright law gives the owner the exclusive right to reproduce the material, issue copies, perform, adapt and translate the work. However, these rights are tempered by the rights of fair use which are available to the public. Under “fair use”, certain uses of copyright material would not be infringing, such as use for academic purposes, news reporting etc. Further, independent recreation of a copyrighted work would not constitute infringement. Thus if the same piece of code were independently developed by two different companies, neither would have a claim against the other.

A patent confers on the owner an absoulte monopoly which is the the right to prevent others from marking, using, offering for sale without his/her consent. In general, patent protection is a far stronger method of protection than copyright because the protection extends to the level of the idea embodied by a software and injuncts ancillary uses of an invention as well. It would weaken copyright in software that is the base of all European software development, because independent creations protected by copyright would be attackable by patents

Many patent applications cover very small and specific algorithms or techniques that are used in a wide variety of programs. Frequently the "inventions" mentioned in a patent application have been independently formulated and are already in use by other programmers when the application is filed.

d) Duration of protection

The TRIPS agreement mandates a period of at least 20 years for a product patent and 15 years in the case of a process patent.

For Copyright, the agreement prescribes a minimum period of the lifetime of the author plus seventy years.

II. Nature of Software and Indian Software Industry

Software is complex: The complexity of computer programs makes it difficult to be understood by any one person. This capacity for complexity allows for the creation of highly sophisticated products but also means that they are dependent on a vast range of technologies.

Software is free from the constraints of the real world that ensure a product does not become too complex. Major software may comprise up to 10 million lines of code - potentially thousands of inventions, any of which might be patented

For example, Apple was sued because its HyperCard program allegedly violates patent number 4,736,308, which covers a specific technique that, in simplified terms, entails scrolling through a database displaying selected parts of each line of text. Separately, the scrolling and display functions are ubiquitous fixtures of computer programming, but combining them without a license from the holder of patent 4,736,308 is now apparently illegal.

In its complexity, software is different from other engineering and mechanical inventions for which patent protection was devised. The latter are often characterized by large "building block" inventions that can revolutionize a given mechanical process. Software, especially a complex program, seldom includes substantial leaps in technology, but rather consists of adept combinations of many ideas. Whether a software program is a good one does not generally depend as much on the newness of a specific technique, but instead depends on the unique combination of known algorithms and methods. Patents should not protect such methods of innovation.

Software Technology evolves rapidly: Software technology is evolving much faster than other industries, even with its own hardware industry. Against this light, a patent that lasts upto 17 years is extremely alarming. Microprocessors double in speed every 2 years.

Research in software is galloping ahead of developments. In most industries, researching new ideas often costs more money than bringing them to the market. The software industry is, on the other hand, loaded with ideas.

The idea behind most software patents can be coded in just 20 lines of code, but any program incorporating that idea - along with many others - will be a thousand times larger. It is the writing of a program that takes all the time, not coming up with ideas.

What this means is that on an average of every two years, a product will have to be replaced in the market. The idea underlying it will remain the same although the particular means and variants of its applications may have changed radically.

Coming out with a full-featured product, every two years is costly especially in relation to the inexpensive idea that backs it. There’s more novelty in the development and application of the same idea to new technology than with coming up with the original raw idea.

The objective of granting patent rights should be to foster the growth and evolution of the industry. Granting a patent at this stage would be akin to unreasonably prolonging the life of a product.

It is generally found that those who are investing time creating and lodging patents are vastly outpacing those who are investing effort bringing such ideas to market. By the time an immature technology develops to the point where it can be incorporated into products, it has a dozen or more patents on it that render it commercially intractable.

Software doesn't wear out: In other industries, research continues up to a point where further research costs too much to be feasible. At this stage, the industry's output merely consists of replacing parts that have worn out.

However, in the software sector, a computer program that is fully debugged will perform its function forever without requiring maintenance or modification. “What this means is that unlike socks that wear out, and breakfast cereal that is eaten, a particular software product can be sold to a particular customer at most once. If it is to be sold to that customer again, it must be enhanced with new features and functionality.” This inevitably means that even if the industry were to approach maturity, any software company that does not produce new and innovative products will simply run out of customers! Thus, the industry will remain innovative whether or not software patents exist.

Software has different economics: Most other major industries have medium to high research and development costs and very high production costs. Most often, the production costs dwarf the other two areas (because of the physicality that they involve) so that these costs can be added on to the cost of the final product without any relatively major difference in the price.

Software is unique in this aspect because

-The research costs very little because “ideas are as abundant as air”

-The development of an idea into a marketable product costs far more than the research.

-The production costs are minimal, often just a little more than the price of the medium, which is typically a floppy or a CDROM.

Patents affect the ‘development’ stage of the process of ‘manufacture’ of software. Thus the threat exists that the price of software could be singularly determined by the number of patented innovations that it incorporates.

III. Patent and Innovation in Software Industry

As argued before the process of software development by its very nature is ‘incremental’ i.e. developing of new software majorly consists of building upon existing ideas and rearranging the processes devised by others, and hence has an inbuilt need for using existing algorithms and mathematical formulae. Patent protection over software or over a set of algorithms within patented software would inevitably create a thicket of patents which the subsequent software developer might need to obtain clearance from before he can begin to work on it. The costs involved in obtaining these clearances and those involved in case one finds oneself having infringed a patent are usually very high, as in the case of biomedical patents. This would act as a disincentive for an aspiring software developer and would adversely affect the growth of the Indian software industry. Introduction of two bills- ‘Genomic Research and Diagnostic Accessibility Bill, 2002’ and ‘Genomic Science and Technology Innovation Act of 2002’ though still pending before the US Congress show the real concerns involved for a ‘patent and innovation policy’ within genomics. Similar concerns are exist in the software and innovation policy and need to be addressed adequately by the each national legislature.

Further there are substantial costs involved in verifying which patents one must obtain clearance for as skimming through the huge patent databases has become a very costly exercise. Unfortunately, conducting a patent search is a slow, deliberative process that, when harnessed to software development, could stop innovation in its tracks. And because patent applications are confidential, there is simply no way for computer programmers to ensure that what they write will not violate some patent that is yet to be issued making survival a very important issue for smaller player in the market.

Various large companies in US have obtained exemptions from going through patent searches for standard work due to huge costs. In such a scenario in a small player software industry like India, it would be unwise to allow ‘software patents’ as they may have negative impact upon the innovation within the industry.

By its nature software industry is ‘innovation driven’ i.e. the only way a software company can compete and improve its sales or grip over market is by making better and more useful features available. This innovation which is the driving force behind the Indian software industry is bound to get affected if a patent protection is provided to software patents. If a company can easily sustain itself on its ‘invention’ (by obtaining patents upon its software) and need not remain innovation driven, which would mean that a patent monopoly would inversely impact innovation and competition in software industry. It would further give rise to monopolistic tendencies and a practice of quoting arbitrary price for the grant of ‘voluntary license’. This lesson can be learnt by looking west where the idea of Public Key Encryption was patented in the US. The patent expired in 1997 and until then, it largely blocked the use of Public Key Encryption in the US. Similar instances can be found w.r.t. ‘data compression software’ and ‘single click software’ patented by Amazon.com. A number of programs that people started to develop got crushed. They were never really available because the patent holders threatened them. This led to a lot of unrest in the software community which culminated into the public outrage against software patents. Similar pressures have prevailed in European community where software patents found public opposition too immense to mount for a long time.

A look at India's own development of its software industry would be of immense help as India started its software industry only after IBM was driven out of country. Before that, there was no software industry worth the name, with software and hardware being imported from IBM. Once IBM left, Indian computer companies developed computers using the UNIX operating system, which was in the public domain. This led to the presence of a large number of skilled software professionals with experience of UNIX were also writing high-level applications for making the entire computer system work.

IV. Political economy of software patents

While understanding the issue of software patents, it’s important to look at its political economy and the implications involved for India. If one were to study the trends of software patenting in US and Europe one would witness that the IBM owns a majority of patents along with other giant software companies and has been topping the list of maximum patents granted in US in the private sector. This fact must be seen in the light of the opposition faced from small business organisations, leading scientists and economists in Europe and the unprecedented delay in passing the Software Patent Directive of 2002 by the European parliament. It should be noted that the directive does not aim to make it possible to patent pure computer programs: it would only apply to computer software integrated into an appliance. This makes it much more restrictive than the amended Indian Patent Act, which opens out any technical application of a programme to industry or its realisation in hardware for patenting. Even with this restriction, the critics of the EU directive have pointed out that a patent on software is in effect a patent on an idea, while traditionally patents have been restricted to concrete physical inventions only. By making this amendment, it is possible to implement algorithms in hardware and then claim patent protection for this. Once an idea can be patented if it is burnt in to hardware, the argument for extending it to a software implementation gains ground. In fact, the first breach in the US for making software patentable came through this route. If one were to study the trends in the scope of patentable subject matter granted in software patents by US courts, one would observe that from Diamond v. Diehr onwards court has been granting patents on much more abstract components, which has slowly transformed into patenting the central idea underlying the software. This trend indicates the easy malleability of legal terminology which has brought US courts’ stand on software patents to a full circle from Gottschalk v. Benson where the court found a patent upon software as a patent upon the underlying algorithms which is nothing more than a mathematical formula, unpatentable by its very definition.

The concerns regarding the weaker relative position of these small players is much more relevant in India. Among the primary reasons for large corporations like IBM lobbying for software patents is due to their stronger hold over the software market and ownership of the largest number of patents in this market. Large corporations use their patents, apart from making royalty upon them, to getting access benefit to the patents of other companies. This would close the option of cross-licensing for a majority of Indian companies which have no patents upon software. License though may be obtained are usually available at exorbitantly high prices which would most likely be unaffordable for Indian companies which operate on a small scale and have restricted budget options. The multinational corporations would use software patents as a defensive strategy for preventing smaller Indian companies from gaining any grounds in the market, which would eventually drive them out of business hence destroying the existing Indian software industry.

Software industry has a very characteristic nature which makes it extremely vulnerable to being easily monopolized. Among these characteristics are Network effects (the fact that a program becomes more useful if more people use it), interoperability and compatibility problems, the low cost of massive reproduction of software, the difficulty of inspecting software distributed without the source code, the learning curve and the rapid evolution of the market. Taking the instance of Microsoft Windows (the most popular operating system in use in India today) which enjoys a perpetual monopoly over the operating system market in India, many a larger institutions find Windows extremely costly and desperately needed an alternative to it in order to do business profitably. The recent success of Linux operating systems is demonstrative of this, but this must be understood in the light that India follows a copyright regime for software which allows many of the above mentioned characteristics of compatibility and interoperability to be resolved which would be totally impossible in a software patent regime. This then means that software patents have a potential to hamper the growth of open software movement in India which has begun to play central role in Indian Government’s ‘e-governance’ initiative. Hence it’s extremely urgent to ensure that patents in software do not cause any harm to the fine balance that copyright has achieved.

While understanding a political economy argument of software patents the adverse impact of monopolization upon public interest which has been held to be of utmost importance by the apex court in India, even above one’s legitimate commercial interests.

V. Procedural Issues

There are a certain procedural issues involved which are of determinative nature as to the allowance of a software patent regime in India. India doesn’t have a well laid out or even a well practiced software patent practice to guide Indian patent office. In the absence of any such policy, examining software patent application becomes a very daunting task, coupled with which the complicated and highly technical nature of software, Indian patent office is quite incapable to evaluate complicated and technically trivial claims which software patent often present. Imposing a software patent regime in such a scenario would impact the quality of such patents which might then prove counter-productive in the development of Indian software industry.

To be able to tackle this situation more personnel and experts would have to be employed in the patent office that can then ensure maintenance of a certain quality standards while granting software patents. But this in turn may not produce increased innovation in the software industry for the human capital which would be invested into processing the claims and preventing and tackling with the patent infringements rather than being invested in developing new software and hence benefit the software industry and economy of the country in general.

The difficulty in reaching a policy to grant software patents and the impacts of granting these patents in the absence of policy are indeed far reaching. In the absence of a policy which classifies patents on algorithms, techniques etc. it would take an awfully long time for the patent office to process a claim, searching the ‘prior art’ which makes the system inefficient and unworkable. Long delays in processing patent applications and subsequent challenge procedure often makes filing for a patent an unwise option for small companies and individual software developer, which form the backbone of Indian software industry. For instance, IBM was granted a patent on the same data-compression algorithm that Unisys supposedly owned. Such an error which could prove lethal for a developing company which has planned its budget meticulously and in consequence of this error would be greatly disincentivized to develop new software. The Patent Office was probably not aware of granting two patents for the same algorithm because the descriptions in the patents themselves are quite different even though the formulas are mathematically equivalent. Even when patents are known in advance, software publishers have generally not licensed the algorithms or techniques; instead, they try to rewrite their programs to avoid using the particular procedure that the patent describes. Sometimes this isn't possible, in which case companies have often chosen to avoid implementing new features altogether. It seems clear from the evidence of the last few years that software patents are actually preventing the adoption of new technology, rather than encouraging it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/software-patents/alfs-note-before-2005-amendment

Response by Knowledge Commons

pranesh — 2008-09-30T15:07:50Z

Arguments on why section 4.11 of the Patents Manual needs to be modified.

1. A patent is a state granted monopoly on an invention. As with any other monopoly, a patent must be treated with great discretion, especially since this particular monopoly is bestowed by the state itself. The original intent of the patent system was to encourage disclosure by the inventor, in exchange for exclusive rights to the invention. This ensured that inventors did not take their inventions to the grave and that society could build on existing knowledge rather than re-invent the wheel. As with any other policy instrument, we need to examine whether patents meet their intended objectives.

2. In this context, the degree of patent protection in India should be seen with the following in mind:

The desirable form of IPR protection is very much a function of development. Currently, the developed economies feel they should protect their IPR and restrict their dissemination. But these same countries have historically had much more lax IPR regimes that have allowed imitation to promote more rapid industrialization. For example, the US actively encouraged copying of European innovation in the 19th century and even “nationalised” wireless patents - claiming national interest. Even late 20th century rapid developers such as Japan and South Korea benefited greatly from relatively lax patent regimes. So there is a strong case for providing less IPR protection in the development phase, especially in those areas where domestic innovation is less advanced.

There is no clear correlation between high IPR protection and innovation[1], and much historical evidence to the contrary. A significant number of studies have shown that patents are important primarily in chemicals, chemical materials and pharmaceuticals, where patents can protect specific molecules or well defined but small slices of technology. In other areas, patents tend to be relatively less important in promoting innovation.

This means that India should first identify what are its national interests and then calibrate the IPR protection accordingly. For example, in pharmaceuticals, the current national interest lies clearly in restricting patents. This is also why the Indian Parliament has taken advantage of the flexibility of TRIPs to raise the bar of what is patentable. Indeed, other countries including the US are now copying some of these measures.[2]

An important example is in the area of software where India has a major interest, and where patents are being opposed by all Small and Medium sized companies. In Europe, this opposition led to the proposed directive on software patents to be defeated overwhelmingly in the European Parliament.

3. There are now attempts being made in India to bring in software patents using either the EPO or the USPTO practice. This attempt is being supported by a small number of large international software companies, who had earlier benefited from software being free from patents and are now trying to obstruct others who are entering the field. It is not in the interest of India's software industry to have restrictive patent regime, particularly as they switch from being service providers to product developers.

4. The EPO in fact has followed much of the USPTO practice, the only area that it differs with USPTO being in the business method patenting. However, as a number of observers have pointed out, this means drafting a business method patent as a technical application: it is the form of the patent rather than its content that changes with the EPO approach. Therefore, both EPO and USPTO have erred in accepting patents that are either algorithms or methods, dressed up as software patents.

5. The crisis of the US Patent Office is well known and many critics have pointed out that the US is facing effectively a broken patent system. They have pointed out that granting patents to objects that have existed for years, or patents that are patently ridiculous, does not serve any purpose whatsoever. A case in point is US Patent 20060071122, granted for a ‘full body teleportation system’. The abstract for this reads, ‘A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.’ Of course, there is no functional version of this. There are innumerable examples of this kind of patent being granted. Another kind of patent that serves no useful purpose is where the patented product or process is something that has been used for years and years, and is known to the whole world, such as the wheel, or swinging on a swing.[3] This undermines the entire basis of the patent system and has the potential to cause havoc. The rapid dilution of the tripartite test of novelty, non-obviousness and utility that led to such patents being granted is finally being halted in the USA, with the US Supreme Court ruling recently that obviousness cannot be constrained by a legal formulation, and the use of common sense is necessary in determining whether a patent be granted or not.[4]

6. Courts in all parts of the world have held that subject matter which would have the practical effect of pre-empting laws of nature, abstract ideas or mathematical algorithms is ineligible for patent protection. This age-old and time-tested precedent effectively establishes the ineligibility for patent protection to laws of nature, abstract ideas and mathematical algorithms. If these could be patented, then in effect one would be patenting the tools of scientific enquiry itself, something no patent law allows as it would lead to halting scientific progress.

7. In the past, the courts have also held that regarding patentable subject that the inquiry into whether subject matter is eligible for patenting is one of substance, not form. This requires that the patent office look, not simply at the language of the patent claim to see if it recites a structure of multiple steps or components, but also at the practical effect of the claim to see if it in fact covers -- or otherwise would restrict the public’s access to -- a principle, law of nature, abstract idea, mathematical formula, mental process, algorithm or other abstract intellectual concept. Otherwise, it would make the determination of patentable subject matter depend simply on the draftsman’s art and would ill serve the principles underlying the prohibition against patents for 'ideas' or phenomena of nature. By skilled patent drafting, one should not be able to start patenting essentially abstract ideas, mental processes and newly discovered laws of nature or mathematical algorithms.

8. However, a number of patent offices, particularly the USPTO and the EPO have been granting patents recently for software also. This is without taking into consideration that all software is ultimately the expression of algorithms or mathematical methods. This has already created a situation which Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium that sets global standards for the Internet, calls the biggest threat to software development.

All companies developing emerging technology are threatened by the prospect of patent licensing royalties. You could never find out what patent could possibly apply to what technology. You could never guess what things people might have the gall to say they have patented already. It really is a universal fear.’ (Tim Berners-Lee at Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 29, 2004.)

9. In the US, recent studies have shown that the only sector of the economy in which royalties are more than legal costs are pharmaceuticals[5]. In their recently published book, Bessen and Meurer have analysed the numbers in terms of revenues generated from patents as against cost of filing, maintaining and defending patents in courts. In their view, the data shows that except in the case of pharmaceuticals, patents generate far more litigation costs than revenue. The numbers are clear: domestic litigation costs --16 billion dollars in 1999 alone -- was about twice the revenue for patents. Even in this, almost two thirds of the revenue was from pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Worse, the more innovative the company, more was the likelihood of it being sued. The software and business method patents fared the worst, with costs far outstripping the benefits of patenting. The sector with the worst royalty to costs record is software, with most high technology firms being opposed now to software patents.

10. Apart from the reasons given above, the software patents have the problem of being ill defined and capable of very broad scope. It is difficult to build around as is possible in other areas of technology, precisely because of the vagueness of the claims. Novelty and inventive step is again much more difficult to disprove unlike pharmaceuticals, where it is the molecule with a clearly defined structure which is being patented. No company in the world can conduct patent searches for software, given the number of such patents being filed and the inability to identify the defining characteristic of the product being patented. Therefore, the provision of copyright is more than adequate for protecting IPR in software.

11. The other problem with software patents is that any large software project uses a large number of software components. Any one of them can be subjected litigation claiming patent violations. This would open the company to costly lawsuits and against the interests of all but the biggest global corporations who have deep pockets.

12. Today, even companies such as IBM, Sun, Texas Instruments, CISCO have joined the growing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community opposing software patents. Most of these companies have publicly stated that they are filing patents only for defensive purposes. Indian law also bars software patents. With regards to proprietary versus FOSS, India needs to analyse and define what should be its trajectory. There is enough grounds to believe that if Indian companies want to move from services model to a product model, software patents and proprietary software will not be the route to take instead, India should promote FOSS, as Brazil and China are doing.

13. Apart from the lack of natural reason for granting software patents, there are potential adverse consequences to the Indian economy in other areas should such patents are granted. The current explosion in bio-pharmaceutical development is increasingly dependent on the ability to perform large-scale data mining from huge amounts of genetic-genomic data. Highly specialised software is developed from pre-existing 'generic' software by bio-informatic technologists for this purpose. Allowing the patenting of the generic basic software will increase the costs of data mining substantially, and will have an extremely adverse impact on the competitive ability of small, knowledge-based entrepreneurial ventures of the kind that India excels in.

14. In India, it has been considered patents should be granted only when public good demands granting of such state protected monopolies. This was the practice also in the UK and the US. It is still the basis of the practice in most countries. It is only in the last few decades that the US, followed by the UK, Japan and now the European Patent Office has tried to change the interpretation of their Patents Acts to expand the scope of patentability. This attempt to enlarge the scope is from their national interest as they hold the largest number of patents. Therefore, their belief that strengthening the patent regime internationally will help their companies to build worldwide monopolies.

15. It is not in India’s national interest or in the interests of its people to expand the scope of state protected monopolies through expanding the patent scope. India’s national interest is best served by restricting the scope of such monopolies. Therefore, the patent regime in India should work on the presumption that patents are to be given only when there is a decisive case for patents. This has been the basis of the Indian Patents Act and is in tune with fundamentals of such legislation world over. It is only the deviation in patent interpretation that has produced a scenario where business methods, software and also mathematical methods are also being patented.

16. The US Supreme Court has now been correcting some of the excesses that has occurred in the US patents interpretation by the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (CAFC). We see no reason why India should change it understanding of patentability following in the footsteps of the US and the EPO and subsequently need to correct such excesses.

17. The US Supreme Court had ruled earlier that Supreme Court has held that patent protection may not be granted for “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.” Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 185 (1981). The case has frequently been misread as a basis for patenting subject matter that is abstract and intangible. In fact, however, Diehr confirms that intangible subject matter may not be patented, whether directly or indirectly through artful claim drafting.

18. Diehr also re-affirmed its holding in Gottschalk v.Benson, 409 U.S. 63 (1972), that algorithms, or procedures for solving mathematical problems—the building blocks of computer programs—cannot be patented. Likewise, it reaffirmed its holding in Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1984), that an algorithm for computing a number that served as an alarm limit was not patentable by adding insignificant post-solution activity added to a unpatentable principle to a patenable process. Diehr reaffirmed that only tangible processes – in this case vulcanizing rubber-- and not abstract ideas are patentable.

19. In alignment with Benson and Flook, the US Supreme Court in Diehr held that structures or processes must, when considered as a whole, perform functions intended to be covered by patent law in order to be eligible for patent protection. Diehr followed and upheld the core holdings of both Benson and Flook.

20. The US Supreme Court therefore has not pronounced on software patents after Diehr and therefore Diehr still remains the definitive interpretation of software patents in the US.

21. The CAFC deviated from the Supreme Court ruling in Diehr in At&T vs Excel Communications and in State Street Bank. There, CAFC held that though abstract ideas were not patentable, they could be patented if they produced “a useful, concrete and tangible result.” This was inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s earlier rulings on this matter.

22. In a number of recent cases, the US Supreme Court has overruled the CAFC. In all these cases, the US Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of what is patentable. We have already quoted the KSR Vs Teleflex case in this context.

23. It is in this context that the CAFC is revisiting the State Street and AT&T Vs Excel Communications sitting in en banc. Significantly, it has posed the following questions on which it wants to re-examine the two cases. These are:

(1) Whether claim 1 of the [Bilski] patent application claims patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101?

(2) What standard should govern in determining whether a process is patent-eligible subject matter under section 101?

(3) Whether the claimed subject matter is not patent-eligible because it constitutes an abstract idea or mental process; when does a claim that contains both mental and physical steps create patent-eligible subject matter?

(4) Whether a method or process must result in a physical transformation of an article or be tied to a machine to be patent-eligible subject matter under section 101?

(5) Whether it is appropriate to reconsider State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), and AT&T Corp. v. Excel Communications, Inc., 172 F.3d 1352 (Fed. Cir. 1999), in this case and, if so, whether those cases should be overruled in any respect?

24. Obviously, the US Courts are re-thinking software patents in the light of its difficulty in establishing clear boundaries and tying all future innovation in a morass of litigation. With patent trolls entering the picture, it has become clear to the industry as well as the larger public in the US that the patent system is not being well served by software patents. The CAFC en banc review is only one such indication. Patent reforms are also being discussed in US Congress to address such issues.

25. Therefore, we would urge the patent office to take cognizance off the above and reconsider the paras in the Draft Patent Manual that allows software patents if they are seen to have technical applications.

26. We believe that the lawmakers have done their job and have defined clearly that software patents per se are not admissible in India. It is now incumbent on the patent office to make this clear and not admit such patents.

----

US CASES

Diamond v. Diehr,

450 U.S. 175 (1981)

Gottschalk v. Benson,

409 U.S. 63 (1972)

Parker v. Flook,

437 U.S. 584 (1984)

Alappat,

33 F.3d 1526 (Fed. Cir. 1994)

State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.,

149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), 525 U.S. 1093 (1999)

AT&T Corp. v. Excel Communications, Inc.,

172 F.3d 1352 (Fed. Cir. 1999),

KSR International v. Teleflex

127 US 1727 (2007)

----

[1] Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm)

[2] Thus, while the US Trade Representative calls for Indian Patent Law to conform to US practices, patent reform is now being pushed aggressively within the US by the high tech industries that are complaining of grant opposition and post grant opposition (as exist in Indian Law) are being put forward as patent reforms in the US Congress. The US Supreme Court has now made combining two existing innovations into a “new” one invalid for patenting (again already barred under Indian Law). The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has now ruled in what is not patentable virtually in the same language for what is not patentable a broken patent system. Both pre according to the Indian Patent Act (Section 3 d, challenged by Novartis in Chennai High Court).

[3] US Patent 6368227, “Method for swinging on a swing”, filed by a five year old child; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1418165.stm, How an Australian lawyer patented the wheel. There are many other examples.

[4] "We build and create by bringing to the tangible and palpable reality around us new works based on instinct, simple logic, ordinary inferences, extraordinary ideas, and sometimes even genius. These advances, once part of our shared knowledge, define a new threshold from which innovation starts once more. And as progress beginning from higher levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts. See U. S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 8. These premises led to the bar on patents claiming obvious subject matter established in Hotchkiss and codified in §103. Application of the bar must not be confined within a test or formulation too constrained to serve its purpose." KSR International v Telefax US Supreme Court

[5] James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers

Put Innovators at Risk, Princeton University Press, March 2008.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/software-patents/response-by-knowledge-commons-1

Digital Pluralism

nishant — 2009-02-06T06:31:50Z

The Internet, when referred to with a capital I, often gives the notion of a centralised, homogenised, consolidated network of access, protocols and people. Popular representations and imaginations of the Internet ‘make invisible’, the extremely complex, intricate, and varied nature, not only of the uses and the stakeholders of the Internet but also the many forms that Internet itself takes. The notion of pluralism – the belief in multiple knowledges and perspectives, the availability of different frameworks and truths, and the transmit-ability and transmutability of information – is built into the very form of the Internet. It is perhaps more appropriate, given the wide scope and range of the internet and the many different ways in which it intersects with the world around us, to talk of many different kinds of internets.

The Centre for Internet and Society sets out to examine the multiplicity of Internet by looking at the notion of digital pluralism. We seek to theorise the particular concept to investigate the many intersections that the internet has with the world around us. Given the scope and persuasiveness of internet technologies, it would be redundant to produce a list of possible meanings of the internet. Instead, we conceptualise the internet at three different levels, each demanding its own history, context, materiality and specificities, to produce a more comprehensive understanding of what the internet means and how it responds and reacts to the digitised and networked times we live in.

Internet as Technology

At the primary level, the Internet is a set of protocols, which allows the transfer of data over a complex and almost interminable network. It is necessary, as the internet increasingly becomes central to the crucial mechanics of survival, to recognise it as a technology. The arrival of internet technologies has made a significant impact in the domains of life, labour, language and history, changing the way we understand certain older structures like property, economy, capital, possession, ownership, etc.

So persuasive is the seductive power of the internet, that it often makes invisible the larger questions of freedom, access, and production, in its unfolding. The call to re-emphasise the internet as technology is to examine the economic rhetoric of globalisation, urbanisation and new digital technologies on the one hand, and the alarmist calls around piracy, security, theft and ownership on the other.

Communities of gift economy, of open access to content online, of advocating Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), of promoting greater inclusion and pluralism of non-licensed softwares and protocols have all emerged around the questions of Internet as Technology. Despite the gravity of the concerns they raise and the unequivocal merit of their activities, very little attention is given to them either by the private sector or civil societies or the government. While there has been a long (and often raging) debate on the internet around these issues, the mainstream media and the larger public remain outside its scope and continue getting implicated in softwares, platforms and digital forms while compromising their rights.

The Centre for Internet and Society hopes, through a model of consultation and collaboration, to actively intervene in this field, to promote the digital pluralism of internet technologies and resist any hegemonic and coercive practices of larger corporate conglomerates and state bodies that may act against public interest.

Internet and its Materiality

The Internet has material consequences. Cybercultures theory, augmented by other instrumental discourses on the internet, incessantly confines cyberspaces to a schism between virtual reality and real life. Such a view of the internet renders the material transactions and consequences of the internet invisible.

As the internet technologies become more pervasive and persuasive, they become an integral part of the mechanics of modern survival. The internet has now become central to the domains of life, labour and language, affecting crucial questions of identity, subjectivity, sexuality, freedom and expression. How do we think of ourselves, not only in relation to technology but also as technologised beings; in a condition of becoming cyborgs? What are the forms of subjectivities that emerge in the technologised transactions of every day? How do we understand the different forms of sexual interactions, mediated and shaped by internet technologies? What are the new kinds of sexual identities which are produced and mobilised by the internet? Is the internet, as is often celebrated in popular discourse, really creating alternative public spheres of freedom or is it producing new forms of exclusion and discrimination?

The Centre for Internet and Society believes that while these questions have cropped up variously, and often emphatically, in the last four decades of Internet presence, there has been very little academic or theoretical attention given to them. The approaches that exist are primarily focussed on the object of change rather than the technologies that shape the change. The accounts provided also, instead of drawing from the mechanics and aesthetics of the technologies, rely on earlier technologised forms to make meaning of the new form. We find it imperative to work for a better understanding of the way the globalised technologised world is being shaped through the wide-spread penetration of Internet Technologies and their material consequences.

Internet and Cyberspaces

Cyberspaces, though a smaller part of the Internet, are the most visible face of the Internet networks. The arrival of the GUI, social networking applications, innovative forms of interaction and networking, online gaming, role-playing and expression platforms like blogging, and virtual worlds, have created a fascinating network of users, distributed across lifestyles and geographies, interacting with each other in unprecedented forms. Cyberspaces, with their ability to immerse the users entirely into the medium, creating a world of incessant interaction – with technologies, with technologised forms, with cultural products, and with the other users, who have translated themselves, using the structures of anonymity and desire – have led to new forms of social, cultural and economic practices which require critical thought and analysis.

Cyberspaces produce many questions – some legal, some judicial, and some about safety, danger, and harm – which need to be answered and engaged with at a serious level. Given the unmoderated nature of access and production on cyberspaces, how do we make a call for safety and caution without compromising the rights of the individual for freedom of expression, speech and being? How do we protect the innocent or the uninitiated, from scandals, scams or situations which might be harmful to them, without making a call for censorship and regimentation? As familial interactions get mediated with technologies, how do we understand the notion of family and the economies that surround it? With new political and cultural mobilisations coming in effect, how do we imagine the space of the public and the political?

Questions like these have a direct bearing on the ideas of individual freedom and right to non-discrimination, while simultaneously asking for a moderated and controlled cyberspatial experience. The design, form, shape and content of cyberspaces all have different implications in these questions, and an analysis of not only the user behaviour or the impact but the very epistemological origins and functions of such forms is important to be studied. These concerns also bolster the idea of digital pluralism of a certain kind – not a neo-liberal call for solipsistic individualism but concentrating on and bolstering the relationships that the individual has with the society and how internet technologies mediate these relationships.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/digital-pluralism-1

Cyberspace in its Plurality: Cybercultures Workshop at TISS, Mumbai

nishant — 2008-10-31T10:38:17Z

Cyberspace has become one of the most potent and persuasive metaphors of our times, enveloping and embracing a wide range and scope of areas across disciplines and perspectives. The cybercultures workshop is designed to be an introduction to the multiplicity of cyberspaces and internet technologies and the key questions which have emerged in the almost four decades of cyberculture theory. The workshop is designed across four days; each day dealing with a certain understanding of cyberspace – in its materiality, in its imagination, in its instrumentality – in order to present a comprehensive view of the vast terrain of cyberspace and its intersections with the contemporary worlds we live in.

Workshop @ Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai

The four day workshop at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, sees CIS engaging with one of the most exciting spaces in the Indian academia; we design and administer an introduction course on cyberspace and its plurality to students of media and cultural studies. The workshop is a part of the Centre for Internet and Society's larger concern on providing a multidisciplinary, multi-media approach towards the internet and contextualising it in India.

Structured on a seminar model, the workshop hopes to bring together the questions in academic debate as well as in the realm of cultural production, for students to understand the internet technologies and cyberspaces as not only important cultural outputs but also crucial forms that shape the world we live in.

Objectives: The four day cybercultures workshop hopes to achieve the following objectives:

To introduce the students to the multiplicity and complexity of ‘cyberspace’.
To introduce ‘cyberspace’ as an epistemological category to emphasise the centrality of cyberspaces in understanding the mechanics of urban survival in the contemporary.
To orient the students towards understanding the textuality of cyberspace; rescuing it from the confines of digital networks and locating it in the transactions of globalization and urbanization in Asia.
To introduce the key debates in cybercultures theory: body, gender, sexuality, authorship, ownership, access and information democratization.

Design: The cybercultures workshop is designed to be conducted over four days with two sessions (of three hours each) per day. Each day is thematically divided to look at a particular idea of cyberspace; the sessions are further sub-divided to introduce a particular perspective on the day’s theme. Each session has its set of individual pre-readings which will serve more as indicators of the stake of the debate rather than as texts around which the class will be centred. The readings shall remain as introductory material, and the class room discussions, while referring to them, will not concentrate on explaining the material.

Day 1: Cyberspace – Form, Textuality and Frameworks

Session 1: Exploring Cyberspace:

Definitions, explanations, locations

Cyberspace and Digital Technologies

Form, text, textuality

Pre-reading: Shah, Nishant, 2005. “Playblog: Pornography, Performance, and Cyberspace” available here

Session 2: The Digital DNA – Database, Networks, Archives

The Database Imperative: Sorting, information, databases

The Networking Impulse: Social Networking Systems and the condition of networking

The Archiving Aspirations: Intention, aspiration and archiving the present

Pre-reading: Manovich, Lev, 2001. “The Database as a Symbolic Form” available here

Day 2: Information technology and human engineering

Session 3 : Gender, Technology and Cyberspace

Gendering of Technology; Gendered Technologies

The body and its boundaries

Physical bodies; Digital selves; cyborgs

Pre-reading: Light, Jennifer, 1999. “When Computers Were Women” available here

Dibbell, Julian, 1991. “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” available here

Session 4: Techno-social Worlds

Orkut Deaths : The distributed self

Role playing and identity : The real and the authentic

DPS MMS: The trajectories of selves

Day 3- 4 : Cyberspace and the Infobahn

Session 5: Movie Screening: Good Copy, Bad Copy (followed by discussion)

Session 6: Who owns Cyberspace?

Ownership and Possession

Licensing and access

Open source and the gift economy

Pre-reading: UNCTAD essay on copyright and related questions, available here

Session 7: 18 Reasons Why Piracy is Good for You

The need for piracy

Piracy, theft, and property

Session 8: The Cultural Value of Intellectual Property

The Digital Millenium Rights

The Copy Right and the Copy Left

Open Access and the Creative Commons

Outputs

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/cyberspace-in-its-plurality-cybercultures-workshop-at-tiss-mumbai

A2K3 Panel XI: Open Access to Science and Research

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:07:56Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam participated in the third Access to Knowledge hosted by The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School between September 8-10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference held at the Geneva International Conference Centre brought together hundreds of decision-makers and experts on global knowledge to discuss the urgent need for policy reforms.

Original Article on A2K3 website

Download Subbiah Arunachalam's Paper

Audio file of Session on Open Access to Science and Research (Ogg, MP3)

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. Made possible by the internet and author consent, OA supports wider and faster access to knowledge. This panel featured Leslie Chan, of the University of Toronto; Subbiah Arunachalam of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and Global Knowledge Partnership; Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology, UCT; and DK Sahu of Medknow Publications Pvt. Ltd. Peter Suber from the Yale Information Society Project and SPARC moderated this panel.

It’s a distant dream for most kinds of literature, where authors are unwilling to give up the revenue they currently earn from publishers. But it’s growing quickly for scholarly journal articles, where journals don’t pay for articles and authors write for impact, not for money. The result is a revolutionary opportunity to accelerate research and share knowledge. OA is especially important for researchers and medical practitioners in developing countries, where access to knowledge has been sharply reduced by four decades of fast-rising journal prices.

This panel will examine what universities and governments can do to promote OA, with a special focus on medical research and health information. Among the models discussed will be peer-reviewed OA journals, OA repositories, the WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), and the new policy from the U.S. National Institutes of Health requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository.

The questions to be addressed will include:

How do access barriers slow research in developing countries? How does OA remove those barriers?
What can universities do to promote OA?
What can governments, and public funding agencies, do to promote OA?
What special challenges do developing countries face in providing OA?
What are some concrete examples of successful OA policies and projects in developing countries?
Why is OA a critical issue for policy-makers concerned with public health, scientific innovation, and higher education?
How does OA accelerate the advance and spread of knowledge in medicine as well as in other disciplines?
How can OA promote the work of researchers in developing and transitional countries, both as readers and as authors?

PETER SUBER

OA literature is digital, online, free of charge, free of needless copyright
OA is compatible with peer review, copyright, revenue and profit, print, preservation, prestige
3622 peer-reviewed OA journals, 1220 OA repositories, 22 university OA mandates (15 countries), 27 funding agencies OA mandates (14 countries)
Part of the problem: journal prices have risen 4 times faser than inflation since mid-1980s. Indian institute of science is the best funded research library in india providing access to 10600 serials.
Harvard has 98990
Yale has 73900
Average ARL library = 50,566
U of Witwatersrand = 29,309
U of Malawi = 17000 ejournals, 95 print
The case for OA is especially strong for publicly funded research, medical research, research from developing countries

SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM

Why do we needopen access to science?
Science as Knowledge commons
Created by researchers, a communal activity, science is about sharing, internet has opened new opportunities
Primary goal of science is the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of humanity
Emergence of open access – seeks to restore knowledge commons to creators. Movement, like everything else, is uneven
Physicists vs. chemists
UK, Netherlands and USA – have had many more successes
Brazil – doing very well – but China and India are not doing so well with open access
Restore the knowledge commons is to the community
This movement is like any other movement which is uneven
Developments in India

3.1% papers in chemical abstracts
30,000 papers a year indexed in SCI
Problems of Access and Visibility

New Developments:

Consortia – able to provide a lot of journals
open courseware
arXiv

Problems: papers that are published are put in inaccessible journals, and people in global South laboratories would be unable to access this knowledge. The Government gives the money but the research then ends up flying out
The policy front:

Individual efforts
National Knowledge Commission has recommended OA
Number of institutional repositories
Need advocacy and training programmes
Action missing from key players

Some individuals are doing a great job and putting all their materials online
Medical information and developing countries

No nation can afford to be without access to S&T research capacity
Neglected diseases are not a priority for pharmaceutical companies
HINARI – any country that has per capita less than $1000 is eligible

DK SAHU

Infectious diseases (chikungunya goes Italian)
Non-infectious diseases (india becoming global hub for diabetes)
Industry effects (how safe are clinical trials)
Several examples (such as MedKnow, Journal of Postgraduate Medicine) of free access to no-fee journals.
A journal from India has the most visits from London
A journal called International Journal of Shoulder Surgery but visitors are from Melbourne
More original research articles, 40+ articles in 2005 vs. 160+ articles in 2008 in IJU, more issues per year for journals, check on scientific misconduct, international recognition (11 journals in SCI in 2 years)
Going online increases citations – this is an open access advantage
Scientific output of new economies: medicine
Open access publishing is not alone sufficient – there are disappearing journals. Commercial publishers are taking over, there is a lack of continuity, non-interoperability/archiving
20-80 phenomenon (majority of journals are not OA)
Local journals are not preferred (high IF journals)

LESLIE CHAN

Role of Universities and Researchers
You need citations in order to advance in academia – if your papers get picked up and ripple throughout the research arena. What about policy impact?
“Impact factor” is evil. Open access was meant to counter the tyranny of impact factor, so OA journals should not try to battle it out in this arena.
Issues involve “big science” and “lost science”, research literature as infrastructure, integrating the gold and green roads to open access.
Institutional repositories and open access journals
There’s a lot of Big Science that costs a lot of money (like LHC)
But we have another big hole – the 10-90Gap. 10% of the global health research spending is allocated to diseases affecting 90% of the population
The G8 countries account for 85% of most cited articles indexed in ISI
The other 126 countries account for 2.5%
How much of these journals are relevant in terms of content?
We are operating with a dominant model of knowledge dissemination from the Center to the Periphery
We end up having “lost science” in the developing world because of that knowledge
Perpetuate the cycle of knowledge poverty in this way
African countries need to have in place appropriate mechanisms and infrastructure for training and exploitation of knowledge. This will enable them to make meaningful evidence based policy that pertains to local needs
Researchers in developing countries ranked access to subscription-based journals as one of their most pressing problems
HINARI: health sciences

108 countries, 1043 institutions, 5000 journals
Collaboration of >45 publishers: free or reduced-cost access to journals for developing countries
Others: eIFL.net, AGORA: agricultural sciences, OERE: environmental sciences, PERI
Dissemination through information philanthropy. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/1001/lcp100109.html

Open access: the solution to the “lost science”
Two routes to Open Access (OA) – open access journals and respositories
African health sciences: two years ago there was a n article published in this journal and authors found that over 50% of these drugs were substandard or fake. This got the local newspaper, and then BBC, and then other researchers started looking at it
Open Access repositories:
Institutionally-based (universities, etc) or subject-based (e.g. PubMet Central, arXiv.org)
Collect copies of articles published by the institutions researchers
Researchers themselves deposit knowledge
Benefits for authors (research output instantly accessible for all (higher impact)
Research output of international research community accessible to author
Partnerships/collaborative projects develop as a result
Career prospects advanced – publications noted by authorities
Opportunities for new research discoveries, data mining etc
Alternative impact assessment
Benefits for funding bodies: what has been discovered with our financial support? Was it a good investment?
Researchers have a moral and intellectual obligation to ensure that their research is accessible
Universities share a common goal and public mission advancement of knowledge for the betterment of human kind
Open access is key to the MDG

EVE GRAY

When we talk about open access, we talk about change and change delivery.
It’s not just intellectual property and copyright issues, but values, cultures, systems, practices, everything that underlie the process moving towards scientific research
We faced the biggest problem in facing change – we’ve seen a massive overhaul, of transformative reports, of leveraging the country into a different direction. Undoing the damage of apartheid and colonialism
What is meant by international? What is meant by local?
African knowledge for Africa: we need to rejuvenate, regenerate our own knowledge
SA: first heart transplant in the world. Have their own vaccines. Operate as a leading scientific country
Growing international competitiveness – publication is perceived as a matter of journal articles in international journals. Little or no support for publication in nationally-based publications
Much research output in grey literature, not easily findable or accessible
The Medicines and Related Substances Control Act, 2001
Research has to address the burning economic issues of a country
Things are changing…slowly
Support for open access publications
What needs to be done – open access journals are necessary.
Changing values and promotion systems – we have to somehow pick up on the vision of that vibrant African dance movement, translate this feeling
Providing support for publication efforts
Expand the range of publication outputs
Ensuring the social impact of research
There is a huge amount of research being pumped out and being printed out by NGOs
Great literature is almost inaccessible in universities
Could not access African journals – no access from their own countries or neighboring countries
Electric Book Works has manuals for health-care workers – manuals are very high-quality, out of University of Cape Town
Often forgotten that science information is necessary to trickle down, if everything is online, we can get things to trickle down
Harvard said: it is our duty to disseminate our research. Stanford: Caroline Handy – when you publish research, research for community use is part of the duty

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research

Piracy

royson — 2009-01-26T10:23:49Z

Context

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

Research Agenda

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

Resources

Music industry ‘should embrace illegal websites’

Causes of illegal music product’s existence

Creativity policy pits internet providers against pirates

Piracy is good?

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