Centre for Internet and Society

General Comments on Data Protection Bill

Pallavi Bedi and Shweta Mohandas — 2022-02-14T15:55:10Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/general-comments-data-protection-bill.pdf

Gender and gig work: Perspectives from domestic work in India

ambika — 2021-12-07T02:11:49Z

Platforms have the potential to be instrumental in protecting workers rights, but the current platform design is not optimised to protect workers’ interests especially those of women in the gig economy, argues Ambika Tandon, a senior researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society in India and an author of the report on ‘Platforms, Power and Politics: Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India’.

Digital labour platforms, broadly defined as digital interfaces that enable the exchange of goods or services, have grown exponentially in cities across the world. In sectors such as transportation and delivery, Uber and similar platforms have achieved dominant status, while in other sectors platforms are still making inroads to transform consumption patterns. Researchers at India’s Centre for Internet and Society, sought to understand the impact platforms have had on the paid domestic and care work sector in India, given its importance for women workers. The workforce in this sector is largely constituted of women from Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi (or caste-oppressed) and low-income groups, with a long history of socioeconomic and legal devaluation and lack of recognition. In this context, platforms have positioned themselves as intermediaries that will improve wages and conditions of work, pushing the sector towards formalisation.

To assess the impact of digital platforms on processes of recruitment and placement and on organisation and conditions of work, we undertook 60 in-depth interviews between June and November 2019. We chose two metropolitan cities, New Delhi in north India and Bengaluru in south India, as our field sites. These are key nodes in the migration corridors of domestic workers in the country. We spoke to workers who were searching for hourly or regular work through platforms, representatives of platform companies and state and central governments, as well as domestic workers unions. We found that platform design breeds and amplifies exclusion and discrimination along the lines of gender and caste, among other social characteristics.

Uber for domestic work

We found that the function of digital platforms in the sector is contingent on the historical organisation of domestic work, rather than any fundamental re-organisation of the supply chain. Unlike in the global North, platforms in India have thus far been unable to ‘gig-ify’, that is, break up most tasks that constitute domestic work – including child and elderly care and cooking – into short-term granular services that have been standardised. Domestic workers continue to find regular term full-time placements through marketplace platforms, which only connect employers to workers with no other role in determining work conditions. HelpersNearMe and Helper4u are examples of platforms that play this role by listing profiles of workers and making these available to employers. These placements are no different from work in the ‘offline’ sector, with complete informality and very little standardisation around hours, wages, and task constitution. As compared to this, on-demand platforms that offer short-term gigs (similar to the Uber model) have grown exponentially in the ‘deep’ cleaning segment by marketing it as a professional service with higher value than ‘regular’ cleaning services.

The function of digital platforms in the sector is contingent on the historical organisation of domestic work, rather than any fundamental re-organisation of the supply chain.

Cleaning gigs provided by on-demand companies have higher hourly wages than ‘regular’ cleaning services in the traditional sector. But accessing these opportunities requires workers to have regular access to a smartphone throughout the day, to be able to accept or reject tasks and receive payments through a mobile application or web-portal. Women workers from low income families have very low levels of digital access, with most phones being shared between families and controlled by male members. Also, the use of technical equipment such as vacuum cleaners and chemicals has led to deep cleaning being viewed as a masculine task. As a result, almost all cleaning workers we identified in the on-demand sector were men, even though cleaning is a feminised job role in the traditional economy. Some cleaning workers we spoke to did not identify as domestic workers at all, but rather viewed their work as holding a higher status than traditional cleaning. This trend of masculinisation of a job role coinciding with higher wages and social status has also been seen in other sectors globally, such as software programming.

Promises and risks of low-tech platforms

One of the reasons that women workers are more likely to find work through marketplace platforms rather than on-demand agencies is because they only require workers to have a basic or feature phone for one-time registration, and subsequently to answer calls from potential employers or the platform. Most platforms in this category do not intervene in task allocation or terms of work, which are negotiated directly between workers and employers. Algorithms and digital interfaces then only facilitate matching, as opposed to on-demand work where all aspects of the job are determined by the platform. This allows women workers to register using shared family phones, or those of their friends, neighbours, and in the case of one of our respondents, her landlady’s phone number. These platforms then may be able to provide placement opportunities to workers who are unable to find work through word-of-mouth networks. This is especially crucial as a result of the unemployment crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, unlike with the on-demand model, these platforms do not offer increased wages or provide better conditions of work.

Although marketplace platforms provide an additional route into finding opportunities in the sector, they also codify employers’ biases through their design. All marketplace platforms and digital placement agencies we reviewed – upwards of 20 companies – provide demographic filters to employers for filtering workers’ profiles. These include information on workers’ gender, age, religion, state of origin, and in one case, even caste. While practices of employing workers based on demographic characteristics are rampant in the sector historically, platforms build them in by design and market them as a key feature of what they are able to offer employers. These open up direct avenues for employers to discriminate against workers from minority religions and oppressed castes. It also reinforces gendered occupational segregation, as employers seek out women workers for feminised roles such as cleaning and care work, and men for tasks such as gardening and plumbing.

Power structures endemic to the domestic work sector continue to thrive in the platform economy, as do gender and caste-based occupational segregation.

Platforms have been making claims of formalising the informal sector, especially in global South economies, through increasing efficiency in matching workers to employers. Despite having the potential to be instrumental in protecting workers rights, currently platform design is not optimised to protect workers’ interests. Power structures endemic to the domestic work sector continue to thrive in the platform economy, as do gender and caste-based occupational segregation. To be able to nudge the sector towards formalisation, platforms need to directly intervene in power structures and co-design with workers, rather than merely functioning as digital recruiters. This could imply adopting practices such as removing demographic details where not relevant, introducing written contracts and minimum wage floors for placements, and addressing gender gaps in some segments of the digital economy.

This work forms part of a project on ‘Platforms, Power and Politics: Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India’, supported by the Association for Progressive Communications. You can read more about the project here, and find the full project report here.

This article gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The blog first published on LSE website can be accessed here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/lse-ambika-tandon-october-21-2021-ambika-tandon-gender-and-gig-work

Gen Comments to PDP Bill

akash — 2020-02-12T11:50:32Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/gen-comments-to-pdp-bill

Gen Comments PDP Bill 2019

pallavi — 2020-02-21T10:00:16Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/gen-comments-pdp-bill-2019

GeekUp with Alan Knott-Craig

praskrishna — 2012-06-29T11:11:52Z

HasGeek and CIS invite you to a lecture by Alan Knott-Craig at CIS office in Bangalore on June 30, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.

Alan is founder of World of Avatar and CEO of Mxit, Africa’s largest social network. Between 2003 and 2006, Alan co-founded five companies in the mobile services sector. In 2006, he was appointed managing director of iBurst, a broadband network operator in South Africa. In April 2008, he published Don’t Panic, a best selling book aimed at persuading emigrant South Africans to return home. In June 2008, he founded The Trust, an NGO focused on assisting charities access skills and capital. In 2009, he was named as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In June 2012 he published Mobinomics, the story of Mxit and mobile in Africa. Alan is a qualified Chartered Accountant (SA).

The Story of MXit

MXit (pronounced "mix it") is a free instant messaging application developed by MXit Lifestyle (Pty) Ltd. in South Africa that runs on multiple mobile and computing platforms. According to a 2011 study by consultancy World Wide Worx, MXit currently has about 10 million active subscribers, making it the largest mobile social network in Africa.

MXit allows users to send and receive one-on-one text and multimedia messages to and from other users, and in general chat rooms. MXit also supports gateways to other instant messaging platforms such as MSN Messenger, ICQ and Google Talk.

On 1 April 2009, MXit released an open-source plug-in for the libPurple library. This allows applications using the libPurple library such as Pidgin and Adium to connect to the MXit network. This coincided with the release of the MXit Developer Zone web-site and documentation on the MXit client protocol. MXit has been included as a standard protocol in Pidgin since version 2.6.4.

Agenda

17:00 - 17:05	Welcome with Tea, Coffee, and Snacks
17:05 - 17:15	Lightning Talks
17:15 - 18:00	The Story of MXit
18:00 - 18:30	Q & A

For registration, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/geek-up-with-alan-knott-craig

Geekup on Open Data in Bangalore

praskrishna — 2012-01-31T03:38:25Z

HasGeek in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society invite you to a talk by Hapee de Groot on 25 January 2012 at CIS office in Bangalore.

Hapee de Groot

Hapee de Groot has worked on a wide range of issues around Open Source Data, ICT and Media Development, Access, Security, ICT for Development (ICT4D) and Localisation of Content, for a global stage towards greater transparency and accountability with the Dutch NGO Hivos since 2001. Before that, in the nineties, he was an advocate for free public internet access, working with xs4all and the digital city Amsterdam (DDS). He has also served as an editor for OneWorld International and ran the Digital Divide Campaign which turned into a still ongoing digital channel at DigitalOpportunity.org.

Hapee is one of the earliest generations of hackers and is highly influential on the subjects of ICT and Technology, Open Source, Social Media, and Technology in Africa, according to the influence measures on Klout. This is his 5th visit to India where he has worked previously on Mission 2009 and setting up access for remote areas in India, in collaboration with Toxic Links and Sarai, Delhi. He was a participant at the InfoActivism Camp in Bangalore, 2008.

His current interest is in the field of Open Government Data and he partners with six international donor agencies to run the Transparency and Accountability Initiative. He brings together his technical skills, policy experience and development research to train people in understanding the politics, responsibilities and risks associated with open data platforms and helps NGOs and governments in producing secure and citizen friendly platforms of data collection, distribution and dissemination.

Open Data

From his background working for a development organisation (HIVOS) Hapee will talk about Open Data and its use for citizen engagement. This is a twofold process. On the one side there is the history of the traditional NGO and their limited impact on the system. On the other side there are the Open Government Data initiatives pushed from within administrations, including by the Obama administration. The question is of how both can benefit from each other.

Hapee has some examples of citizen driven projects in Africa that HIVOS supports. He will present on these projects, including on data visualization and technical platforms. He would like to hear from the audience (that's you!) on similar projects in India.

The other side of the coin is privacy which is a bigger issue in India than in Africa. How can we be open while still protecting privacy? Hapee will lead a discussion on this.

Registrations are closed

Wednesday, 25 January 2012, Bangalore

Welcome with tea, coffee and snacks	6.00 p.m. - 6.15 p.m.
Lightning Talks	6.15 p.m - 7.00 p.m.
Open Data	7.00 p.m. - 8.00 p.m.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/geekup-bangalore

GCSC_RFC-CIS.pdf

Arindrajit Basu, Gurshabad Grover and Elonnai Hickok — 2019-01-22T08:12:38Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/response-to-gcsc-on-request-for-consultation-norm-package-singapore

GCSC Response

Admin — 2019-09-11T01:30:47Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/gcsc-response

GCSC Research Advisory Group

Admin — 2018-10-26T14:55:42Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/gcsc-research-advisory-group.pdf

GCIP2015: Notes from the Inaugural Session

Spadika Jayaraj — 2015-12-17T15:54:31Z

The 2015 Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest kicked off with its inaugural plenary session, on 14th December, 2015. With over 400 registered participants, ranging from established academics to activists to students gathered in the auditorium in National Law University, Delhi, Phet Sayo, a Senior Fellow at IDRC and a panelist at the session rightly observed that if a bomb were to go off at this venue, "there goes IP activism".

The story first appeared in Spicy IP on December 14, 2015. Click here to view this post on SpicyIP and leave a comment.

The inaugural session began with Dr. Ranbir Singh, the Vice-Chancellor of NLU-Delhi addressing the audience about NLU-D's meteoric rise in the field of legal education in India. This was followed by Phet Sayo's humorous and thought-provoking address on the importance of data in today's world- he remarked that in some cases, data and meta-data about material objects is attached more value than the objects themselves.

The session then saw Mr. Sean Flynn neatly summarising the history of public interest in the realm of IP, and how the Global Congress tied into this movement. He traced the predecessors of the Global Congress to the Bellagio Global Dialogues and the Doha Declaration meetings, both of which saw a similar confluence of minds devoted to discussing how IP can serve the public interest. He also mentioned how the Public Interest movement of the 90's and early 2000's led to a counter-movement in which ACTA and the larger enforcement agenda gained prominence. With this, he urged the attendees of the Global Congress to learn from each other and reorient their energies towards a positive agenda focusing on IP and Public Interest.

The next speaker was Professor Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa, who began by remarking that the new government in Canada appears to have ushered in a new era of openness and transparency, with the Ministerial Mandate Letters being released into the public domain. At the same time, he highlighted the proliferation of IP into other realms of law and policy with the TRIPS and the TPP being the most prominent examples of this proliferation. He pointed out the ramifications of this- that IP is now being framed and shaped in realms such as trade, privacy and internet governance. The challenge for the next twenty years, he urged, is for civil society to keep up and adapt to this change. Hong Xue, Director of the Institute for Internet Policy and Law at Beijing Normal University (BNU) expanded on this theme, highlighting the backsliding of Open Access norms with developments in international trade. With the growth of giant, cross-border ecommerce entities like Alibaba, multilateral trade treaties are attempting to normalise IP maximalism. Provisions such as Art. 60 of TRIPS, the de minimis exception, are being brushed under the carpet in this wave.

Zakir Thomas then debunked some popular IP narratives- the first being that stronger IP protection is necessary for investment in a country and the second being that copyright protection is necessary for content creation. With respect to the first, he highlighted the (underplayed) role of public funding in pharmaceutical R&D, and the various economic and other reasons unrelated to innovation that motivate the actions of Big Pharma. With respect to copyright, he spoke of social media and the open source movement. The takeaway from his address was that innovation happens in a complex environment with several stakeholders- the "one line approach" advocated by popular narratives should be regarded carefully for this reason.

The final address was by Nagla Rizk, founding director of the Access to Knowledge for Development Center in Cairo on the different normative conceptions of openness and how the tensions between different conceptions can reflect in growth paradigms. She especially pointed to how the economic growth rhetoric adopted by several national governments ignore the intricacies in open policies. She remarked that we need to examine how openness can aid the public interest by paying attention to the context and realities on the ground.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/gcip2015-notes-from-the-inaugural-session

GCIP15 Day 2: Fixing the problems in Trade Negotiations

Kartik Chawla — 2015-12-17T16:37:23Z

This post documents the interesting discussions that took place in the Trade Negotiations Panel at day 2 of the GCIP 2015.

The post was published by SpicyIP on December 17, 2015. The panel was conducted under the Chatham House rules, and hence no attribution has been made for the content herein.

One of the oft-repeated propositions in various panels in the GCIP, and even outside it, has been that the international trade negotiation process, particularly those leading up to agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (‘TPP’), are broken. They are broken in many ways – they are overbroad, undemocratic, negotiated in secrecy, the list goes on. The theme discussed by this Panel was therefore how can the civil society fix this? (Check our Twitter feed for some of the most interesting bits of the conversation!). The behemoth of trade negotiations has, from the ACTA days, grown even bigger, and this conversation is part of figuring out how to deal with it.

Trade agreements, their name would imply, should deal with ‘trade’. But the first speaker noted that international trade negotiations nowadays involve far more than ‘trade’ alone. They spread into issues we would rarely have associated with ‘trade’ earlier, with new – and surprising – issues being included in every new trade agreement that comes to light. Moreover, trade agreements and their negotiations are becoming less inclusive, with their negotiation processes being shrouded in increasing levels of confidentiality.

The speaker attributes these failures of international trade negotiations to multiple causes, at both the domestic and geopolitical levels. The national level causes include the disconnection between trade agencies from other countries, a tendency to mission creep, revolving door policies and policy laundering. At the global level, causes include post-War architectures of global governance and international negotiations, the limitations of the options available to the US due to the actions of BRICS.

The speaker proposed multiple ideas to deal with these issues, including using governments’ own documents, statements, and promises, and holding them accountable when they breach these promises with trade agreements, or the creation of international standards to regulate such activities. The standards under the latter could require higher transparency and institute standards for participation in negotiation, or could be addressed in a white paper detailing the problems with trade negotiations. Other recommendations along this line included tabling alternative proposals for global rulemaking from organisations such as the IGF, human right impact assessments of trade agreements, and non-binding human rights based recommendations.

The most interesting idea, though, was that of ‘Idea Rating Sheets’, to be used to propose, comment on, and of course ‘rate’ ideas to facilitate collaboration among civil society participants.

Finally, the speaker argued that the civil society cannot deal with this issue alone, but needs the support of authoritative global institutions. The civil society has the tools it needs, but needs to apply them in effective ways.

Taking the point forward, the second speaker noted aptly the movement from the awe at the ‘democratising’ effect of the internet that captured the world’s imagination early in its life to today, where we create ‘artificial barriers’ in access to information on the internet. This, I would note, ironically results in position where the internet was more conducive to providing information to more people when it had far less information and was far less pervasive than than it is today.

The speaker called the TPP a sophisticated method of blocking and criminalising ‘access’ at all levels. If you’re on the list of the limited negotiators that pluri-lateral treaties have nowadays, it is negotiated with the mindset of ‘if you sign this agreement, you can gain all of ‘this’’, but if you don’t sign or if you aren’t on the list, you will suffer.

Secrecy of Negotiations

And these negotiations are, of course, secret. This ‘secrecy by default’ issue puts civil society in a weaker position, with big gaps in the information that they receive. On the issue of secrecy, the speaker raised some very interesting questions. Specifically, how limited is the civil society’s access that not only can we not access the proceedings, but even what the negotiators are basing their positions on? Moreover, how does a trade negotiator has more access than the Parliament itself? Where are the checks and balances on the Executive here? And while secrecy seems to be paramount, corporations do have access.

The next speaker, in very crucial contrast, spoke of why it is that negotiators engage in such secrecy. The speaker first pointed out that some documents as old as even the Uruguay rounds are still kept confidential, even though they are stored on obsolete media and are possibly being corrupted.

The speaker stated that international trade negotiations are different from other negotiations on one crucial count – these negotiations, more than the others, are about dollars and cents. If a State has everything to lose and nothing to gain, it will simply walk away. But, clearly, they stay because they have enough to gain. Moreover, reaching a consesus is really very, very difficult – and ‘consensus’ is a requirement for WTO agreements. Every country in a negotiation has some bottom line/red line that they won’t cross, and they, of course, don’t want to show them, just as in a game of poker. So, the speaker explains, secrecy becomes paramount.

Interestingly enough, it was pointed out that this secrecy is actually more important for smaller countries, as while you can kind of guess the bottom lines with the US or the EU, the red liens of smaller players are unpredictable.

Thus, and this was widened to cover all negotiations, while live, transparent coverage of such negotiations might be ideal from the perspective of the civil society, that is not going to happen. Most of the time, simply because the governments don’t want you to see what they’re doing, and negotiations become much more difficult if they’re open for everyone to comment on.

Whom Should Civil Society Target?

The speaker stated that the best way out for civil society would be to influence the key players, the few governments who actually make a difference, who can and will take as stand. In a democracy, that should be entirely possible.

This, however, was highly contested in the discussion following the panel. The example of WIPO was brought up in this context, with a speaker noting that even though it started off as a closed, hostile organisation, it is now one of the most open, transparent organisations we have.

It was also argued that for a good negotiator, transparency is key, even though they don’t share what their final decision or thoughts on the topic are. Countering the speakers argument, it was stated while it’s true that everybody sits to gain something, it’s not necessary that they sit down to gain what they are supposed to gain – which might be the cause for the lack of transparency.

The next speakers stated that in order to influence trade negotiations at all, you absolutely and persistently have to be there, have to be present. The modus operandi of the industry is that comes with lots of reports, numbers – their approach is not necessarily right, but it is appealing. Plus, as was discussed in the questions sessions, the ease-of-access of visual aids means that they are taken up quickly by multiple people engaged with the process, and slowly become ubiquitous. As compared to that, for the civil society, you raise your concerns once, twice, but then you don’t have anything new, and the people you are trying to convince lose interest. And that is what the civil society has to learn to compete with. Finally, the speaker noted – very validly, if I might add – that FTAs are the reality of international rulemaking, and we have to find a way to live with that.

Need to Obtain Relevant Information

The final speaker disagreed with the previous speaker to a certain extent, stating that the solution lies in remote monitoring of activities and crowdsourcing movements. The speaker noted that the civil society is usually called in at 4AM, after the deals are made and the fat cats are fed.

The second speaker stated that we need to figure start by asking the right questions – ‘who (is involved), when (is any event happening, to prepare in advance), what are their interests?’, and so on. The speaker recommended that we map relations beyond trade talks alone, involving journalists, coordinating regionally. The street-level politics that worked with ACTA are no longer enough – we need to overwhelm the systems of the government and negotiators and ask them about all the information that we can.

Moreover, the speaker stressed the importance and necessity of whistleblowers, noting that the few things we know and the scandals that have been caused have been caused by whistleblowers. When there is a leak, a journalism-friendly report should be released within 24 hours. Finally, the speaker stressed the idea of strategic and creative litigation to bring these issue up in the Courts.

In the final discussions, the participants noted the importance of multiple levels of awareness and engagement. One participant specifically noted that it is important to engage with parliamentarians and legislators – but we must first figure out who has the right levels of access – and journalists.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/gcip15-day-2-fixing-the-problems-in-trade-negotiations

GCIP Day 1 Session 3: Challenges in Re-Articulating Public Interest

Spadika Jayaraj — 2015-12-17T16:13:03Z

At the third plenary session of GCIP15, the discussion revolved around challenges in re-articulating ‘public interest’ dimension in IP law and policy.

This post is part of SpicyIP’s coverage of the Fourth Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest.

At the third plenary session of GCIP15, the discussion revolved around challenges in re-articulating ‘public interest’ dimension in IP law and policy. The session saw an eclectic mix of speakers addressing the public interest question from various perspectives- such as copyright, human rights, international law and trade law.

Making Technology Accessible in Indian Languages

The first speaker was Venkatesh Hariharan, Director of Alchemy Business Solutions LLP and a Board Member of Software Freedom Law Center, who discussed open source policy in the Indian context. He spoke about activists’ negotiation with the Government of India to adopt open source as far as possible, to deal with India’s unique demographic of a large population which converses in hundreds of different languages. He ended on the note that while some significant battles have been won in the open source and software patents fronts, there is still a long way to go in making computers and the internet accessible to the 900 million people in India who are not conversant in English.

IP and Public Interest as Yin and Yang

The next speaker was Chunyang Wang, from Peking University. She outlined the development of IP expansion in China, and how it closely followed liberalization and the policy move to attract foreign investment. She then drew upon the conception of Yin and Yang, and compared it to the balance between IP protection and openness.

A BRICs FTA?

Anand Grover, Senior Advocate, then addressed the audience on two developments that affect the public interest in patent law in India- Product Patents and the rise in Free Trade Agreements and Bilateral Investment Treaties. He stressed on how it is important to drive home the point to governments that product patents in pharmaceuticals will lead to exorbitant monopoly pricing, while process patents will lead to relative competition. With respect to Free Trade Agreements, he outlined how having private dispute settlement measures built into FTAs and BITs is a “sinister objective” as it leads to private, opaque, unaccountable arbitration fora deciding matters of public importance such as access to medicines. To counter this development, he proposed a BRICS FTA, which will allow developing countries like India to have more leverage in trade and investment.

TRIPS Flexibilities is the Beginning, not the End Goal

Lisa Forman, a human rights lawyer spoke about the simultaneous proliferation of Human Rights instruments and constitutionalisation of health rights domestically and internationally, and the expansion of TRIPS-plus standards imposed through FTAs, etc. She noted that the former phenomenon means that activists and academics have more tools at their disposal to counter the latter phenomenon. She ended by remarking that narrowly-defined TRIPS flexibilities and exceptions is not the best case scenario, but a losing one. The more we focus on these exceptions, she said, the more we normalize existing norms.

Merging the ‘Independent silos’ of IPR and Human Rights

Justice Ravindra Bhat of the Delhi High Court ended the session with a thorough analysis of access to medicines in International Law. He drew upon the UDHR and the ICESCR and how they are viewed as “independent silos of rights” when compared to IPR. He said that the challenge in the future is to integrate the two sets of rights and read them harmoniously. He also explained provisions from the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties and cases before the ICJ to emphasise his point.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/gcip-day-1-session-3-challenges-in-re-articulating-public-interest

FY14 Customer Payments final version

geetha — 2014-12-08T05:46:58Z

ICANN's detailed list of revenues from domain names

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/fy14-customer-payments-final-version

Future of Work in ASEAN

aayush — 2019-09-02T04:16:36Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/future-of-work-in-asean

Fueling the Affordable Smartphone Revolution in India

sinha — 2016-03-16T15:23:43Z

Smartphones have emerged as the exemplar of mankind's quest for shrinking technologies. They embody the realization of a simple premise – that computing devices would do more and cost less. This realization has been responsible for modern society's profound transformations in communication, governance, and knowledge distribution.

The essay was published as part of the The Good Life in Asia's Digital 21st Century essay collection.

The launch of the iPhone in 2007 is often credited with ushering in an era of smartphones. Ever since, the world's best tech R&D has focused on increasing the capabilities of these devices. And as a result, less than a decade later, we have sub-hundred dollar smartphones. The low-cost smartphone has found an enthusiastic and insatiable market in developing countries, especially Asia. India is no exception to the Asian narrative – Micromax, Spice, and Lava (low cost smartphone manufacturers) are household names in the Indian smartphone market, which accounted for 65% of internet traffic in 2014 (Meeker, 2015).

The Indian Prime Minister, carrying the twin aspirations of catalyzing the growth of indigenous manufacturing and bridging the digital divide, launched the “Digital India” and “Make in India” campaigns last year. During his US visit, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook extended their support to the campaigns' vision (Guynn, 2011). The campaigns outline the government's elaborate initiatives to, inter alia, bridge the digital divide and build indigenous manufacturing capacity. While all these developments bode well for the indigenous smartphone, there remain some serious concerns affecting the growth of the industry – for instance, patent infringement litigations and the absence of clear legal and regulatory solutions.

From the state of the industry and its implications, it can be concluded that: first, growing access to smartphones has been influenced by their phenomenal affordability; second, smartphones are an excellent example of technology for development (UNDP, 2001) and a facilitator of access to knowledge; and third, domestic smartphone production has occurred in an imprecise legal and regulatory environment.

This essay attempts to build an appreciation for the role that smartphones are playing in development, specifically, by fostering Access to Knowledge. Conversations around development by public-interest groups and emerging industries often espouse Access to Knowledge to address concerns in international development, communications, technology, education, and intellectual property policy. Whereas the principle can be regarded as in-theworks, two theories inform us about the role of mobile phones in fostering Access to Knowledge. Lea Sheaver's theory classifies mobile as an Access-toKnowledge good. Lea enumerates the five key components of a robust Access to Knowledge framework, viz., education for information literacy, access to the global knowledge commons, access to knowledge goods, an enabling legal framework, and effective innovation systems (Sheaver, 2007). According to her, affordability of the good is the ultimate indicator of its efficacy as an access to knowledge good. Furthermore, inventions in microchip technology, electronics manufacturing, and software need to be supported by enabling legal and policy frameworks coupled with effective innovation systems.

Yochai Benkler's framework classifies mobile-devices as both informationembedded goods and information-embedded tools (Benkler, 2006). He says, “Information-embedded goods are those goods which are ‘better, more plentiful or cheaper because of some technological advance embedded in them or associated with their production,’ such as medicines, movies, and improved crop seed. Information-embedded tools, in turn, are those technologies necessary for research, innovation, and communication of knowledge” (Benkler, 2006). A smartphone qualifies as both because it can be used to obtain knowledge, and it depends on discoveries in microchip technology, electronics manufacturing, and software to function.

To date, there has been no formal, theoretical or evidentiary investigation on the emergence of smartphones as an Access-to-Knowledge good. In the following sections, I will attempt to explain the smartphone’s dependence on an enabling legal framework and effective innovation systems (Lea's components). It must be borne in mind that globally, discussions affecting access to knowledge have aimed at creating balanced and inclusive systems related to intellectual property (Kapczynski & Krikorian, 2010). Therefore, the essay will focus on: first, the relationship between constituent mobile technologies and intellectual property as a function of production/deployment of smartphones in India; and second, the relationship between innovation and access.

Creating an Enabling Legal Framework to Foster Access to Knowledge

The adage “the only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself” is worth bearing in our narrative. The emergence of the smartphones industry in Asia has commonalities with the flourishing Asian piracy trade – which remains an essential access solution for low-income societies constantly barraged by expensive western media goods. The prohibitive cost of acquiring brand-name devices (e.g. Apple, HTC, Samsung, Sony) drove local production to imitate and innovate cheaper substitutes (WIPO, 2010). This occurred within the lenient and flexible intellectual property regimes prevalent in Asian countries, which continue to be constantly criticized for their failure to enact stricter intellectual property law. The hubs of smartphone production – China, Taiwan, and India – have flexible intellectual property protection law and lax enforcement measures (Centre for Internet and Society, 2012).

Concerns of intellectual property center around patent and copyright legislation, which have yet to be fully developed to address intellectual property in high-tech industries (since trademark issues remain unchanged, they will not be discussed in the essay.) As a result, constituent smartphone technologies have been shaped and governed by a blend of formal and informal rules and legal and illegal practices. This is why they are often referred to as “gray market” technologies. A smartphone in terms of constituent intellectual property can be broadly divided into hardware and software technologies. This piece will first deal with hardware, followed by software technologies.

Hardware Technologies and Their Relationship with IP Law

Presently, most Indian manufacturers import hardware from China and Taiwan, and assemble the phones in India. A few key Indian domestic players are Maxx Mobile, Intex, Spice, and Lava, whose dominance have not gone unnoticed by foreign manufacturers. A couple of these domestic manufacturers are now embroiled in patent litigation threats or infringement suits. And as litigation piles up in Indian courts, the judiciary is slowly waking up to mobile patent litigation, but is yet to rule comprehensively. To make matters worse, the jurisdiction of the Indian antitrust regulator remains unclear, and to a certain extent overlaps with the judiciary, adding to the ambiguity. For instance, when an appellate court ruled in favor of the Swedish tech-giant Ericsson, it ordered Micromax to pay a flat 1.25 – 2% of its devices' selling price to Ericsson (Lakshane, 2015). The ruling was devoid of a more rational and reasoned approach developed by courts of other jurisdictions in similar matters, which prescribed that the infringers pay damages based on the price of the patented components only, and not the retail price of the phones. This decision risks causing a significant increase in the price of phones and potentially threatens local innovation.

The Indian government's Make in India and Digital India campaigns aim to fulfill the vision of a digitally empowered India, and the 2015 Indian Union budget also targets boosting the electronics manufacturing industry. Despite these broad initiatives, there needs to be a more focused policy in place to ensure domestic companies do not get weighed down by patent related concerns. The root cause of litigation is the vesting of a majority of critical mobile patents (Standard Essential Patents, or SEPs) by a handful tech-giants. For instance, Qualcomm owns 5700 patents around CDMA technology (qualcomm.com). In another instance, the DVD format constitutes 311 SEPs for DVD players and 272 SEPs for DVD recorders (CIS, 2012). Such a dense concentration of patents around SEPs creates a patent thicket and thereby compels Smartphone manufacturers to acquire multiple licenses, and to pay high transaction costs and huge royalties to the owner. To reduce conflict and protect domestic players from being arm-twisted into paying high royalties, the government can potentially identify critical technologies and initiate the formation of a patent pool of such technologies. The concept of a patent pool mandates that the patent holders issue licenses on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory basis to interested parties. However, a nuanced and cautious approach to setting up such pools is necessary (Shapiro, 2001).

There are interesting lessons in China's steps to encourage local innovation of Smartphone hardware as well, specifically in the form of standardized technologies. The Chinese government has actively supported the development of indigenous standards to shield domestic manufacturers from royalty exposure. In fact, the China Blue High-definition Disc (CBHD) standard was built as an alternative to the Blu-ray disc and was duly adopted by the Chinese government, which reportedly caused the royalty rates for the Blu-ray format to dip. Much later, Warner Bros, Paramount, and other motion picture producers adopted the CBHD standard as well for distribution in China.

Software Technologies and Their Relationship with IP Law

Unlike hardware technology, where India is struggling to build manufacturing capacity, the success of the Indian software industry has already been realized. The software-as-a-service (SaAS) industry is led by Infosys, TCS, and Wipro in software exports. The prevailing trend in the industry since the 1980s was to assign ownership of their products to offshore clients. However, in the past decade, there has been a conscious shift by the Indian software development workforce to build products for Smartphone platforms. This is in response to the shift in local populations to accessing content and services online. Reports indicate that India has the second largest population of mobile applications developers (approx. 3 million) in the world, second only to the US (Livemint, 2015). The Indian government has recognized the potential of mobile application-based ventures and created funds to encourage app development in India (IAMAI, 2015).

Intellectual property protection around software is fairly ambiguous. A piece of code is potentially capable of gaining both patent and copyright protection. In the area of mobile application development, preliminary research findings indicate that coding occurs with an agnostic attitude towards intellectual property laws (Cassar, 2014). One of the reasons is ambiguity on a multitude of issues around the protection of software because Indian legislation on patent and copyright is frustratingly insufficient. There is a growing discontentment about long-term patent protection over software code, which could be detrimental to innovation – particularly, to the start-up segment of software industry. In more technologically advanced economies, software patenting has emerged as a scourge – last year, the US Supreme Court in Alice Corporation Pty Ltd v. CLS Bank International Et Al narrowed the eligibility of software inventions to gain patent protection. The activist discourse has shifted in favor of eliminating software patenting because of the incremental and obsolescent nature of a software invention, inter alia (Lapowsky, 2015). However, in a recent disappointing move, the Indian patent office widened the scope of patent-eligible subject matter for software-related inventions – a move that was decried by free software activists and industry alike. This widening of scope can only benefit tech-giants in building bigger patent portfolios, which is unnecessary and unhealthy for innovation by small and mid-tier entities (Sinha, 2015).

Effective Innovation Systems

Innovation ensures fresh creation of knowledge. A society cannot premise itself on the mere importation of knowledge; it must also strive to use the knowledge to meet its own local needs and environment. Innovation depends on a variety of factors – there is no singular path or factor to build an innovative and enterprising society. The patent system is often incorrectly credited with “promoting” innovation. The discourse around innovation was extremely patent-centric until studies disproved the assumptive correlation between high patenting activity and innovation. Continuing in the same vein, Lea states, “From the A2K perspective, however, relying on patents – which represent the right to exclude others from access to the innovation – is particularly problematic. Patents likely represent the segment of innovation of least value for expanding access to knowledge: improvements in the knowledge stock whose application is limited by exclusive property rights” (Shaver, 2007).

In this framework, it is also important to shed light on the growing movement of openness. Openness as a movement has been captured by various fields - Big data, software, education, media, etc. Free and Open Source Software has emerged as a key agent in information technology policy-making in India, with the Indian government adopting an open standards policy and an open software policy for its own purposes.

In the context of smartphone technologies, preliminary findings also support the shift towards openness (Huang, 2014). Industry participants have observed that openness will lead to greater benefits in private production of hardware technologies. Similarly, mobile applications developers have also voiced support of open source software (Cassar, 2014).

Conclusion

The discussion above identified a limited set of legal and regulatory concerns affecting the state of production/deployment of smartphones in India. These issues and findings are backed by preliminary research, and purport to sustain the emergence of the smartphone as an enabler of access to knowledge. The proposed solutions direct industry and the government alike to take immediate steps to fix problems impeding pervasive access to this knowledge good.

The experience of the smartphone industry with an imprecise legal and regulatory environment, akin to piracy, has thus far been a success story of affordability, quality substitution, and innovation. However, this narrative is now threatened by messy litigation, jurisdictional uncertainties between the anti-trust regulator and judicial system, SEP licensing issues, rise of software patents, inter alia. Despite these issues, the industry continues to grow. The future of access to knowledge is therefore bright, provided that stakeholders make efforts to meet the needs of this emerging industry and the public, including development and consumer interests.

References / Links / Resources

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