Centre for Internet and Society

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

praskrishna — 2016-06-09T12:51:46Z

The OER conference was held in Edinburgh, Scotland on April 19 and 20, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi gave a talk at the event organised by the University of Edinburg.

The vision for the conference was to focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. The conference was chaired by Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, and Lorna Campbell, OER Liaison at the University of Edinburgh and EDINA Digital Education Manager. The OER 16 conference primarily focused on:

The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
Hacking, making and sharing.
The reputational challenges of openwashing.
Openness and public engagement.
Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

Subhashish Panigrahi - Cultural Institution aka GLAM for More OER (OER16, 19-20.04.2016) from The Centre for Internet and Society

Resources

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

subha — 2016-02-27T06:00:20Z

My submission titled "Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER" under the theme of "Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education" has been selected for the OER16 conference to be held in Edinburg, Scotland from 19 to 20 April 2016.

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) is a global initiative for making cultural data open targeting galleries, libraries, archives and museums in particular. GLAM projects are run in collaboration with these cultural institutions where the artifacts and other institutional collections get all sorts of digital treatment, from digitizing manuscripts and books to creating meta data and developing tools to automate and ease the life of contributors, building and 3D models of artifacts and creating multilingual virtual museum experience by using Wikipedia.

These institutions historically being the reservoir of knowledge need more attention with more digital innovation coming in day by day. There being a synergy between the fundamental focus of OER and GLAM initiative, it leaves scholars and GLAM and/or OER practitioners to explore this area that is currently not widely covered. GLAM projects are centered around data mining, digitizing and publishing the work in both machine and human readable forms. The output of all the GLAM projects could directly contribute to creating OERs classifying and customizing the OERs for different age groups and people with accessibility needs. This, in return will also benefit the GLAM projects and institutions for both expanding their reach and replicating these initiatives. The presentation will be around the best practices of several GLAM initiatives and how these projects could lead to create useful OERs. I will also shed some light on the methodology of creating OERs during the development of a GLAM project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)

sumandro — 2018-05-14T07:25:49Z

The CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) has been set up by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) to encourage, host, and provide seed funding for the development of digital tools and infrastructure for arts, humanities, and social science research in India. The Fund’s priorities have been shaped by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Lawrence Liang, Nishant Shah, Sitharamam Kakarala, S.V. Srinivas, and Tejaswini Niranjana; and it is administered by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS.

A fundamental challenge has emerged in arts, humanities, and social science research with the coming of digital media. The challenge is of at least two kinds: 1) the ways in which we access our primary materials have changed, opening up the possibility of formulating new problems as well as conducting our research, and 2) additionally, the digital networks and objects that facilitate research are themselves becoming part of the phenomena we document and analyse. While the contexts under investigation are rich and diverse, the digital tools and methods by which to explore them are not readily available, especially in India.

CDIF uses the terms tools and infrastructure to respectively refer to autonomous software programmes and hardware devices, and platforms for collective use. A software to enable capturing of comments posted on a news website will be an example of the former, while an archive to be populated and annotated by a number of users will be an example of the latter.

The core mandate of CDIF is as follows:

Identifying digital tools and infrastructure needed by researchers and practitioners in arts, humanities, and social science fields. This is clearly not a one-time exercise, but a continuous one.
Promote, support, and fund the development of new digital tools and infrastructure, as well as revision and expansion of existing ones.
Creating focused conversations and materials around teaching of, and teaching through, digital tools and infrastructure across the arts, humanities, and social science disciplines.

During 2015-2017, CDIF has a specific interest in supporting efforts that engage with questions of the digital futures of Indian languages, needs and forms of archive-building, and tools and infrastructure of academic collaboration, among learners and among researchers.

CDIF will periodically announce open calls for project proposals related to development of digital tools and infrastructure for research. To receive these announcements, please subscribe to the cdif@cis-india.org mailing list. In exceptional cases, we may also consider directly supporting a project.

For any clarification, including sharing of project ideas, please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund

Crowdsourced innovation for government projects and services is easier said than done

praskrishna — 2017-02-07T15:36:38Z

Late January. The buzz was palpable at the MLR Convention Centre in South Bengaluru. Developers were streaming into 50p, a conference organised by HasGeek, which has curated technology forums since 2011. But this wasn't just one of the six HasGeek communions that the programmers attend annually. 50p put the spotlight on digital payments, which meant the gathering would be more diverse than anything before.

The article by Kunal Talgeri was published in the Times of India on February 3, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Of the 250-plus attendees in two days, only 40% were developers. There were around 10 lawyers, an activist here, a social-impact investor there, product managers, and a 20-strong team from online payment systems company PayPal. There were managers from traditional banks too. "We realised early on that one thing the developer community really needs to know is how various payment-systems work, like who makes what percentage (in the value chain)?," said Zainab Bawa, cofounder of HasGeek. "It is a big mystery to them."

Kiran Jonnalagadda, co-founder of HasGeek and Bawa's husband, concurred: "A payment conference cannot primarily be centred on technology. Regulations make a bulk of the difference." So the interdisciplinary forum traversed areas as diverse as customer data and privacy, payment-systems unique to India, regulations, and the Watal Committee report apart from technology.

HasGeek got folks from the payments industry to converse with developers. At the outset, Bawa spelt out to the audience something about technology's role in society. "While we (coders) are here to bridge gaps, we also need to understand that technology is not necessarily the solution. Developers must have their ears to the ground." She had touched upon the divide between the coder community and the government.

Globally, governments are only just beginning to be exposed to the geeks. "The broader theme of digitisation and opening up of APIs (application programming interface) is happening across the world," said Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at Prime Venture Partners, and an Aadhaar volunteer with the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) until early 2011. APIs empower developers to build applications that access the features or data of an operating system or service. This requires developers to come together with, in this case, the government.

The digital dream has never showed more promise in India—the chance for a few developers to build a platform that can digitise government services for millions of users. "The government wants to use hackathons for digital disruption—leverage hackers to build solutions for them," says Subhendu Panigrahi, co-founder of Venturesity that helps companies find developers.

This is easier said than done. But how did India even get to this point?

CODE NAME: GENESIS
On 10 June 2016, the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT) think-tank released a paper that took note of the country moving from "data poor to data rich."

This was a few weeks after the UIDAI platform Aadhaar crossed 1 billion enrolments. "The Aadhaar system can authenticate 100 million transactions per day in real time," iSPIRT stated. The paper also pointed to three national platforms - essentially services that would in time digitise government services on a national scale.

These were the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Network, the Bharat Bill Payment System which would cover utility services (electricity, water, gas, and so on), and the electronic toll collection system.

All three platforms come under the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organisation for retail payment systems in India. iSPIRT had helped NPCI organise a hackathon in Mumbai in February 2016 to build prototypes for harnessing the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) platform's application programming interface to digitise bank transfers in real time. Similarly, steps were being taken to open up APIs to large companies for the other NPCI platforms.

On its part, iSPIRT was drawing the attention of a breed of software developers to the national-scale opportunities ahead. It unequivocally stated: "Data flows benefit public services and governments." But even as India moves to being data rich, the outreach to developers - estimated to be more than 5 million in India - could be futile for two reasons.

First, government departments and traditional systems of, say, nationalised banks have a technology procurement culture that is at odds with how developers build digital solutions. While government is the largest technology procurer, procurement contracts typically have clauses that encourage lowest (cost) bidders, which rarely spawns innovation.

"Government needs to adopt and evangelise pro-challenger tools and policies that reduce barriers to experimentation, level-playing field and encourage innovating around national issues," wrote Swati T Satpathy for iSPIRT in a November 2015 paper titled 'Igniting Hundreds of Experiments'.

Second, independent developers still have to come out in larger numbers for the best solutions to shine. Sachin Gupta, CEO of HackerEarth, another developer platform, agrees: "Governments may still go ahead and give projects to a TCS and Wipro, but they want to crowdsource the innovation, prototype and the whole concept. They want to build an active relationship with the tech community."

These can be government bodies at the state level, too, like the Department of Urban Land Transport in Karnataka, for whom Venturesity helped with a 'transit hack' to solve traffic in Bangalore with submissions like how to enable carpooling or track public transport.

"The government is really interested in the final product or an app they can use," Panigrahi said. For this, governments are willing to distribute their APIs to eventually own the app. "Developers participate in such hackathons to make it part of their portfolios or resumes, or because they love building products, or for the prize-money."

This is crowd sourced innovation. Yet, culturally, it is hard for developers and governments' interests to be aligned.

INSIDE THE DICHOTOMY
The API-driven approach is based on a philosophy in the United States that dates back to the 1960s. It a culture of giving powerful building blocks, as opposed to just building an actual solution, said Jonnalagadda. A 'solution' evolves into a platform if it can serve as 'building blocks' for the next set of developers to build on.

"A good product is also one on top of which something more can be built. That has been the principle on which the developer community has thrived," he said. This approach works well in technology. "It means you are slow, but also that you are a lot more mature and innovative."

The government has got this aspect right, by opening up secure APIs to nationalscale projects and systems. But while they have provided such building blocks, they have already decided the path to meet goals like financial inclusion. Mobile apps like BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) are becoming the default mode of reaching the masses. Many observers agree with the smartphone as a medium for India, but developers feel web browsers are more secure than apps.

Jonnalagadda cites a 50p session, 'Everyone can see your credit card details. Seriously,' where the speaker Arnav Gupta described the flow of the web as independent websites that can't actually communicate with each other. As against this, every function of a mobile app is a subset of the parent app. "So whatever password you type for one 'function' can be visible to the parent, which never happens on the web," Jonnalagadda said. "If security is defined by the fact that it is tested against being broken, a mobile app is trusted on the basis of goodwill. For developers, this is a shitty way to do technology. It bothers the heck out of him when a security model assumes goodwill because government wants an app."

Also, solutions need a decentralised approach from governing bodies like local municipalities. Independent budgets and decision-making can lead to stronger links between government and local service providers. There are exceptions to this, like Singapore, a city nation. But in larger developed countries like the United States, local government bodies are stronger than in India. "Here, we are getting even more centralised over time," Jonnalagadda said. It makes the government look like a monolith in the eyes of developers. How can the two be compatible? "We haven't found a solution yet."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-february-3-2017-kunal-talegri-crowdsourced-innovation-for-government-projects-and-services-is-easier-said-than-done

Crisis for identity or identity crisis?

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:16:30Z

The hurry with which the government is pushing its most ambitious project to assign a number (UID) to every citizen without any feasibility study or public debate has raised many questions.

“It will empower all”, declared Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he issued the first UID card to a villager from Tembhli village in Maharashtra. But as days pass and relevant issues come for public discourse, many people have begun to doubt prime minister’s assurance.

Unique identification number (UID), named Aadhaar is a 12 digit identification number that the government plans to issue to all citizens that will not only be an identity card but will also serve multiple purposes for its holder.

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has been assigned the responsibility to execute this proposal as Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Mr Nilekani leads a team of 120 people having the task of assigning unique identities to 1.2 billion people. He plans to take Aadhaar beyond being just a 12-digit identification number for every Indian. This ambitious and mammoth project is pitched to handle projects as diverse as a national-highway toll-collection system, a technology backbone for the forthcoming Goods and Services Tax (GST) and reform of the vast public distribution system (PDS) for subsidized foodgrains.

Government plans to cover 60 per cent of the nation’s population under this project in the next three years starting October this year. This project is intended to collect identification data about all residents in the country. It is said that it will impact the PDS and NREGA programmes, and plug leakages and save the government large sums of money.

But the UID will not replace ration cards and passports, and is not mandatory as of now. No questions would be asked related to language, caste or religion of the person applying for UID.

The UID number is linked to the fingerprints and the pattern of the eyes of the person assigned that number. This inimitable biometric data ensures that any given number is linked to only one person. So there is hardly a chance of any misgiving or stealing of rations and wages from the holder. It is believed that soon banks, insurance companies, cell phone providers and hospitals will demand UID number before doing business with you.

In short, in the future our name, address, bank account numbers, personal information and identity as a whole will be solely linked and governed by those 12 digit number we hold.

Critics say that there has been no feasible study conducted about UID project, neither has there been a cost benefit analysis done. To add to it, there are serious concerns about data and identity theft.

But apart from the buzz about this new project, there is an air of suspicion surrounding it too.

The launch of the UID has led to a flurry of debate amongst policy-makers, legal experts and civil society at large. In response, Mr Nilekani claims the UID to be “a foolproof project implemented at a low cost”.

However, some critical issues remain unanswered.

One of the major objections about UID is that there has been no feasible study conducted, neither has there been a cost benefit analysis done. There is no project document as such.

To add to it, there are serious concerns about data and identity theft.

In a world where cyber terrorism is the new threat, and the countries are gearing themselves to protect against such a threat, projects like UID come as an open invitation to terrorist outfits to infiltrate their defences.

The UID number is linked to fingerprints and the patterns of the holder’s eye. But medical studies show that our eye's iris patterns can change due to aging, disease or malnourishment. More over the government has no alternative option for many millions who fall outside this pattern of identification owing to callused hands, corneal scars and cataract induced by malnourishment. Even as enrollment is poised to begin, authentication is still an unstudied field. Fake fingerprints can very easily be made. Hence, the unique element of these numbers can be tampered.

Recently, Sunil Abraham, Director, Centre for Internet and Society has remarked, “If I leave my fingerprints around, my identity can be stolen and transactions done on my behalf. They could use that number, to share information about anybody.”

A cyber-criminal having access to any person’s identification number can virtually control that person. Telephone numbers, addresses, family history can all be tracked down. Bank accounts can be manipulated and transactions done without the person knowing. Since these days, a lot of money transactions are done through internet, a cyber criminal can easily steal few UID numbers and impersonate those persons to manipulate the bank or credit card accounts.

In an even uglier scenario, where people might be tracked and judged by their numbers, a criminal’s fingerprints left behind on a scene of crime can be mixed with some one else through a slight manipulation and exchange of UID numbers, making an entirely innocent person a suspect in the eyes of law. Some incompetent or revengeful government officials can also frame innocents for a crime one never committed.

Human rights activists claim that a tech-savvy person can hack into the system and gain any person’s information from the servers unless the government tightens the defenses. A reminiscence of the Bruce Willis starrer Hollywood blockbuster Die Hard 4, a bunch of techno geeks operating from trailer truck hold the entire United States hostage as they hack into every main frame computing network from transportation, communication, power, defence and individual accounts.

The number can also be used for real time tracking, profiling, mounting surveillance and ‘convergence’ of information. Apart from the concerns about identity theft, the number can also invade our private space. If in the future insurance companies and hospitals merge their databases, the insurance companies can increase premium, or simply refuse insurance cover to a person who is not keeping well.

Poor labourers and immigrants who are on the move in search of work could also be the victims of the ‘Aadhaar’. In future, in case of card being lost or misplaced, poor labour would be threatened with financial and welfare exclusion. Where being a legal resident is to be closely tied in with having a UID number, it could render the poor vulnerable to exclusion and expulsion by exploitative employers and others.

Interestingly, few months back in June, UK government scrapped the plans for the controversial 5 billion pounds National Identity Card scheme. The UK government now plans to destroy all information held on the National Identity Register, effectively dismantling the whole system.

Though Mr Nilekani claims that UID would be a cost effective project, however deeper analysis throws a different story. It is reported that the UIDAI project will cost Rs 45,000 crores to the exchequer in the next 4 years. This does not seem to include the costs that will be incurred by Registrars, Enrollers, additional costs on the PDS system to connect it to the UID, the estimated cost to the end user and to the number holder.

Defending himself from the flurry of queries, Mr Nilekani has stressed that the identification number is not mandatory for everyone and only those interested can enroll. The project aims to first enroll the poor and uneducated masses promising them better wages and ration schemes. As was reported, the first villager to get the UID card was ‘happy but did not know its benefits’. Critics allege that the reason why Aadhaar is selling itself to millions of poor in the country is to create a foundation of legitimacy to deflect concerns over its possible misuse, unsafe technology and huge costs. Later, with a larger foundation, the UID can be enforced upon all citizens in the near future as the apex identity proof, making everyone vulnerable to several risks described above.

The UIDAI project has proceeded so far without any legal authorization. There has been no feasibility study or cost-benefit analysis preceding the setting up of such a pervasive project. All calculations are of the back-of-the envelope variety. Data theft is a very serious threat to every individual and the country as a whole. There are deeply disconcerting facts about the project that should make even a die-hard UID supporter worry about its long term implications.

This article has been written by Sushant Sharma. He is a college fresher and avid reader.

Interestingly, few months back in June, UK government scrapped the plans for the controversial 5 billion pounds National Identity Card scheme. The decision came after about 15,000 citizens had already been enrolled and given their numbers. The UK government now plans to destroy all information held on the National Identity Register, effectively dismantling the whole system.

The UK system like the Indian UID had also started with much fanfare, claiming to save nearly 900 million pounds for the taxpayers. While the project was axed, UK’s Home Secretary Theresa May stated - “It (the identity card project) is intrusive and bullying, ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty that does not promise a great good.”

The same logic implies to the India as well. But instead of scraping this over-hyped-failure-in-the-making project, our Prime Minister claims the UID project “will empower all”. But will it actually? That is for us to decide now.

Read the original article here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/identity-crisis

Creative Activism - Voices of Young Change Makers in India (UDAAN)

denisse — 2015-04-14T13:21:22Z

This post is a short account of what happened at UDAAN in December 2013 — a conference that gathered 100 youth from across the country to discuss pressing environmental issues and creative strategies to tackle them. We conducted a survey to map the perspectives of these young change-makers and get a glimpse of how India's youth is now framing and going about making 'change'



CHANGE-MAKERS: Youth (India)

EVENT: UDAAN 2013 organized by 350 India: a global organization building grassroots movements across the country.

METHOD OF CHANGE: Behavioral change, solidarity networks and creative activism.

“Change or making change is to bring about a paradigm shift in the way we do certain things. To alter our general way of life as it remains now into something that is positive and ideal.”

This is one of the many responses we collected from UDAAN participants on what it means to make change in India today. So far, in previous articles, we have looked at organizations working with specific demographics and themes. On this opportunity, we are exploring the ideas behind a group conformed by individuals coming from different walks of life, who embody an array of historical, linguistic and cultural understandings of the world, yet still find an intersection at their intents for change. We addressed the core questions raised in the project's thought piece: Whose Change is it Anyway: “What is the understanding of change with which we were working? What are the kinds of changes being imagened? Whose change is it, anyway?” -to start touching base with the ideas underpinning their actions, and identify how -or whether- it introduces new ways to define this concept.

UDAAN 2013

I had the privilege of joining this inspiring group during a four day conference and got the opportunity to share with students, activists and entrepreneurs from 13 states of India (chosen from a pool of 2000 applicants) involved in social change practices across the country. Despite the diverging world views among participants, the sense of a common purpose was almost undisputed. Every attendee was committed to mitigate the detrimental impact of climate change in their cities, protect vulnerable populations and advocate for justice. However, the most interesting points of contention lied on how to translate this commitment into individual and collective action, create conditions that enable change, and encourage community participation in environmental, political and social issues.

With these questions in mind, the conference focused on providing strategies of action and the attendees explored all sorts of lobbying and political participation mechanisms through its workshops. Three main elements stood out for me. First, the cocktail of tactics provided by experienced campaigners: from direct resistance and non-violent action to story-telling and street theater; participants were inspired to experiment and re-conceptualize activism.

Space Theatre Ensemble

Educators Collective

Second, the use of gamification in the workshops, facilitated by the experiential learning group Educators Collective, was the key to introduce values of leadership, solidarity and sustainability into individual behaviour and team practices. And finally, the add of 'unconference slots' to the program empowered attendees to share their methods, initiatives and projects in an open platform. This fostered peer-to-peer learning and more importantly reinforced the net of support and the immense amount of admiration (that grew exponentially between participants) for each other's work.

Youth and Activism in India

Coming from the perspective of our research project: Making Change, it was second nature to me to question frameworks utilized around "making change". I was pleasantly surprised to find an array of perspectives and experiences floating around panels, workshops and keynote presentations. They were definitely seeking consensus, yet in a way that did not inhibit diversity of thought, intellectual curiosity and self-reflection. This sparked the idea of collecting these views and use them as a sample of the current status of youth activism in India. Particularly considering how many of the strategies taught at UDAAN, while incredibly powerful, require a set of resources (including capital, time and energy) that are not readily accessible for all aspiring activists in the country.

These thoughts are consistent with a couple of articles I referred to for context on Indian youth and activism. Starting with the IRIS Knowledge Foundation and the UN-HABITAT's report: "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012: Employment, Livelihoods, Skills". It states that in only seven years, India will become the youngest country of the world with a median age of 29 years old. This, coupled with the fact that India's youth is the largest group in the working-age population — in a country that is expected to become one of the world's next major economic powers (Ilavasaran, 2013) — has, according to Padma Prakash, led demographers and economists to consider youth as the future of the country's economic growth. Having said that, these promising prospects do not reflect that 87.2% of the unemployed of the country are youth, only 27% of Indian youth is literate and 64% is located in rural areas. These facts display a constant negotiation between precariousness and hope, and particularly the high level of dissonance between the expectations and opportunities surrounding this group. Furthermore, as put by Prakash, despite the amount of economic information we have on this group, we lack a deep understanding of the social constructs underpinning their motivations and actions. On one hand, Ilavasaran suggests precariousness is the trigger behind both their unrest and their activism. On the other, the path they end up taking will depend on how they understand making change and their role within this process.

This dilemma was quite evident at UDAAN. Youth from all over India came together to fervently speak about the grievances climate change is causing in their regions and share the stories behind their struggles. On this note, the conference represented an incubator for their ideas and frustrations. and one of its main goals was to steer all this energy towards a path of constructive positive change. Carpini on his work on civic engagement (2000) outlines three factors that lead to participation: motivation, opportunities and capabilities; and how the interplay of the three result in different patterns of change-making. Hence, what is left to answer is how will this chaotic ecosystem shape youth's ideas of creating change? And to what extent will these conditions determine their motivation, opportunities and capacities of participating in the process? The survey we sent out to participants is only a starting point to reflect on these points. It did not aim to resolve these questions, but instead gather a snapshot of how politically and socially active young citizens are locating change and framing some of the biggest challenges of its generation.

Online Survey

About 25 people participated in the survey. The survey had five questions that explored three concepts analyzed in the Making Change research project: change, civic engagement and methods of change. It was divided into three sections:

a) Definitions: Participants were asked how they understand 'change' and 'making change'.

b) Actors: Participants were asked to reflect on their role and the role of youth in the process of making change. It also touched on concepts of active citizenship and engagement.

c) Methods: This section looked at the practices and methods preferred by youth for making change. Participants were asked to think about strategies and tactics discussed at the UDAAN workshops or other initiatives of interest, and how ICT/technology affect the process.

The purpose was to collate as many ideas and perspectives around change-making from this group and hence, the questions were broad and open-ended. The participants remained anonymous and details about their age, religion, region, socio-economic status, etc., were not disclosed. The language barrier and access (and frequency of access) to social media platforms was a big limitation to obtain a larger sample but the responses still reflected interesting patterns, which were later classified and categorized using a keyword system.

The results were displayed on the info-graphics found below:

Infographic 1* reflects the different ways participants outlined change-making: definitions of 'change' and 'making change', type of change (positive, neutral or confrontational), location of change (individual, society or system) and time of change (now, future, long-term).
Infographics 2* and 3 outline the profiles of a change-maker and an active citizen.
Infographic 4 lists their preferred methods of change -in no particular order. The bottom section reflects the spectrum of opinions around the use of technology.

*The percentages reflect the portion of respondents who reflected this view and the texts are excerpts of the respondents' answers.

This presentation format was chosen for three reasons: first, to facilitate the consumption of raw data collected from the survey and make visual associations between themes. Second, to put into practice some the recommendations from the storytelling workshop to make research more accessible to the public. And third, as a somewhat self-serving experiment to measure a) the ability of a graphic designer rookie, with no previous experience (like me), to create visual aids and graphics with free online tools, and b) explore empirically some of the methods I have encountered through my research: Methods for Social Change. Hence, the following results will not be of an academic nature as previous posts, but will instead clarify some of the patterns, evident in the original responses, that may have been lost in graphic translation.

Locating Change: Definitions

"Change is any alteration from an established status-quo. Making change is creating a system that is self-sustaining and capable of surviving over a long period of time"

In spite of including both concepts on the same question, most respondents differentiated them in their answers. Approximately 50% of the sample responded 'change' was either an irreversible process or an outcome to a process, while the other 50% implicated themselves in the 'change' process, stating it means to shift and modify how we act and think. A similar spirit was reflected about 'making change'. About 29% of the participants acknowledges a break from previous practices, and 29% considers we are implicated through the adoption of a new model of action. Interestingly enough, only 5% considers making change a duty or a responsibility. This low percentage signals making change is understood as non-compulsory which does not affect active politically involved citizens but leaves the more passive and idle off the hook when it comes to acknowledging their role in the process of change.

Moving on to type of change: 38% of the respondents consider making change a neutral process that does not guarantee a positive change (as considered by 33% of the sample). It was defined as an event that merely breaks the norm or from usual practices. A possible reading of this is that a group is not mobilizing its efforts with a plausible positive alternative in mind. Instead, it seeks difference without a deeper considerations of how will it differ from the conditions it is breaking from. This fits into the 'politics of hope' paradigm brought up by Shah in the piece: This approach to change and the idiom 'making a difference' is "so infused with the joy of possibilities" that it doesn't evaluate whether the outcome will lead to further assurance or precariousness, when compared to the earlier structure. This approach limits structural, systemic and sustainable change, an issue that was also evident in the results of the time-line. 0% thinks change must be made immediately but the rest of the sample was divided into making plans for the future (19%) and a smaller number on securing a self-sustaining system (10%) to replace the former.

Infographic 1: Making Change (Generated using: easel.ly-)

Finally, on the question of where is change located, we find the first instance of a pattern that was evident throughout the survey. On this category 38% finds change must occur externally: either in society and others (19%), or through the shift from a status quo that is perpetuating inequality (19%). Yet the largest group (24%) identified that change must occur internally first. The role of the self was also very prominent in the following sections as well.

Agents of Change

After locating change, the project also intends to understand who are the main actors and stakeholders lumped into the category of 'citizen' or 'citizen action'. On this survey, these actors were dubbed 'change-makers'. Respondents were free to describe what they understood by the term and the social construct determining the model they were working towards (as aspiring change-makers themselves). The second actor we inquired about was 'active citizen'. The concept of citizenship is ambiguous terrain, yet there seems to be a connection between the identity confered by the 'citizen' status and the respondents' inner call for action.

a) The Change-Maker:

"I think that all of us can be change-makers. We need to be sure of what and why we need to change and have a vision of how the world will be after making the change"

The Change-Maker (Infographic 2) was defined by the four characteristics outlined below.

Infographic 2: The Change Maker (Generated using: easel.ly )

Each characteristic was coupled by actions that reinforce this behaviour. For example, understanding the issue (33%) comes hand-in-hand with inciting motivation through information: 'If one aspires to change, then one must first understand what is to be changed, how it is to be changed and what would replace the changed system. The primary step is to realize and acknowledge the problem, educate others and then action” (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) Another interesting example is how the 28% that identified the individual as the source of change, also recommend self-reflection on how to create the most impact: "[My role as a change-maker is] practicing what I preach and learning to critique myself constructively and in a manner that helps me improve" (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) This brings a different light to Carpinis categorization of 'capabilities' in social change. It is no longer about participation in an external movement but more about how the individual secures sustained change through his own consistent and coherent behaviour.

b) The Active Citizen

"An active citizen is who follows the constitution, understands and takes responsibility for himself and for influencing his family and community for the betterment of life's social, economic and environmental issues"

Self-awareness was a key point in how the active citizen was personified. It was one of most emphasized points, placing more responsibility on the role of the citizen as opposed to on the issue at hand. Attitudes such as 'realizing the problem', 'taking responsibility' and 'taking initiative' reflect that the individual is finding motivation on taking ownership of his choices and decision-making power. The individual is focusing less on antagonizing the structure and is instead elevating his identity to a fearless, noble status -the citizen is becoming the hero of its own narrative. This ego-emphasis, is also motivating the citizen to invest on increasing its own knowledge capital and attain a thorough understanding of the issues, to then heighten individual and collective awareness around them. The objective is either local -give back to its community- or normative -work towards justice and equity- but there seems to be consensus on the starting point.

Infographic 3 - The Active Citizen (Generated using: easel.ly)

Methods for Change

“By going out there and making the change! Get down and dirty. Then use those examples in the form of story, pictures, etc. and inspire others around you to first change themselves and then help change society!”

Finally, infographic 4 displays a mapping of the methods brought up by participants. Again, awareness and behavioural change were the most popular, placing information and the individual at the epicenter of change-making. The impact of the theater and story telling workshops on participants was also evident, on several mentions to the power of 'artivism'.

Infographic 4: Methods for Social Change (Generated using: easel.ly )

In regards to communication and technology, I was surprised to find that many respondents find it insufficient. They instead recognize the need for strong offline communities making sure activism online translates into the offline realm. “[online platforms] are vital in building quick connections amongst those who feel alike towards bringing change. But eventually, all struggles for change have to be offline [...] technology could be the first step that eventually leads the path to more offline and personal connections.”(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) : Others were wary about its power and they recognize it can be used to both help and contain the activist with the same intensity: "Technology can either blind people or give them sight."(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) These views reflect youth has moved on from the tech hype that pervades the digital activism discourse. The role of technology was not excluded from the conference's tactic package and the group perceives technology as a powerful complement, yet it still places a lot more emphasis on creating sustainable change through education, behaviour and offline interactions than through digital interventions.

Conclusion

Comments at the aftermath of the event reflected participants had undergone a collective mental shift on how to create social change. We arrived looking outwards: accustomed to pointing fingers and scouting for common enemies that personify the misdoings of inequality perpetrators. Five days at Fireflies later and after UDAAN's intervention, I can safely say we left looking inwards. We are now determined to seek information and identify the most effective ways to mainstream it and make it accessible; we are impelled to reconnect with our creative and artistic selves and put them at service of communication; we are encouraged to share our personal stories and have them inspire solidarity and movement in our communities, and above all, we will continue to pursue the level of behaviour-action consistency that legitimizes our efforts at making change. The conference turned out to be a very organic experience and it provided all of us with a space to connect with ourselves and one another in a time of growing loneliness and isolation in the digital age.

Furthermore, the thoughts that surfaced on the survey are important pointers to continue uncovering what drives civic engagement among youth. Seeing these activists locate change in the self was a refreshing break from the times we used to overindulge in the possibilities of technology-mediated change. It seems that the digital is already so embedded in our interactions and ecosystems that it has not only has ceased to be novel, but it is recognized as insufficent, and hence, the attention has returned back to the user and its offline communities. With this in mind, the group that attended UDAAN, as part of the demographic who represents "the promise and future of India's growth", is taking up the challenge of strengthening ideas of making change in their networks. Have them succeed, and this 'growth' will be met by a current of better informed, better armed young activists working to secure a self-sustaining system for the generations to come.

** Thanks to everyone who participated on the survey, Special mention to UDAAN organizers, Educators Collective and the wonderful UDAAN 2013 group**

Sources:

HABITAT, UN. "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012.", (2013)
Ilavarasan, P. Vigneswara. "Community work and limited online activism among India youth." International Communication Gazette 75, no. 3 (2013): 284-299.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. (April 30, 2013).

Resources:

Easel.ly: To create and share visual ideas online: www.easel.ly/‎
Info.gram: Create infographics: infogr.am
More on UDAAN: http://world.350.org/udaan/
More on Global Power Shift (350) - http://globalpowershift.org/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/young-voices-udaan

Creating Free Software Environment at Andhra Loyola College

rahim — 2015-05-27T00:54:42Z

Andhra Loyola college has signed an MoU with CIS-A2K and as part of it CIS-A2K team has provided a free and open software environment at Andhra Lyola College's Computer Center. Thirty machines have been installed with free software Operating system and some useful applications such as GIMP, Inkscape, firefox, libreoffice, etc.

Principal, Vice-principal, management and faculty at Andhra Loyola College expressed interest in upgrading their lab computers to latest software without having the glitches of piracy issues. The obvious solution to this was to install Linux based free OS like Ubuntu/Debian

Program Director of CIS-A2K advised to have this process done in a pilot manner instead of forced imposition on faculty and students to use a totally new working environment. So, 30 machines from PG lab were selected for this purpose.

These machines were installed with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS edition. In addition to the default available Libre office, firefox and terminal, Tools like Gimp, inkscape, apache web server were also installed.

Each of the faculty and students present at the installation time were evangelized about Free Software and its wise uses in the long term.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creating-free-software-environment-at-alc

CPRsouth 2016 – Young Scholars Programme

praskrishna — 2016-05-30T02:01:21Z

Rohini Lakshané, Amber Sinha and Vidushi Marda have been selected to attend the two-day Young Scholars' Programme to be held in Zanzibar, Tanzania in early September this year. The programme is a part of the CPRSouth conference.

Read the original announcement published by CPRSouth here.

Following highly successful joint Afro-Asian CPR conferences in Mauritius in 2012, and India in 2013, CPRafrica and CPRsouth formally merged under the banner of CPRsouth in 2014. Since then, CPRsouth has hosted conferences in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa (2014), and at the Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence at Yuan Ze University, Taiwan (2015).

This year’s conference is co-hosted by COSTECH and TCRA in Zanzibar, and will include sessions on cutting-edge developments on ICT policy and regulation in the South and discussion of the research-policy interface.

30 Young Scholars from Africa and the Asia-Pacific region will be selected to participate in a tutorial programme taught by recognised scholars and practitioners from Africa and Asia, and they will attend the main conference thereafter.

Tutorials are scheduled to be held on the 6^th and 7^th of September 2016, prior to the main CPRsouth conference.

Who will qualify?

Masters/PhD students in Economics, Public policy, Communications and Journalism
Officers of government/regulatory agencies undertaking ICT policy research, developing/gathering indicators (monitoring and evaluation)
Staff of private companies in the communication industries working in regulatory affairs
Officers in NGOs/INGOs working in policy and regulation
Researchers from think tanks, university research centres
Journalists covering communication public policy and regulation

Seminar

The seminar will cover a number of topics of the two days, such as:

policy analysis using supply-side or demand-side data;
ICT impact analysis;
convergence, net neutrality;
funding broadband network extension, open access networks, spectrum;
sector and competition regulation;
research to policy interventions;
Internet governance – privacy, surveillance, human rights online; and
introduction to big data, open data.

(2016 tutorial programme still to be confirmed)

Previous tutorial presentations can be accessed at http://www.cprsouth.org/

Application deadline: 22 April 2016

Application guidelines

Applications should be submitted via this link by 22 April 2016, and must contain the following:

one-page curriculum vitae; and
one-page write-up outlining why you wish to become an African or Asia-Pacific based expert capable of contributing to ICT related policy and regulatory reform in the region

Applicants’ write-ups and biographies should be in a single word document, and named: CPRsouth2016_YoungScholar_ApplicantLastName.

Kindly note: Late applications and applications that do not conform to the prescribed format above will automatically be disqualified.

Review Criteria

Applications will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

content of application;
evidence of interest in, and commitment to, policy-relevant research for Africa or the Asia-Pacific region;
quality of writing; and
gender and country representation

The selection committee may contact your supervisor or mentor before making the final selections.

Candidates selected to participate in the tutorial programme must:

provide a one-page research proposal upon acceptance onto the tutorial programme
participate in all tutorial sessions
participate in the entire CPRsouth 2016 conference

Funding

Selected young scholars who are passport holders of, and travelling from, low and middle income countries within the Asia Pacific and Africa (as classified by the World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-classifications/country-and-lending-groups#Low_income) will be provided with:

lowest-cost economy airfare to conference destination (less USD 150 registration fee);
ground transfers between the conference venue and airport; and
twin sharing accommodation on bed and breakfast basis, 5 lunches and 1 dinner for the duration of the conference and tutorials (6 – 10 September 2016). Not all meals are covered.

The registration fee for young scholars to attend the conference and tutorials is USD150, and airfares will be reimbursed less this registration fee. Participants will be required to cover:

transport to and from airports in their home countries;
visa fees (if any);
meals not provided; and
any other incidental costs

As the registration fee is so low and should be met personally even if there is no institutional support for attendance of the course and conference, please note that only under exceptional circumstances of extreme financial hardship may the organisers consider a waiver of the conference registration fee. Such waivers will be considered on a case-by-case basis and only where a scholar would otherwise be prevented from attending the YS programme and conference.

Visas

Letters of invitation will be provided for purposes of visa applications after participant selections have been made. Participants are responsible for securing their own visas to enter Tanzania, and are strongly advised to initiate visa approval procedures immediately on receipt of confirmation of their participation.

Kindly direct all enquiries to Ondine Bello: admin@researchictafrica.net orinfo@CPRsouth.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cprsouth-2016-2013-young-scholars-programme

CPOV: Critical Point of View

nishant — 2009-07-13T09:07:42Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) seek to bring together ideas, experiences and scholarship about Wikipedia in a reader that charts out detailed user stories as well as empirical and analytical work to produce.. The organisations will jointly host two separate conferences aimed at building a Wikipedia Knowledge Network and charting scholarship and stories about The Wikipedia from around the world.

CPOV: Critical Point of View

Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge

Proposal for a research network, two conferences and a reader

Organized by Centre for Internet & Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Introduction: It would be no exaggeration to state that Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The highly visible clashes amongst opinion leaders, university professors, Web 2.0 ‘evangelists’ and publishers over accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. In this respect, what does it mean to now say that Wikipedia has become “mainstream”?

The accelerated growth and scope of Wikipedia as a knowledge reference of universal ambition is unheard of. The Google search engine gives preferential treatment to Wikipedia in an attempt to beat search engine optimizers and to provide a more fruitful experience to its users. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty's Wen-hsien ta-ch' eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie.

Wikipedia owns a whole set of characteristics – including number and automation (bots) of contributors, regularity of updates, fluidity, ease of search, number of languages, and growing user base. In doing so, this online encyclopedia might be cited as the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. Those of us who believe in pluralism, and the possibility of another world have reason to celebrate and defend Wikipedia from intellectual- property-right-maximalists and promoters of proprietary models of knowledge production and dissemination. However, such celebration and defense should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The Wikimedia Foundation has recently employed its first research analyst and provides spaces for “Wikipediology”, including projects such as the Wiki Project on vandalism studies. Nonetheless, critical Wikipedia research should also be done outside the self-reflexivity of the Wikimedia Foundation and its community. There is an urgent need for quantitative and qualitative research from an Humanities and Arts perspective that could benefit both the wider user base and the active Wikipedia community itself.

More than this though, as one of the largest if not the largest self-contained general knowledge reference of our time, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. New strategic and tactical operations of knowledge/power are clearly at work. The concept of the open remains ambiguous in this formation, serving as both a rallying concept and masking new agonistic encounters.

By permanently (re)formulating the open and inclusive as the guiding Wikipedia principle being formulated by the community itself, one might also look at this norm as a narrative or even call it a founding myth. For example, the demographic profile of the Wikipedia editor as a white male geek with a limited mono-cultural worldview based on Western rationality remains a concern. However, the question of (non)diversity being formulated in Wikipedia discussions needs also to be posed beyond existing stereotypes and at the general level of discourse. The question of (post)identity and representation is not necessarily resolved via the discursive construction of 'inclusion', if such inclusion may require leaving competing knowledge histories and practices at the door and if it puts a culture of editing not next to a culture of listening/hearing.

In the most material and perceptional way, every new technology modifies conditions of possibility for knowledge. The logic of technologies bleeds into the very structures and organizing principles of knowledge and today, both medium and message may reflect the ideas of the (organized) network, multitude or the Deleuzian machine. It is through a selected mix of technological and normative conditions – the distributed architecture of the net, the Wiki software platform, commons-based property licenses and the FLOSS zeitgeist – that Wikipedia as the encyclopedia of the information age emerges, both continuing and transforming the Enlightenment encyclopedic impulse or will to know.

The authors of these proposal are aware of the seemingly conflicting overarching research agenda: At one level is a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts and social, culture construction in terms of , authority and politics. At the other level the research agenda is an empirical, anecdotal, sociological investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia. This has been done on purpose so that the learnings from theoretical research activities can inform practice oriented research and vice-versa.

Overall the conferences and reader may include the following areas inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based contributions:

WikiTheory (opening session)
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production
Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century
Wiki Art
Designing Debate
Critique of Free and Open
Global Politics of Exclusion
The Place of Resistance
Wikipedia and Education
Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies
Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production

Descriptions of the Sessions/Fields of Interest

1. WikiTheory – Mining for Concepts (opening session)

Besides providing a general overview of the topics to come, and with an emphasis on diverse global approaches, the aim here is develop concepts that could be used in further research and that could fit into larger projects on Internet culture and the critique of the free and open. Is it possible to develop a counter-hegemony of critical practices that situates itself in the midst of technological cultures? What kind of critical lessons does Wikipedia provide in the face of overwhelming Web 2.0 hype and P2P utopianism? How can a radical Wikipedia critique be developed that does not present itself as the cynical ‘I told you so’ outsider or mimic the neo-conservatist position of Andrew Keen? What kind of insight can Wikipedia offer regarding the continuing tension between knowledge and information?

2. Wikipedia and Critical Histories of Western Knowledge Production

This session may include topics like: western vs. non/post-western knowledge production, textual vs. oral tradition, visual vs. textual knowledge, Wikipedia and language diversity, and indigenous knowledge.

The persistence of almost buried master-narratives: The Western tradition of Enlightenment tends to permeate both common and official understandings of knowledge on Wikipedia. Mirroring the Enlightenment itself, Wikipedia both offers a very particular type of knowledge and simultaneously makes claims upon the universal - e.g. in the formulation of visionary goals, structure of articles, author positions, writing style, categorization of entries, conflict resolution models and so on. The ways in which such ideals persist and continue to bear their mark on the present in often subtle ways requires further attention. Indeed, the 'grand narratives' of the Enlightenment that Jean-Francis Lyotard claimed had retreated with the emergence of 'computerized societies' continue to inform the popular imaginary in ways largely untouched by the deconstructive moment. Frederic Jameson once referred to this as the 'persistence of buried master-narratives', a 'political unconscious' that guides decisions irrespective of philosophical status. Likewise, this resonates with Foucault's urge 'to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge' as that which performs the task of subjugation but operates beyond contention. What matters here is not truth or belief, but operation.

The predominance of textual or even linguistical cultures: The current system of Wikipedia citation prejudices textual systems of knowledge over oral and visual systems of knowledge. This under-values the knowledge systems of cultural memory and related technique such as mnemo techniques or oral poetry on the one hand, and illiterate populations on the other hand.

3. Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century

The word made durable: In this session we want to give an overview of various attempts to create a collection of global knowledge. In order to get a better understanding of the cultural specificity of the underlying code on which Wikipedia is built, this topic seeks to dig further into the histories of the encyclopedia. D' Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie is often described as the most succinct statement of European Enlightenment, and the Encyclopedie itself as the material project of Enlightenment. It is through the Encyclopedie that the Enlightenment becomes durable, tangible and disseminated. What can be learned by examining such historical precedents?

Encyclopedias have been said to be sources of national images and stereotypes of the self and the other within Europe. In Wikipedia image construction tends to be both disembogue and masked in favor of a cosmopolitan, global self-understanding. This session might interrogate to what extent knowledge production’s construction of national images is shifted from a discursive to an automatic georeferencing system of construction.

As machines think (or maybe Knowing Machines or The Machinic Intellect): This session may also look to historical attempts to revolutionize knowledge through the creation of new technologies and to what extent these alternate histories resonate with Wikipedia specifically and the technologies of the Net as driven by knowledge imperatives more generally. Examples include the Mundaneum, the Memex, the Galactic Network and project Xanadu.

4. Wikipedia Art

Art at the gates: Wikipedia Art is understood both as artwork and intervention. Taking place largely on Wikipedia itself, the project Wikipedia Art was considered controversial and was quickly removed (see recent debate on nettime-l). What does this project reveal about this type of knowledge production? What is the threshold of legitimacy for this type of knowledge and how are the boundaries policed? What is at stake in the rejection of art?

5. Models of Disambiguation and Designing Debate

May include topics like: Dissent made visible, After Talk / Alerts / Mailing Lists, the role of forum software, technical opportunities for discontent, barnstars/award culture.

The paradox of neutrality: The Neutral Point of View policy of Wikipedia does not always accurately depict the state of debate on topics: The view held by a corporate lobby, using funded research, will find equal space as the opinions of thousands of disadvantaged persons who might be impacted by the actions of the corporate lobby. Would it make sense to replace the NPoV policy and think about Wikipedia as a space of open political agonality; as a battle for meaning underpinned by the desire for reason?

New crises of authenticity: As Wikipedia gains the status of default reference for other printed textual knowledge artifacts – there are emerging challenges of representation; longevity born digital references; digital manipulation of sources; and circular referencing. Shuddhabrata Sengupta of CSDS/Sarai says “Wikipedia encouraged in its community the active exercise of a critical and skeptical attitude towards any received form of knowledge”. In this context the evolving notions of authenticity has to be further interrogated given the rise of peer-produced knowledge and the diminishing cult of the expert.

6. Critique of Free and Open

May include topics like: the parasite model of free culture (“You work for free, others will make the money from your free labour.”), governance, the role of developers, economy of Wikipedia, the beliefs of the founders as the political foundation of Wikipedia, critical interrogation of knowledge in relation to 'the open'.

Vacuous collaboration: Master concepts like freedom and openness are at constant risk of remaining empty or constituting an ‘empty signifier’. The failure to fill such concepts has lead to many descriptions of Wikipedia as 'collaborations' or even 'ad hoc meritocracies' (Alex Bruns). Both these second-tier notions also tend to mask the reconfiguration of the political and new forms of closure.

Paid and voluntary community manipulation: Many Wikipedians hold strong opinions on range of sensitive areas including identity, religion, science, politics, culture, and use sophisticated techniques such as astro-turfing on Wikipedia. Additionally, some states, corporations and organized religious groups sometimes pay specialists to engage in astro-turfing in order to remove critical opinions and rewrite information from Wikipedia.

7. Global Politics of Exclusion

May include topics like: non-western, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks.

Tyranny of the connected: In societies which are compounded by digital and participation divides, the connected usually always win over those who don't have access and time to spare.

Gendered Knowledge: While women are strongly represented among readers, globally, they are hardly represented among contributors. In offlist chats, women express that they do not feel comfortable when contributing to Wikipedia conversations. They even felt silenced by the perception of Wikipedia as a masculine tech culture. Some women have already created an alternative space of discussion at wikichix.org. Does the separation of discussion spaces and the marginalization of domestic issues and social impacts on Wikipedia turn back time?

Morality laundering: Moral standards that exist in one country are being exported to other countries via Wikipedia. For example, photo-realistic images of human bodies on pages dealing with sexuality and anatomy are being replaced with drawings. Does this type of common denominator approach undermine the pluralism of global sexuality? The call and eventual refusal of image censorship for the entry on Mohammad represents a similar scenario.

Language diversity: Despite the self-imposed normative claim of language diversity and the self-description of Wikipedia as a truly multi-lingual project, English is the Lingua Franca in translingual meta projects and policy discussions. Also, on the level of content, is the English Wikipedia the 'Leitmedium' in terms of (content) synchronization. In what other ways does the language divide operate on Wikipedia?

Global governance: Governance of Wikipedia has evolved and become increasingly sophisticated to match its phenomenal growth and the attention it has garnered. While these changes in governance have managed to sustain the growth of Wikipedia and prevent its credibility from being undermined, there is a need to understand the impact that various governance mechanisms have on the different incarnations of Wikipedia throughout the world. Such analysis should consider separately (and compare) different national chapters, plus extend beyond Wikipedia projects to the governance of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Form and format: As the Wikipedia becomes a standard of documentation and knowledge archive, it becomes important to focus on traditional, oral and ephemeral knowledges which might die because of the limitations of technologised platforms to capture them. Oral histories, community knowledges, incipient systems of documenting personal and collective memories, etc. start getting lost as the logo-centric, ‘objectively verifiable’ structures of knowledge production come into being. Rather than a critique of Wikipedia, analysis needs to concentrate on ways by which such knowledge systems are not lost and further tools which need to be developed in order to make them accessible and visible.

8. The Place of Resistance

Why do people resign from Wikipedia? Are critical voices silenced by the majority of the mass? Does the exclusion of the Wikipedia Art project reveal that within Wikipedia is no place for contesting forms, repertoires, styles that go beyond linguistic approaches? Rituals and mechanisms of exclusion offers critical insights into the contemporary status of resistance formation in an paradigmatic age of diversity and inclusion. Going beyond and extending the thinking of social movement scholars such as Touraine or Melucci the study of Wikipedia might inform culture and identity approaches of social movement studies and vice versa.

Can Wikipedia said to be a social movement and/or how do social movement actors appropriate the Wikipedia to built alternatives?

9. Media Literacy and Education

Knowing about knowing: While technologies like newspapers, television, radio and cinema have given birth to educational institutions that engage in media studies, thereby providing tools for the discerning citizen-consumer and future professional, there is still much work required to develop similar critical models for emerging projects like Wikipedia. The common institutional (non)response to warn against the ‘dangers’ of Wikipedia-like projects and discourage or ban their use seems grossly inadequate. The rise of 'prosumers' suggests a need for new 'production literacies' in addition to the traditional 'consumption literacy'. Furthermore, there is also a growing number of meta projects on Wikipedia that seek cooperation with schools and academia. But is the Wikimedia foundation and select national bodies the legitimate actors to teach media literacy or is this rather a public relations effort? What would Wikipedia literacy entail?

10. Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies

Possible Topics: Protocological Knowledge, Knowledge vs. Information, Cultural Analytics, Cybernetics in the present, (Un)dead labour and the posthuman bot.

Knowledge in the neighborhood of software: Can we start thinking of Wikipedia as an interplay of editors and technology, since software and notification systems are such an important part of the Wikipedia project? Indeed, whilst humans argue over knowledge statements, 'bots' do much of the dirty work and general knowledge housekeeping – a kind of (un)dead labour. The presumption here, of code as politics, is that the wiki principles themselves need to be debated from a perspective of software studies. To what extent has bot politics triumphed over vernacular expertise or lead to an empowerment of the e-tech geeks in knowledge projects? Related to this is the question of the cultural history of Wikipedia as a platform. What is the relation between policy formation and technical protocols? Is Wikipedia knowledge Cybernetic?

Wikipedia as a data set: Besides the automation participation in the form of the bot, Wikipedia is an information artifact through and through. What kind of data analysis techniques can contribute to a radical critique or illuminate network regularities beyond human interpretation? What additional anonymised data sets of edit and use history should be released by the Wikimedia Foundation to promote media literacy and education.

11. Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production

Possible Topics: Politics of knowledge production, question of authority, The fallacy of objectivity, Wikipedia and the Public Sphere.

The alarm that traditional bastions of knowledge production and consumption (like universities and publishing houses) raise against Wikipedia, brings into sharp relief, the fact that the Wikipedia is a part of a much larger knowledge production industry. With the Wikipedia’s integration into more ‘mainstream’ usage, it becomes necessary to focus on how the emergence of such a space (and the principles it embodies) also affects the much larger and global politics, aesthetics and mechanics of knowledge production. Wikipedia has substantially changed academic trends of publication, citation, classroom pedagogy and research. It has also been central to many debates about who produces knowledge and who has the ‘right’ to be an Authority on the knowledge thus produced.

Moving beyond the class-room and questions of plagiarism or teaching, there is need to investigate the pre-conditions and the contexts within which Wikipedia emerges, and the kind of questions it poses to processes of knowledge production, consumption and verification.

Production Details

Besides setting up a network for critical Wikipedia research with its own mailing list and organizing two events early 2010 in Bangalore and Amsterdam (to start with), the aim is to gather materials for a Wikipedia Research Reader that will be published in the INC Reader series around September-October 2010.

Research and editorial group: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

Contact info:

Sunil Abraham: sunil@cis-india.org

Nishant Shah: Nishant@cis-india.org

For more information on how to apply to the Bangalore WikiWars conference, please click here.

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

CPOV : Wikipedia Research Initiative

nishant — 2011-08-23T02:52:25Z

The Second event, towards building the Critical Point of View Reader on Wikipedia, brings a range of scholars, practitioners, theorists and activists to critically reflect on the state of Wikipedia in our contemporary Information Societies. Organised in Amsterdam, Netherlands, by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, the event builds on the debates and discussions initiated at the WikiWars that launched off the knowledge network in Bangalore in January 2010. Follow the Live Tweets at #CPOV

Second international conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative :: March 26-27, 2010 :: OBA (Public Library Amsterdam, next to Amsterdam central station), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam.

Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta- ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie. The multilingual Wikipedia as digital collaborative and fluid knowledge production platform might be said to be the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. However, such celebration should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The CPOV Research Initiative was founded from the urge to stimulate critical Wikipedia research: quantitative and qualitative research that could benefit both the wide user-base and the active Wikipedia community itself. On top of this, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. The overarching research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations, and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: Wiki Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate and Global Issues and Outlooks.

Follow the live tweets on http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23CPOV

Confirmed speakers: Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Andrew Famiglietti (UK), Stuart Geiger (USA), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL), Charles van den Heuvel (NL), Jeanette Hofmann (DE), Athina Karatzogianni (UK), Scott Kildall (USA), Patrick Lichty (USA), Hans Varghese Mathews (IN), Teemu Mikkonen (FI), Mayo Fuster Morell (IT), Mathieu O’Neil (AU), Felipe Ortega (ES), Dan O’Sullivan (UK), Joseph Reagle (USA), Ramón Reichert (AU), Richard Rogers (USA/NL), Alan Shapiro (USA/DE), Maja van der Velden (NL/NO), Gérard Wormser (FR).

Editorial team: Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne). Project manager CPOV Amsterdam: Margreet Riphagen. Research intern: Juliana Brunello. Production intern: Serena Westra.

The CPOV conference in Amsterdam will be the second conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative. The launch of the initiative took place in Bangalore India, with the conference WikiWars in January 2010. After the first two events, the CPOV organization will work on producing a reader, to be launched early 2011. For more information or submitting a reader contribution.

Buy your ticket online (with iDeal), or register by sending an email to: info (at) networkcultures.org. One day ticket: €25, students and OBA members: €12,50. Full conference pass (2 days): €40, students and OBA members: 25.

Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

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

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Copyrights and Copywrongs Why the Government Should Embrace the Public Domain

pranesh — 2013-09-06T04:56:42Z

Each of you reading this article is a criminal and should be jailed for up to three years. Yes, you. "Why?," you may ask.

This article by Pranesh Prakash was published in Yojana, Issue: August 2013.

Have you ever whistled a tune or sung a film song aloud? Have you ever retold a joke? Have you replied to an e-mail without deleting the copy of that e-mail that automatically added to the reply? Or photocopied pages from a book? Have you ever used an image from the Internet in presentation? Have you ever surfed the Internet at work, used the the 'share' button on a website, or retweeted anything on Twitter? And before 2012, did you ever use a search engine?

If you have done any of the above without the permission of the copyright holder, you might well have been in violation of the Indian Copyright Act, since in each of those examples you're creating a copy or are otherwise infringing the rights of the copyright holder. Interestingly, it was only through an amendment in 2012 that search engines (like Google and Yahoo) were legalized.

Traditional Justifications for Copyright

Copyright is one among the many forms of intellectual property rights. Across differing theories of copyright, two broad categories may be made. The first category would be those countries where copyright is intended to benefit society, the other where it is intended to benefit the author. Within the second category, there can again be two subcategories: those that see the need to benefit the author due to notions of natural justice and those that see the need to provide incentives for authors to create. Incentives to create are necessary only when the act of creation itself is valuable (and more so than the creator). The act of creation is valued highly as it directly benefits society. Thus, it is seen that the second sub-category is closer to the societal benefit theory than the natural justice sub-category. In the United States, the wording of the Progress Clause makes things clear that copyright is for the benefit of the public, and the author is only given secondary consideration. It is in light of this that the U.S. Supreme Court said,
"The monopoly privileges that Congress may authorize are neither unlimited nor primarily designed to provide a special private benefit. Rather, the limited grant is a means by which an important public purpose may be achieved. It is intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the provision of a special reward, and to allow the public access to the products of their genius after the limited period of exclusive control has expired."

Economic theories of copyright see copyright as an incentive mechanism, designed to encourage creators to produce material because they would be able to recover costs and make a profit due to the exclusionary rights that copyright law grants. Thus, the ideal period of copyright for any material, under the economic theory would be the minimum period required for a person to recoup the costs that go into the production of that material. Allowing for the great-grandchildren of the author to benefit from the author’s work would actually go against the incentive mechanism. Even if the author is motivated enough to put in even more hard work to provide for her great-grandchildren, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren wouldn’t have any incentive to create for themselves (as the incentive is seen purely in terms of economics, and not in terms of creative urge, etc.), as they are already provided for by copyright. Thus, in a sense, the shift towards longer periods of copyright terms that we are seeing today can be seen as a shift from the incentive-based model to a rewards-based model of copyright.

The other standard theory of copyright justification is the natural rights theory, which deems intellectual property the fruit of the author’s labour, thus entitling them to complete control over that fruit. This brings us to the conception of property itself, and the Lockean and Hegelian justifications for personal property is what is most often used to back such an argument up.

There are many problems with the natural rights theory of intellectual property. If that theory were to hold water, copyright law would accord greater precedence to authors than to publishers. Yet, we see that it is publishers primarily, and not authors, who get benefit of copyright. The "work for hire" doctrine, embodied in Section 17 of the Copyright Act, holds that it is the employer who is treated as the owner of copyright, not the author. This plainly contradicts that natural rights theory. And it also raises the question of why we should protect certain kinds of knowledge investments in the first place. Publishing is a business, and all risks inherent with other businesses should come along with publishing. There is no reason that the State should safeguard their investment by vesting in them a right while safeguarding the investments of any other business only occasionally, and that too as an act of munificence. This problem arises because of the free transferability of copyright. This leads us to the larger problem, which is of course that of treating knowledge as a form of property. Property, as we have traditionally understood it, has a few features like excludability. Knowledge, however, does not share that feature with property. Once you know something that I created, I can’t exclude you from that knowledge that (unlike my ability to take back an apple you have stolen from me). This analysis also has the pernicious effect of excluding free speech analysis of copyright laws. An incorrect analogy is often drawn to explain why free speech analysis doesn’t work on property: you may wish to exercise your right to free speech on my front lawn, yet the State may decree that I am in full right to throw you off my property, without being accused of abridging your right to freedom of speech. So, the argument goes, enforcement of property rights is not an affront to freedom of speech. The problems with this analogy are obvious enough: the two forms of “property” cannot be equated. If you take the location of speech away, I can still speak. If, on the other hand, you restrict my ideas/expression, then I can no longer be said to have the freedom of expression.

One Size Doesn't Fit All

It is easy to see that copyright is an ill-fit for all the things that it now covers. Copyright in its present form is a historical accident, which evolved into the state it is in a very haphazard fashion. It is a colonial imposition on developing countries. It does not value that which we often value in Indian culture: tradition. Instead, copyright law values modernity and newness. It can also be seen as a trade issue imposed on us through the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS Agreements) as part of the World Trade Organization.

Importantly, copyright is not a single well-planned scheme. In some cases — for literature, visual art works, lyrics, musical tunes, etc. — it provides rights to the artist, while in other cases — for recordings of those musical tunes, and for films — it provides rights to the producers. What are the legal reasons for this distinction? There aren't any; the distinction is a historical one (with sound recordings and films getting copyright protection after literature, etc.). At one point of time only exact copies were governed by copyright law. Hence, translations of a work were considered not to be infringement of that work (or a "derivative work"), but new independent works, since after all it takes considerable artistic effort to create a good translation of a work. However now even creating an encyclopedia based on Harry Potter (as the Harry Potter Lexicon was), is covered as infringement of the exclusive rights of the author. At one point of time photographs were not provided any copyright, being as they are, 'mere' mechanical reproductions. They were seen as not being 'creative' enough. However, around the turn of the twentieth century, that position changed, and hence every photograph you've taken of your dog is now copyrighted. According to a recent Supreme Court decision, merely adding paragraph numbering to court judgments is considered to be 'creative' enough to merit copyright protection! At one point of time, copyright existed for 14 years. Now, with the international minimum being "fifty years after the death of the author", it lasts for an average of more than a century! Once upon a time, copyright was only granted to those who wanted it and applied for it. That has now changed, and you have copyright over every single original thing that you have ever written, recorded, or otherwise affixed to a medium.

Copyright in the Digital Era

All digital activities violate copyright, since automatically copies are created on the computer's RAM, cache, etc. Because now everything is copyrighted, and copyrighted seemingly forever, each one of us violates copyright on a day-to-day basis. It is a mockery of the law when everyone is a criminal. The US President Barack Obama violated copyright law when he presented UK's Queen Elizabeth II an iPod filled with 40 songs from popular musicals like West Side Story and the King and I. When even presidents, with legal advisers cannot navigate copyright law successfully, what hopes have we ordinary people?

There is no shortage of similar examples to show that copyright law has gone out of control.

Take extradition, for instance. Augusto Pinochet was extradited, Charles Shobraj was sought to be extradited. Added to their ranks is the pimply teenager who runs TVShark, who British courts have cleared for extradition to the USA for potential violation of copyright law. The extreme injustice of copyright is easily observable if one sees the contorted map depicting net royalty inflows available on Worldmapper.org: there are a sum total of less than a dozen countries which are net exporters of IP; all other countries, including India, are net importers of IP. IP law is one area where both those who talk about social justice and those who talk about individual liberties find common ground in the monopolistic or exclusionary rights granted under copyright law. Copyright acts as a barrier to free trade, thus allowing Nelson Mandela's autobiography to be more expensive in South Africa than the United Kingdom because South Africa is prohibited by the UK publisher from importing the book from India. Mark Getty, the heir to the Getty Images fortune, once presciently observed that "IP is the oil of the 21st century".

Government Copyright

In the ivory towers of academia, there has in recent times been a clarion call that's resounding strongly: the call for open access. As the Public Library of Science states, "open access is a stands for unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse". Why is it important? "Most publishers own the rights to the articles in their journals. Anyone who wants to read the articles must pay to access them. Anyone who wants to use the articles in any way must obtain permission from the publisher and is often required to pay an additional fee. Although many researchers can access the journals they need via their institution and think that their access is free, in reality it is not. The institution has often been involved in lengthy negotiations around the price of their site license, and re-use of this content is limited." Importantly, the writers of articles (scholars) do not get paid by the publishers for their articles, and most developing countries are not able to afford the costs imposed by these scholarly publishers. Even India's premier scientific research agency, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, recently declared that the costs of scientific journals was beyond its means.

Why is this important? Because apart from establishing the idea of informational equity and justice, it also establishes the idea that taxpayer-funded research (as most scientific and much of academic research is) ought to belong to the public domain, and be available freely. This principle, seemingly uncontroversial, is very unfortunately not embodied in the Indian Copyright Act. Most public servants do not realize that that which they create may not be freely used by the public whom they serve.

Under the Indian Copyright Act, all creations of the government, whether by the executive, judiciary, or legislature, is by default copyrighted. This does not make sense under either of the two theories of copyright that we examined above. The government is not an 'author' who can have any form of 'natural rights' over its labour. Nor is the government incentivised to create more works if it has copyright over them. Most of the copyrighted works, such as various reports, the Gazette of India, etc., that the government creates are required to be created, and the cultural works it creates are for cultural promotion and not for commercial exploitation. Hence it makes absolutely no sense to continue with the colonial regime of 'crown copyright', when countries like the USA have suffered no ill effects by legally placing all government works in the public domain.

While there are a limited set of exceptions to government copyright provided for in the law, those are very minimal. This means that even though you are legally allowed to get a document through the Right to Information Act, publicising that document on the Internet could potentially get you jailed under the Copyright Act. This is obviously not what any government official would want. If instead of the four sub-sections that form the exception, the exception was merely one line and allowed for "the reproduction, communication to the public, or publication of any government work", then that itself would elegantly take care of the problem. This would also remove the ambiguities inherent currently in the Data.gov.in, where the central government is publishing information that it wants civil society, entrepreneurs, and other government departments to use, however there is no clarity on whether they are legally allowed to do so.

Recently, the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization passed a treaty that would facilitate blind persons' access to books. On that occasion, at Marrakesh, I noted that intellectual property must not be seen as a good in itself, but as an instrumentalist tool which may be selectively deployed to achieve societally desirable objectives. I said: It is historic that today WIPO and its members have collectively recognized in a treaty that copyright isn't just an "engine of free expression" but can pose a significant barrier to access to knowledge. Today we recognize that blind writers are currently curtailed more by copyright law than protected by it. Today we recognize that copyright not only may be curtailed in some circumstances, but that it must be curtailed in some circumstances, even beyond the few that have been listed in the Berne Convention. One of the original framers of the Berne Convention, Swiss jurist and president, Numa Droz, recognized this in 1884 when he emphasized that "limits to absolute protection are rightly set by the public interest". And as Debabrata Saha, India's delegate to WIPO during the adoption of the WIPO Development Agenda noted, "intellectual property rights have to be viewed not as a self contained and distinct domain, but rather as an effective policy instrument for wide ranging socio-economic and technological development. The primary objective of this instrument is to maximize public welfare." When copyright doesn't serve public welfare, states must intervene, and the law must change to promote human rights, the freedom of expression and to receive and impart information, and to protect authors and consumers. Importantly, markets alone cannot be relied upon to achieve a just allocation of informational resources, as we have seen clearly from the book famine that the blind are experiencing. Marrakesh was the city in which, as Debabrata Saha noted, "the damage [of] TRIPS [was] wrought on developing countries". Now it has redeemed itself through this treaty.

The Indian government needs to similarly redeem itself by freeing governmental works, including the scientific research it funds, the archives of All India Radio, the movies that it produces through Prasar Bharati, and all other tax-payer funded works, and by returning them to the public domain, where they belong.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/yojana-august-2013-pranesh-prakash-copyrights-and-copywrongs-why-the-govt-should-embrace-the-public-domain

Copyright: Access to Knowledge in Free Trade Agreements?

praskrishna — 2015-10-02T03:36:53Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/copyright-access-to-knowledge-in-fta.pdf

Copyright Law: More Than A Moral Obligation

praskrishna — 2012-08-13T03:59:47Z

It was a cozy and warm atmosphere in a bookstore in South Delhi — with plenty of cushions thrown on the floor — that I attended a delightful book launch for children. The book was displayed prominently, along with some fabulous original illustrations done by the author, from which the book illustrator had been “inspired”. I clicked some photographs with my smartphone. The publishers, based in another city, couldn't attend the event. So, I thought why not mail it to them, they are fraternity. Soon, a newsletter popped into my mailbox from the same publisher, with a lovely write-up of the book launch accompanied by my photographs, but with no acknowledgement given to me. I was disappointed.

This column by Jaya Bhattacharji Rose was published in Business World on August 9, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

After pondering over it, I decided to bring it to the publisher’s notice. To me, it was the principle of recognising the IPR (intellectual property rights) of the creator and giving due credit that I felt was at stake here. This was the reply I received, “So sorry. It was a slip up as I had said that you should be acknowledged. But since that is not the usual practice — simply because no one had asked — it was overlooked.” An apology received and accepted. I did not stop at that. I requested that in the next newsletter it should be rectified and on the blog, the photographs uploaded should go with credits.

To explore larger issues surrounding copyright, and for publishers in general, management of copyright is a very important part of their business. In May 2012, the Indian Parliament passed a few amendments to the Copyright Act. (It is still a bill, at the time of writing this column.) A victory to a large extent for the music industry, but it has made very little difference, so far, to the publishing industry. Plus, the debate surrounding Clause 2(m) of the Indian Copyright Act is still an open chapter. As per the clause, a book published in any part of the world can easily be sold here. Thus, diluting the significance or infringing upon an exclusive Indian edition. The Parliament Standing Committee investigating the pros and cons of Clause 2(m), made a “forceful recommendation” for its amendment, but it was not included in the bill. So the HRD Minister has referred it to an NCAER expert committee constituted.

However, another amendment relevant to the publishing industry has been the increase in copyright term for photographs. “This will make using older photographs impossible without hunting down the original photographer,” says Pranesh Prakash, a lawyer and copyright expert and programme manager at Centre for Internet and Society. “So far, things have worked well because sepia-tinted photographs have generally become part of the public domain. But now, only photographs by photographers who died before 1951 are part of the public domain. This has shrivelled up the public domain in photographs since it is even more difficult to trace the photographer (and date of death) than to estimate the age of a photograph, determining whether a photograph is in the public domain is laden with uncertainty. The use of historical photos in books (and Wikipedia) will be badly affected.”

Having been a publisher for years, I tend to be very careful about issues involving copyright. Dig deep and you will find anecdotes that illustrate the crying need for understanding copyright issues. For example, an illustrator submitting files to a reputed art director could be told that the illustrations are not up to mark. Unfortunately, when the book is published, the ‘new’ illustrations are pale imitations of the original line drawings submitted by the illustrator.

Or for that matter, a playwright being asked to create a script, but is never acknowledged or even paid the royalty due since the director believes that the core idea for the play is hers. ‘The playwright merely gave it a form’ is a common retort. Or, a couple of editors discovering their original research (and highly acclaimed globally) has been blatantly plagiarised by a well-known writer and published by an equally prominent publisher. Despite having marshalled all the necessary evidence, the editors are unable to file a case, since the court fee is a percentage of the damages sought and is beyond their reach. So, these cases stagnate with no redressal and the creators are left frustrated and angry.

The core issue is, how many professionals in the publishing eco-system actually know what is copyright or how to exercise their rights? After all, it is only a concept, albeit a legal one, which gives the creator of an original work exclusive right(s) to it for a limited period of time. Establishing and verifying the ownership to copyright is a sensitive issue. A good example of how an organisation can facilitate, disseminate, inform and empower a literary community on IPR and related topics is the Irish Writers Union.

According to their website, it is “the representative organisation for one of the major stakeholders in any discussion about copyright: Irish authors. While we understand that copyright legislation might be a barrier to innovation in certain industries, the IWU believes that any change to copyright law must be managed in such a way as to ensure that no damage is done to Ireland’s literary activity. ...literature earns hard cash for Ireland. Both in the form of its contribution to the €2bn annual gain from cultural tourism and in the considerable revenues deriving from the success of sales of Irish works, Irish publishing and writing is an activity that should not be jeopardised by any legal change that weakens the value of copyright ownership to the creators of original literary works. ...We note that if anything, copyright law in regard to literature should be strengthened to protect rights holders.”

As Shauna Singh Baldwin, a Canadian-American novelist of Indian descent, comments upon the significance of copyright in an e-mail conversation with me, “The breath of the individual creator, his/her imagination and speculation gives life to a work of art. To create something new, you take ideas from many sources, recontextualise them, find unexpected connections between them, and create something new — and beautiful. If we continue to be ashamed of our own imaginations and so fearful of mistakes that we must copy the tried and true, we will never create, only innovate.”

As for the rejoinder and photo credits I had requested for my photographs, the publisher implemented it immediately. And I was glad.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an international publishing consultant and columnist.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-businessworld-in-jaya-bhattacharji-rose-august-9-copyright-law

Copyright Enforcement and Privacy in India

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

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

Introduction

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

Copyright Enforcement

Context setting

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

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

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

Civil and Criminal Enforcement under the Copyright Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Anton Piller' orders and 'John Doe' Orders

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

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

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

Picture this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technological Measures

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

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

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

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

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

Portents

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

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

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

Copyright and Confidential Information

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright and Publicity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Private under the Copyright Act

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

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

Public/Publish

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

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

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

Private

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[8]Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15]Ibid at. Pp 41-42.

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

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

[18]Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[33]Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[41]52(1)(l)

[42]52(1)(za)