Centre for Internet and Society

Hacking, Modding & Making

praskrishna — 2012-04-09T09:51:41Z

Seeber's electronics laboratory is a room in a unit he shares with his mother. Every available space is taken up with teetering towers of electronic parts, writes Brendan Shanahan for GQ.

Like subprime lending or the line at the motor registry, patent and copyright laws control all our lives but no one really understands them. In the world of DIY Tech, however, it is not a subject that can be ignored.

" If they are infringing on patents then it's a question you have to ask within the individual jurisdiction," says Abraham. "In many jurisdictions design many not have protection. Whether it's legal or illegal is an open question."

At its heart Abraham's argument is pragmatic: the developing world, especially China, is too big to stop. Companies can fight patent wars in every world territory, hire private detectives, pressure governments and prosecute consumers who buy rip-off products, but, ultimately, they won't win. The genie is out of the bottle.

"If something has been made technologically possible, we cannot make it illegal and hope that everyone will now pretend that this is no longer technologically possible," says Abraham. "We can't have the government checking everyone's iPod and laptop. The better move is to change the model."

Abraham has many suggestions for making copyright law more flexible to benefit manufacturers and consumers. One thing is certain: in a world in which Amazon, not even five years after the launch of the Kindle, is now selling more e-books than all hard copy books combined, and technology such as 3D printing will soon be standard, it would be unwise to cling to old certainities. The music industry may come to be regarded as merely the canary in a digital coalmine of failed industries.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/hacking-modding-making

Global Censorship Conference

praskrishna — 2012-03-30T11:34:07Z

The Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School is holding a conference on global censorship from March 30 to April 1, 2012, at Yale Law School. The programme is sponsored by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and Thomson Reuters.

"This conference is the first major event for the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and it brings together an exciting group of thinkers from law, political science, computer science, business and the non-profit sector to discuss the lessons of the past few years,” explained Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin, director of the Abrams Institute and the Information Society Project. “We think the study of free expression in the digital age should be international and interdisciplinary."[1]

Rishabh Dara, Google Policy Fellow who worked at CIS office in Bangalore on freedom of expression and internet-related policy issues is participating in the event as a speaker in the panel on Case Studies of Censorship. The panel will explore recent instances of censorship in the United States, Egypt, Syria, Brazil, and India and the common themes and important differences that emerged.

This conference will consider how censorship has changed in a networked world, exploring how networks have altered the practices of both governments and their citizens. Panels will include discussions of how governments can and do censor and how speakers can command technical and legal tools to preserve their ability to speak. The conference will conclude with a discussion of new controversies in censorship, including laws designed to prevent online bullying and intellectual property infringement.

Agenda

Friday March 30, 2012

2:00	Begin Registration
3:15 – 4:45	The Means of Change, Familiar and New (co-sponsored by Sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights) In the popular story of the political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, information technology stands out as the new factor that was critical to rapid mass mobilization for demanding change. The media have been credited with making popular demands for change contagious. Enthusiasts for the potential of technology to foster progressive change have labeled these apparently sudden developments a Facebook revolution. Governments responded by seeking to curtail the use of mobile phones and the Internet. What role has technology played in igniting, sustaining and shaping recent political changes in the Arab world? Anupam Chander, Professor of Law, University of California, Davis and Director, California International Law Center Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation John Pollock, journalist
5:00– 6:30	Keynote Lecture (co-sponsored by Sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights) Irwin Cotler, Canadian Parliament, former Attorney General of Canada
6:30– 9:00	Reception for Panelists of the Global Censorship Conference

Saturday March 31, 2012

9:00 – 10:00	Registration and Breakfast
10:00– 11:30	Panel One: Old and New Forms of Censorship Years ago, activists met in person to plan protests and quietly shared subversive texts. Now, events can be planned over social networking sites, and arguments for change are posted online. How have governments responded to these changes? How have activist practices and governments’ reactions changed the way we conceptualize censorship? Jack Balkin, Yale Law School Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School Navid Hassanpour, Yale Political Science Deptartment Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
11:45 – 1:15	Panel Two: Technical Architectures of Censorship There are a number of choke points across the Internet and a number of different censorship mechanisms that can be deployed at various points across the network. Censorship can be executed at the router level, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level, the Internet Content Provider (ICP) level, or the device level. Additionally, countries can employ a number of different technologies at each level. This panel will explore the many technical options for censorship and the strategic value of different choices. Laura DeNardis, Associate Professor of Communication at American University, and Affiliated Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School Nagla Rizk, American University in Cairo Hal Roberts, Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Technology Ashkan Soltani, Independent Researcher and Consultant on Privacy and Security
1:15 – 2:15	Lunch
2:15 – 3:45	Panel Three: Case Studies of Censorship In the wake of censorship both domestically and abroad, many questions emerged about how the censorship was executed, what effects it had, if and how activists were able to route around the it, and how, if it all, it was eventually stopped. This panel will explore recent instances of censorship in the United States, Egypt, Syria, Brazil, and India and the common themes and important differences that emerged. Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director and the Kahle/Austin Promise Fellow at Public Knowledge Lina Attalah, Journalist, Managing Editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm Anas Qtiesh, Blogger, Editor of Global Voices Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, Vice-Coordinator of the Center for Technology & Society (CTS) at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School Rishabh Dara, Researcher at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
4:00 – 5:30	Panel Four: Technical Methods of Circumventing Censorship New technology may provide governments with new tools to censor, but it also creates opportunities for speakers and “hactivists” everywhere. How can individuals evade identification online and access blocked content? Can activists circumvent attempts to shut down the internet during periods of political unrest? What new methods are being developed to preserve free speech online? Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project Peter Fein, Telecomix Alex Halderman, University of Michigan, Dept. of Computer Science Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Initiative Director, New America Foundation Wendy Seltzer, Senior Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School
6:00 – 9:00	Dinner for Speakers

Sunday, April 1, 2012

9:00 – 9:30	Breakfast
9:30 – 11:00	Panel Five: Legal Solutions to Censorship Given the way censorship technologies have slowly crept into acceptable use because of concerns like piracy, child pornography, or national security, there is much debate about the role and capacity of law in combatting these new, digital forms of government censorship, domestically and internationally. This panel will discuss if and how legal solutions to censorship can be deployed most effectively. Derek Bambauer, Brooklyn Law School Jim Dempsey, Vice President of Public Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology Molly Land, New York Law School Linda Lye, ACLU Northern California Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
11:15 – 12:45	Panel Six: New Controversies in Censorship Does new technology change the appropriate scope of free expression rights? Can policing intellectual property infringement burden free speech interests? Does surveillance ever have a censoring effect? This panel will wrestle with whether a variety of government activities constitutes inappropriate censorship or necessary actions to protect the public interest. Rebecca Bolin, Fellow at Information Society Project, Yale Law School Mark MacCarthy, Vice President for Public Policy, Software and Information Industry Association; Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology Program, Georgetown University Preston Padden, Senior Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center and an Adjunct Professor at the University Of Colorado's Law School and Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program David Post, Temple University, Beasley School of Law Christopher Soghoian, Graduate Fellow, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Indiana University
12:45	Bagged Lunch Available

[1].Global Censorship Conference to be Held March 30-April 1 at Yale Law School | Yale Law School, last accessed on March 30, 2012, http://www.law.yale.edu/news/15140.htm

Read the original posted in Yale Law School website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/global-censorship-conference

Open access to government data on the cards

praskrishna — 2012-03-26T07:31:48Z

The way has been cleared for public access to the data collected by Union government ministries and departments, with official approval being accorded to the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). T Ramachandran's article was published in the Hindu on March 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in it.

Following its recent approval by the Union Cabinet, the policy has been notified and is in the process of being gazetted, said R. Siva Kumar, CEO of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, and head of the Natural Resources Data Management System, Department of Science and Technology.

The use of open data as a tool for promoting governmental transparency and efficiency has been gaining ground in some parts of the world. An Open Government Partnership was launched last year by the United States and seven other governments. Forty-three other governments have joined the partnership, which has endorsed an Open Government Declaration, expressing a commitment to better “efforts to systematically collect and publish data on government spending and performance for essential public services and activities.” It acknowledges the ‘right' of citizens to seek information on governmental activities.

India has not joined the partnership, but is collaborating with the U.S. in developing an open source version of software for a data portal.

The NDSAP states that at least five ‘high value' data sets should be uploaded to a newly created portal, data.gov.in, in three months of the notification of the policy. Uploading of the remaining data sets should be completed within a year.

The Department of Science and Technology will co-ordinate the effort and create the portal through the National Informatics Centre. The Department of Information Technology will work out the implementation guidelines, including those related to technology and data standards.

Welcoming the approval for the NDSAP, Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO, said the removal of “a few good aspects” in an earlier draft of the policy — such as linkage with Sections 8 and 9 of the Right to Information Act that specify the kinds of information exempt from disclosure by the authorities — had weakened it “even further.” “None of the criticisms the CIS had sent in as part of the feedback requested on the draft have been addressed,” he said.

The NDSAP seeks “to provide an enabling provision and platform for providing proactive and open access to the data generated through public funds available with various departments/organisations of the government of India.”

However, the Ministries and Departments can draw up, within six months of the notification of the policy, a negative list of data-sets that will not be shared, subject to periodic review by an ‘oversight committee.'

The policy envisages three types of access to data: open, registered and restricted. Access to data in the open category will be “easy, timely, user-friendly and web-based without any process of registration/authorisation.” But data in the registered access category will be accessible “only through a prescribed process of registration/authorisation by respective departments/organisations” and available to “recognised institutions/organisations/public users, through defined procedures.” Data categorised as restricted will be made available only “through and under authorisation.”

The policy also provides for pricing, with the Ministries and Departments being asked to formulate their norms for data in the registered and restricted access categories within three months of the notification of the policy.

Read the original published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-to-govt-data

Locating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai

Larissa Hjorth and Genevieve Bell — 2015-10-24T13:41:47Z

From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice.

The transition from the analogue to the digital, from dial-up to broadband internet access was dramatic in how it changed our notions of space, catalysing new ways of thought and practice. In the case of locative media the uptake is more accelerated with it already engaging more than ten times those involved in the analogue-digital transition. The spread and usage of locative media is fast and promises to produce an even more dramatic transformation as the net becomes portable and pervasive.

As yet we know little about the impact locative media is having, and will have upon people’s livelihoods and identity, or on public policy around privacy, identity, security and cultural production. Discourse in the field has opened up questions of art, innovation and experimentation (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009; Hjorth 2010, 2011). However, there remains a dearth of nuanced research on locative media that provides in-depth, contextual accounts of its socio-cultural and political dimensions. Little work has been conducted into locative media as it migrates from art and into the ‘messy’ (Dourish & Bell 2011) area of the everyday.

Locating the Mobile seeks to address this knowledge gap by undertaking close studies of locative media in three locations—Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. We aim to capture and analyse the multiplicities of locative media practice emerging in both developed and developing contexts.

These three locations have relatively high smartphones (or copies like shanzhai) usage and are indicative of twenty-first century migration, diaspora and transnational practices. As one of the leading regions for mobile media innovation (Hjorth 2009; Bell 2005; Miller & Horst 2005), the various contested localities in the Asia-Pacific provide a rich and complex case study for mobile media as it moves into locative media. The three locations also show how the presence of digital and internet technologies is ‘flattening’ the globalised landscape and bringing about dramatic changes in the ways in which these cities shape and develop (Shah 2010). We consider how place informs locative media practices and how, in turn, these practices are shaping new narratives of place.

Locating the Mobile seeks to collect and analyse some of the emergent, tacit, innovative and ‘making-do’ practices informing the rise, and resistance to, locative media. Drawing on pertinent issues for the present and future of locative media, Locating the Mobile aims to:

Pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media.
Develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice.
Provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging.
Develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy.

By bringing together an expert team that represent a commitment to probing the social, cultural and community dimensions of technological innovation, Locating the Mobile will develop methodologies that capture the dynamic and mundane features of this emergent media practice. By doing so, Locating the Mobile will move beyond binary debates about surveillance and privacy or ‘parachute’ case studies of locative art towards nuanced and complex understandings of locative media and its implication for future cultural practices.

Significance and Innovation

The nascent field of locative media is impacting upon cultural practice, place-making and policy in ways we can only imagine. While much analysis has been conducted in mobile media (Goggin & Hjorth 2009) and experimental forms of locative media/art (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), the increased ubiquity of locative media through devices such as the smartphone will undoubtedly transform the way in which place and mobility is articulated. Locating the Mobile seeks to substantially expand and contextualise upon the burgeoning area of locative media through a variety of innovative and significant ways.

Locating the Mobile is original in its topic, method, outcomes and industry collaboration. Firstly, it is significant in that it brings depth and innovation to the emergent area of locative media, and its impact upon discourses around mobile media in ideas of mobility and place-making. In the face of parachute nature of many locative art research (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), Locating the Mobile is one of the first studies internationally to explore locative media over time in specific locations. Secondly, it deploys a variety of methods (such as surveys, focus groups, interviews and diaries for scenario of use, overlaid with data-mining) across different devices (mobile phone, iPad) and platforms (Foursquare, Jie Pang) to analyse the local and socio-cultural dimensions of use. With its team of experts in mobile media (Hjorth, Bell and Horst), communication for development (C4D) (Tacchi and Shah), gaming (Hjorth), social networking (Shah, Zhou and Hjorth) as well as a range of methodologies, this three-year study will investigate and contextualise locative media in Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. Despite its ubiquity in many locations in the Asia-Pacific region, much of the locative media literature remains Anglophonic or Eurocentric in focus. Thirdly, through multi-site analysis of locative media practices we will provide innovative ways in which to reflect upon narratives of place, belonging and transnationalism. Fourthly, by pioneering the first multi-site analysis of locative media over time, Locating the Mobile will develop the much missing socio-cultural understandings of locative media and how it impacts upon intimacy and privacy upon individual, group and policy levels. We will now detail these four key areas of significance and innovation. We will pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media. In these models we actively address locative media in the transnational context of contemporary feelings about belonging, possession, mobility, migration, and dislocation. As locative media becomes more pervasive, the power of its banality needs further understanding beyond ‘global’ generalisations (see www.pleaserobme.com). Like the rise of mobile media that was accompanied by the ‘subversive user’ (Hjorth 2009), we need to figure out the digital subject who is shaped—both historically and socio-culturally—through the pervasive spread of locative media. As Gabriella Coleman (2010) observes in her review of ethnographic approaches to digital media, there are three main overlapping categories: research on the relationship between digital media and the cultural politics of media; the vernacular cultures of digital media; the prosaics of digital media (and this attention to the commonplace, the unromantic, the quotidian). In the case of locative media, ethnographic approaches—emphasising the situated, vernacular and prosaic—are needed in order to understand the relocations of mobility across a variety notions: technological, electronic and psychological to name a few. Moreover, given the relatively high proportion of Indian and Chinese migrants in Melbourne—and migration in Bangalore and Shanghai—exploring locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place.

We will develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice through methods that deploy both qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (datamining) approaches such as ‘ethno-mining’ (Anderson et al. 2009). With the emergence of ethnomining approaches—that is, data-based mining combined with ethnography—new models for analysing media and mobility can be found. Locating the Mobile addresses this need for innovative methodologies that capture the dynamic nature of locative media by situating it within three legacies: social, cultural and historical mediatisation. Further, Locating the Mobile seeks to frame locative media as evolving through the cultural precepts informing mobile media and urbanity LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 8 of 123 discourses. Drawing upon case studies from a region renowned for divergent and innovative use of mobile media (Hjorth 2009) and gaming (Hjorth & Chan 2009)—the Asia-Pacific—Locating the Mobile seeks to understand the lived and local dimensions of locative media and how it can inform emergent and older forms of place-making, belonging and migration. By focusing upon this nascent but burgeoning area in global mobile media practice—locative media—Locating the Mobile not only places Australia as a forerunner in innovative, original, and challenging methodologies for new media, but also, by bringing together key industry partners, Intel, CIS and Fudan University,

Locating the Mobile seeks to contextualise the research in terms of industry and community outcomes. In this sense, Locating the Mobile clearly addresses the National Priority 3, Frontier Technologies (see below for more details).

We will provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging through our three case study locations—Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai. Locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place. Although place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2003; Bell 2005; Hjorth 2003), locative media both amplify, redirect and redefine practices around place, community and a sense of belonging—phenomenon that impacts upon cultural policy and media regulation (Goggin 2011). Along with the digital interfaces that overlay our physical experiences as we enter into a state of augmented reality (AR), the presence of these cartographic, geospatial locative platforms also changes the ways in which the cities and how we navigate with them (Shah 2010). With the rise of locative media like Google maps we are seeing new ways to frame and narrate a sense of place through various technological lenses overlaying the social with the informational. This phenomenon is especially the case with smartphones and their plethora of applications (apps) drawing heavily upon locative media—even most photo apps come with locative media. With locative media we see the arrival of increased accessibility to augmented
reality (AR). Instead of replacing the analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up ‘hybrid realities’ (a term used by de Souza e Silva to describe AR mobile games) that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to unravel the dynamics. We are no longer looking at just the technology mediated hypervisual digitality but also exploring what these locative media augment and simulate in everyday practices.

We will develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy and how we might comprehend locative media’s implications on individual and cultural practices, and regulation. In the second generation of locative media that sees it move increasingly into the mainstream, questions about security, privacy and identity—and how these are shaped by the local—come into focus (Dourish & Anderson 2006). For Dourish and Anderson (2006) locative media can been viewed as a form of ‘Collective Information Practice’ that have social and cultural implications upon how privacy and security are conceptualised. For others such as Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) locative media like Google maps and street views are about a corporate surveillance. As a burgeoning field of media practice intersecting daily life, there is a need for in-depth situated accounts into locative media and their cultural-economic dimensions to understand the impact they will have on intimacy, privacy, identity and place-making. In Locating the Mobile, by developing and implementing new hybrid models for analysing locative media (Anderson et al. 2009), we consider the role locative media plays in how place shapes, and is shaped by, these practices and the future implications around cultural policy. The comparative dimension brings a rich data-set to bear on our understanding of locative media and the questions it may pose in the future. The outputs are significant not only for Australian mobile communication, gaming and internet studies—by providing a regional context for evaluating the socio-technologies—but also demonstrates internationally Australia’s lead in ground-breaking research into locative media (Priority 3, ‘frontier technologies’) in arguably the most significant sites for global ICTs production and consumption, the Asia-Pacific.

National Research Priorities: With the rise of smartphones becoming ubiquitous, location-based services have burgeoned. And yet, little is known about this area and its impact upon individuals, LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 9 of 123 organisations and governments. Given this phenomenon, a comprehensive understanding of the impact upon locative media upon notions of privacy, identity and place-making is needed. In the twenty-first century, locative media will become an increasingly important part of everyday life—for individuals, communities, businesses and government agencies. Thus it is imperative that we have a robust comparative understanding of locative media in Australia and across the region. By conceptualising this impact within the context of the region, Locating the Mobile ensures Australia is at the frontier of new technologies and their impact upon future technological practices and policies. Such an understanding is fundamental to Australia’s technology and cultural sectors, thus contributing to National Research Priority 3 through one of the strongest currencies in twenty-first century global market, mobile media, as well as contributing to the broader long-term project of locating Australia in the region. By drawing on qualitative, cross-cultural longitudinal research into locative media, Locating the Mobile will document, analysis and provide future recommendations for how locative media is impacting upon people’s experience of place and identity. A study like this is important as it is innovative for not only pioneering methodologies to evaluate this media phenomenon but also to understand some of its long-term implications on how mobile media intervenes and even reconfigures experiences and perceptions of place which, in turn, impact upon cultural policy.

Collaborators: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne), Genevieve Bell (Intel, Shanghai)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile

The Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia

nishant — 2015-10-05T14:53:30Z

The digital turn in education comes across a wide range of initiatives and processes. The Wikipedia which is the largest user generated content website stands as a figurehead of such a digital turn, writes Nishant Shah.

Context

The digital turn in education has been described across a wide range of initiatives and processes. These include the introduction of digital tools and gadgets as a part of the learning environment, building digital archives and repositories of learning and curriculum building, facilitating remote access to education through information and communications technologies infrastructure, improving quality of access to education and learning resources, building diverse and customised syllabi to accommodate for alternative and contesting perspectives, building peer knowledge communities of information and knowledge production, and including non-canonical material and experiences into formal institutions of education. Different locations, contexts, geo-political circumstances, socio-economic factors, and cultural differences influence the spread, rise and integration of digital technologies in mainstream education. Much academic, policy and implementation attention has been given to these processes and several models of new learning environments and infrastructure have been postulated over the last two decades. The democratising promise of internet technologies has been largely if not exclusively about education, learning, literacy and production of knowledge from different parts of the world.

Wikipedia, one of the first and possibly the largest user generated content websites, that aims to put together the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’ in an open encyclopaedia, stands as the figurehead of such a digital turn. It questions and subverts the traditional analogue forms of knowledge production and relationships. The much discussed experiment conducted by Nature (Giles, 2005 and Orlowski, 2006) that established Wikipedia as an almost equal (if not more) reliable source of information to the fountainhead of print-based knowledge Encyclopaedia Britannica, has become the touchstone by which digital collaborative knowledge structures seek their validity within mainstream classroom pedagogy and learning. Wikipedia itself has emerged as an object of deep scrutiny and contestation, with warring factions going strong about its strengths and weaknesses. The supporters look at how this collaborative peer-to-peer structure has changed knowledge relationships that defined consumers, producers and mediators of knowledge. They see in the rise of Wikipedia, and other such wiki-based structures and user generated content sites that remix, reuse and share knowledge within the digital realm, the potentials and possibilities of changing the futures of knowledge ecologies and economies. The detractors of Wikipedia make a strong case for specialised and expert curatorial practices of knowledge, without which the information explosion of the digital world would collapse all distinctions between speculative writing and rigorous accountable research.

Concerns

In the seemingly unbridgeable differences of these two contesting positions, there is however, a set of common presumptions which remained unquestioned and unchallenged. The example of Wikipedia accordingly serves to throw in sharp relief these more general questions regarding digitally produced knowledge and digitally enabled learning practices.

Design of Trust

The first among them is the concern around Authority and Authorship (Liang, 2010). Increasingly, as Wikipedia becomes a de facto global reference site available in different languages, there is a growing dependence on the authority of information available on Wikipedia. Given that the number of users of Wikipedia is exponentially higher than the number of editors on Wikipedia, there are many users who never confront the structures of participation, processes of editing, and questioning the source of information (Harouni, 2009, Broughton, 2002) found on the site. This is not a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. Given the explosion of user generated sites which often gloss over the problems of authority and authorship, misdirected or misguided information, there is a need for digital criticality which can help people sift through different kinds of information and develop the capacity for effective critical judgment regarding both truth or falsity and rhetorical persuasiveness or manipulation. Especially within the context of scholarly and academic research and learning, classroom teaching and pedagogy, there is a need to define new parameters by which information introduced in the classroom or learning environment needs to stand deeper scrutiny regarding reliability (over authority).

Flattened Politics

The second concern has to do with the depoliticized perception of participation, collaboration and knowledge production on Wikipedia (Graham, 2010). Not only are geographical counters, experiential knowledges and non-standard forms of citation (Prabhala, 2010) ignored on Wikipedia, but they are also rendered redundant under the guise of objectivity. The essentially viral nature of information online and conditions of easy replicability that allow for copy and paste cultures often means that the information gets de-contextualised and de-politicized from its original intentions and circuits of production/distribution.

In many ways, Wikipedia’s adherence to an encyclopaedic model, promotes the idea that there is universal, objective knowledge which can be produced and understood without engaging with the politics of context, language, translation, evidence, etc. This adoption of an older model of aggregating knowledge becomes problematic in the light of new perspectives and theories of reading and writing, which establish knowledge as a contested terrain rather than the benign site that can be mediated through protocols, bots and procedures (Miller, 2007 and Rosenzweig, 2006). In classrooms, students and teachers are both faced with problems when they encounter the simultaneously authoritative and collaborative, definite and tentative nature of information on Wikipedia. The flattened structure of information further complicates our engagement with the larger contexts it refers to and often hinders the learner’s ability to go beyond the self contained universe of Wikipedia, unable to engage with that which has been omitted or left-out and only concentrating on that what has been written and represented.

Technology as Tool

The third concern marks a larger anxiety with the Web 2.0 technologies and their integration with formal structures of education and learning. It has to do with new configurations of power, recalibrated hierarchies of learning and teaching, and distributed communities of learning which might not often be cohesive and concurrent. With the unqualified emphasis on digital gadgets – OLPC, Smart Boards, iPads – and ubiquitous connectivity, there is often a danger to reducing these structures to sheer functionality. There have been experiments where pedagogues have merely introduced user generated sites as reference material and ways of accessing information without actually looking at how they posit questions to existing education systems. The larger trend of distrusting non-academic spaces continues.

A lecture on the problems of Wikipedia is immediately followed by a ban on or “policing” of the use of Wikipedia as a reliable resource, trying to create a false and divisive distinction between offline and online learning tools (Davidson, 2007). With the increased focus on ‘Digital Natives’ within education policy and everyday classroom pedagogy, there is a call for changing the existing classroom and replacing it with a digital classroom – a classroom that challenges the teacher-student relationships, the authority of the prescribed curricula, and the form of learning and teaching within college and university structures. The Digital Classroom is often mistaken to be a virtualisation of the contemporary classroom, where virtual presences and cloud-based resources of learning structure the syllabi and the methods of learning. However, the larger anxieties are about rendering the physical classroom digital by establishing new relationships and structures at the levels of curricula design, teaching, learning and evaluation. The need is to look beyond the social media as a tool, and start unpacking the transparency of the digital interface and the perceived non-hierarchical nature of information filtering (Geiger, 2010) on Wikipedia and other such user generated content portals.

Quality of Access

The fourth concern draws from digital internet rhetoric of Do It Yourself. There is a heavy promotion of howthe only thing that stops a student (or anybody who is a learner) from being an intelligent and engaged student is lack of resources. This rhetoric finds bolstering in other political movements like FLOSS and A2K (Willinsky, 2006). There is a presumption that the teacher is merely a proxy for the paucity of resources and that once the students have unlimited access to the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’, they will be able to Learn everything on their own. The DIY University models, the proposition of phasing out teachers and investing in digital infrastructure instead, the idea that the digital native student has instinctive abilities to navigate through knowledge systems (like a fish does to water), all obfuscate not only the traditional learning processes but also reduce all learning to Access.

There is no debate about the quality of access. Even when factual errors are spotted, it is celebrated as an opportunity to improve so that information on Wikipedia is by definition flawed and always potentially in the process of being improved. There is little theorisation of both the role of a teacher in a classroom and the relationship with information access and learning. The presumption that the only gating factor to better education is lack of resources glosses over questions of social and economic disadvantage, political contexts, age, language, race, gender, sexuality, social support, etc., that come into play when designing inclusive education systems. Instead, there is a promotion of fact-based skill-oriented learning that fits the larger neo-liberal agenda of producing workforces who necessarily should not have to be critical in their everyday labours (Achterman, 2005). Universities and colleges are finding increasing pressure to produce students who work within such flat knowledge horizons towards market expansion and promotion of information capitalism rather than a critical learner who is able to deploy lessons learned from education in order to question and change the reality of the conditions within which s/he lives.

Rationale

Given these dramatic measures and accelerated changes happening in academia and within the university systems across the worlds, it is necessary to dwell on what a digital college classroom and learning environment looks like in the time of Wikipedia. A synthesis of perspectives from different stakeholders in varied disciplines, engaging with knowledge production, consumption, distribution and access is necessary to understand what the futures and contours of the university system and classroom pedagogy are. The ambition is to look at Wikipedia as a symptom of our times rather than a site of analyses.

Call for Proposals

This is a call for proposals towards a special Reader, from people who are interested in producing historical and contemporary accounts of relationships between education, technology, learning, and pedagogy in order to map existing crises and questions of our present times. We take the classroom as the unit where different processes and flows of the education system meet. In this context, we invite researchers, academic practitioners, students, artists, new media theorists, education policy actors and historians of knowledge to look at the Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia as an opportunity to question global trends in education and ways by which Wikipedia (and other such structures) can be fruitfully integrated in formal education towards better learning. Proposals can be for producing theoretical accounts, critical analyses, case-studies from one’s practice, review of information and knowledge, narratives of art and activist interventions, regional and local snap-shots, and other innovative forms by which the diverse and complex questions can be elaborated.

Key Questions

Proposals can be inspired by but not limited to some of the questions listed below that we identify as beginning points for engaging with the area:

What does a digital classroom look like? If we had to think beyond just integration of digital tools into the classroom, what are the new models and structures of classrooms (physical, pedagogical, or otherwise) that we are looking at?
What are the new relationships that we are mapping in the time of Wikipedia – student-teacher, teacher-curriculum, student-classroom, student-student, technology-education, pedagogy-learning? How do we account for the shifts and map the transitions?
How do we understand the changing nature and function of the university and education with the rise of the internet? What are the policy and practice visions of the University of the Future?
What does the integration of Wikipedia and similar structures in everyday classroom practice lead to? What does it change and for whom?
What is the role of the teacher in the age of ubiquitous information access? How do we restructure our ideas of pedagogy, learning and evaluation?
What are the historical tensions between technology and education that are being replayed with the rise of the digital?
What does the rise of Wikipedia mean for our traditional understandings of data repositories? What are the politics and implications of Wikimedia’s other projects on Alternative Citation, Wikipictures, GLAM, etc. on the larger knowledge ecology and industry?

References:

Achterman, D. (2005). “Surviving Wikipedia: Improving student search habits through information literacy and teacher collaboration”, Knowledge Quest, 33(5), 38−40.
Davidson, C. (2007). “We can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies”, Education Digest, 73(1), 15−18.
Geiger, S. (2011). “The Lives of Bots”, Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.
Giles, J. (2005). “Internet encyclopedias go head to head”, Nature, 438(7070), 900−901.
Graham, M. (2011). “Wiki Space: Palimpsests and the Politics of Exclusion”, Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.
Harouni, H. (2009). “High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies with and Despite Wikipedia”, Harvard Educational Review, 79 (3), 473-494.
Liang, L. (2011). “A brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.
Miller, N. (2007). “Wikipedia revisited” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 64(2), 147−150.
Orlowski, A. (2006, March 26). Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study, The Register. Retrieved December 17, 2011, from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/
Prabhala, A. (2011). People Are Knowledge. Documentary retrieved from December 17, 2011 from http://vimeo.com/26469276.
Rosenzweig, R. (2006). “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past” Journal of American History, 93(1), 117–146.
Willinsky, J. (2006). The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press :Massachusetts.
Collaborators: Dr. David Theo Goldberg, University of California Humanities Research Institute and Claudia Sullivan, Digital Media and Learning Initiative, HASTAC.
Photo source: Flickr (Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution and share alike distribution).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia

Why your Facebook Stalker is Not the Real Problem

nishant — 2012-03-21T05:02:16Z

We live in networked conditions. This is a statement that can now be taken at face-value, and immediately explains our highly connected, inter-meshed environments finds Nishant Shah in this article published in FirstPost on March 20, 2012.

Especially within the digital world, the World Wide Web has become synonymous with social networking systems, where increasingly all our access, communication and interaction is located within a series of interconnected networks.

From the imagination of the web as a complex network, we have evolved to looking at the web as facilitating networks where different relationships, transactions and connections can be mapped and managed. This is why we often have romantic imaginations of networks as free, open, collaborative, shared spaces of interaction and expression.

However, we have reached a stage where this idea of a network as a liberatory space is under threat. Even as I write this, Internet Service Providers are now planning to set up sophisticated, automated systems that will do a deep-spy on your data transfer to see if you are sharing files (sometimes also called piracy) using the Internet.

These systems will now keep track of all your digital transactions and will monitor what you consume, who you talk to and determine whether you are a good ethical subject who is only using the Internet in ways that the powers to be want you to.

For me, this particular networked condition of being constantly monitored and watched is scary. And it surprises me that this invasive process is less in public attention than Google’s recently changed privacy policies or the TOS-in-progress nature of privacy on Facebook.

This is because the ubiquitous presences of networks in our lives have made them transparent to us – we do not think of the networks themselves as entities but as spaces where interactions with other objects is possible. Hence, if I ask you, right now, to name the top 5 entities that you interact with the most on Facebook, I am sure you will be able to name them. More probably than not, these top 5 entities with people that you have formed strong Facebook Friendships with.

In fact there are platforms designed to let you know who you are talking with most on your networks. Network influence measurement indices by services like Klout are able to tell you not only who you talk to but also what are your key areas of influence. This is a way by which the network becomes invisible to us. It hides the fact that the thing that talks to you the most on Facebook is Facebook itself.

The marketing of Facebook might tell you that you are talking to other human beings, but reality is that the network is more than the sum total of all human beings on the system. Just look at the amount of information Facebook produces on your behalf and to you. Notifications for adding friends, for liking people, for people writing to you, for people commenting on your walls and posts, form more than 50% of the information traffic on Facebook or social networking systems.

This information is produces and shared by scripts, coded bots, algorithmic applications, and non-human entities that not only support and sustain the network but are also significant members of the networks.

This is the actual networked condition – where the processes and entities that make the networks possible, produce an illusion of seamless communication and interaction, while performing and extraordinary amount of information and for you.

This blindness to our own ‘networkedness’ has crucial ramifications for our online activities because it makes us oblivious to questions of privacy, control, safety and trust. We have privacy settings to protect us from human entities on Facebook. There is very little concern about the non-human entities who store, distribute and use the data that we produce. If we don’t even know what these watchers are, how do we protect ourselves from being watched? What happens when between you and your ‘friend’, is a series of silent interceptors who are recording and using your data without your knowledge?

Being in a network is like being in a glass-house. We cannot see the walls and hence, we presume that we need our privacy from the other inhabitants of the same house. However, in that, we forget that the walls are watching, and that there are invisible watchers beyond the walls, who are in control.

It is time to make our networks visible again. It is time to realise that what we really need to be afraid of, on social networking systems, is the social network itself, and not the mythical stranger who wants to stalk us or that unwanted friend you want to exclude from your information sharing.

Privacy and safety are not merely compromised at the interface, where information might leak and travel into zones outside of your knowledge and control. The real questions of being safe are actually in the protocols and designs of the network itself.

We need to start looking at larger invasive policies exercises by the different invisible actors like the ISP, ICT ministries, corporate policies, design choices and architecture of interception that sustain the networks we so gladly embrace.

Nishant Shah is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society and recently edited a 4 volume book on youth, technology and change, titled ‘Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?’

Read this in FirstPost

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/facebook-stalker-is-not-real-problem

Expert Meeting on Freedom of Expression and Intellectual Property Rights

praskrishna — 2012-03-16T07:41:39Z

This report provides an overview of the discussion from the Expert Meeting on Freedom of Expression and Intellectual Property Rights, organized by ARTICLE 19 in London on November 18, 2011.

At the meeting, nineteen international scholars, experts and human rights activists met to explore the antagonistic relationship between Intellectual Property (IP) and the rights to freedom of expression and information (FoE). This conversation is timely if not overdue, as governments are increasingly using the pretext of IP protection to place unjustified restrictions on the exercise of FoE, particularly on the Internet. ARTICLE 19 believes that increasing the profile of the human rights perspective in debates on IP law and policy is essential to protecting FoE, particularly in the digital environment. The objective of the meeting was therefore to develop an appropriate rights framework for evaluating IP law and enforcement mechanisms, to advance a policy paper on the issue and eventually to establish a set of key principles on IP and FoE.

This report outlines:

A summary of the discussions that took place during the meeting; and
Outstanding issues and those requiring follow-up discussion in order to conceptualise and complete a position paper on the subject.

List of Participants

Andrew Puddephatt: Director, Global Partners & Associates
Brett Soloman: Executive Director, ACCESS.
Dinah PoKempner: General Counsel, Human Rights Watch.
Jérémie Zimmermann: Co-founder and spokesperson, LaQuadrature du Net: Internet & Libertés
Jeremy Malcolm: Project Coordinator for IP and Communications; Consumer International.
Jim Killock: Executive Director, Open Rights Group
Michael Camilleri: Human Rights Specialist, Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at OAS.
Michael Geist: Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law, Univesity of Ottowa.
Pranesh Prakash: Programme Manager, Center for Internet and Society
Raegan MacDonald: Policy Analyst, ACCESS (Brussels)
Saskia Walzel: Senior Policy Advocate, Consumer Focus
Yaman Akdeniz: Associate Professor in Law; Human Rights Law Research Center, Faculty of Law, Istanbul Bilgi University.
Walter van Holst: IT legal consultant, Mitopics
Agnes Callamard: Executive Director, ARTICLE 19
Barbora Bukovska: Senior Direct for Law and Policy, ARTICLE 19
David Banisar: Senior Legal Counsel, ARTICLE 19
Gabrielle Guillemin: Legal Officer, ARTICLE 19
Andrew Smith: Lawyer, ARTICLE 19
Michael Polak: Intern, ARTICLE 19

Welcome, Introductions, Purpose

Agnès Callamard opened the meeting with a welcome and introduction, giving a brief overview of ARTICLE 19’s extensive experience over twenty years bringing together coalitions to increase the profile of various advocacy issues and develop key policy documents, including the Camden Principles on FoE and equality, and the Johannesburg Principles on FoE and national security.

In the last three years, the Internet has increasingly come to the forefront of ARTICLE 19’s work. During this time it has become clear that the agenda for protecting IP negatively impacts FoE, and that there is a notable absence of traditional human rights groups engaged with the IP agenda or campaigning on its implications for human rights. ARTICLE 19 believes that there is a clear need for this gap to be filled, for us to enter this dialogue and challenge current preconceptions with an alternative human rights narrative that counters that promoted by IP industries.

The purpose of this meeting, therefore, is to develop a strategy for promoting the FoE perspective in debates on IP. To do this, it is important to first conceptualise the relationship between FoE and IP within a rights framework: to identify how or if these interests should be balanced and what the areas of conflict and conciliation are. This discussion should clarify the best way to proceed, with a view to arrive at a policy paper and eventually a set of principles on how to best protect FoE in the IP context.

Session 1: Brief comments by participants on issues of concern for freedom of expression campaigners in relation to IPR

The objective of the first session was for all participants to identify the most significant issues in current debates on freedom of expression and IP, and the extent to which some issues may have been overlooked, underestimated, or over-emphasised. These issues, ideas and perspectives would then guide discussions during the remainder of the meeting and at future meetings.

All participants agreed that applying a human rights framework to this debate is an important and worthwhile endeavour. The following issues were identified during the discussions:

Conceptual starting point

Participants agreed that the status quo should not be the “starting point” for discussions, and that we should avoid being trapped in the narrative that has been developed and imposed by IP rights holders. This requires questioning accepted language and norms, pushing the boundaries of the debate and thinking outside the box. The proliferation of terms such as “piracy”, “theft” and other criminal law language to describe non-commercial copyright infringement demonstrates the extent to which corporate interest groups have controlled the agenda. We should reject these terms and instead adopt positive language that emphasises the cultural and economic value of information sharing, and frame IP as a potential obstacle to these values. This dialogue should recognise that the relationship between people and information has changed in the digital age, and that a new generation of people express themselves through sharing media online and creating new works such as video mash-ups.

A human right to IP?
Several participants questioned whether we should accept interests in IP as “human rights”, particularly as the concept is one born from censorship. Rejecting IP as a human right would require challenging accepted language such as “intellectual property rights” and “rights holder”. If we speak of IP interests or claims, rather than human rights, then it is also inaccurate to speak of their interaction with other rights as a “conflict between rights” that requires “balancing”. Instead, certain IP claims, and the detection or enforcement mechanisms that support them, should be framed as restrictions on the right to freedom of expression.

Some participants expressed doubts over the value of advocating that IP is not a human right when the idea is already embedded and various regional courts have already recognised it as such. Such a campaign would be difficult and achieve little, particularly as it may require changing established agreements such as Berne and TRIPS that would take decades to reform. Staying within the existing legal framework may be the only pragmatic way to achieve change in the short and medium-term. There was agreement that understanding how different treaties and human rights instruments or bodies understand IP is important before proceeding.

In the alternative, it was suggested that IP could be viewed as a “human right” to the extent that it complements other human rights, such as FoE. Copyright is often justified on terms that it is essential for incentivising creativity and that it is an “engine” of free speech – this argument needs further exploration, as it shows that the two rights may sometimes be complementary. ARTICLE 19 is familiar with a strategy focussed on complementarity, as the Camden Principles promoted a similar approach to advocate that the right to equality and right to FoE were mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. Similarly, participants spoke about a “social value” approach to viewing IP as a human right, i.e. the greater the social value behind the IP protection, the more weight it would have in a rights “balancing” exercise.

Other suggestions on reframing or reversing IP preconceptions included recommending a system where the “public domain” is the norm and any monopoly interest the exception. Exceptions would have to be argued on a case-by-case basis and would be granted only when it would be in the public interest to do so.

A consensus seemed to develop that rejecting the idea of IP as a right would not be a helpful strategy. However, between the various alternative suggestions the only agreement seemed to be that the issue requires more exploration so that the nature of IP as a right can be better understood. It is anticipated that reaching a definite conclusion on this issue will inevitably not satisfy everyone, but would be necessary to proceed with an advocacy campaign.

The Right to Culture
As well as the right to property and the right to freedom of expression, there is also the right to culture in Article 27 of the UDHR and Article 15 of the ICESCR. Both instruments reflect the tension between a right to access culture and the competing right of individuals to protect the material interests in their intellectual property. Participants recommended further exploration of the economic, social and cultural rights perspective on IP issues and integrating this into a campaign.

Pulling apart multiple IP issues
Participants identified a number of ways in which IP engages freedom of expression, and that it is therefore important that a FoE analysis dealt with these issues separately. One focus should be on the IP protections themselves – these give individuals monopolies over information and thereby restrict others’ FoE. Within this, the breadth of exceptions regimes is important, as these vary significantly between countries, in particular the duration of copyright protection and how ‘fair use’ or ‘fair dealing’ type exceptions are defined. The use of digital rights management systems (DRMS) as preventative measures also relate to this area. A second focus, and a current “hot topic” in IP circles, is the enforcement agenda. This includes the criminalisation of non-commercial IP infringement, the privatisation of policing IP infringement and its impact on net neutrality, and criminal and civil law protections for DRMS.

The difference between types of IP was also discussed. There are different rationales behind copyright, trademarks, and patents. Our approach should be as nuanced and specific as possible – when we are criticising copyright we should only refer to copyright and not IP generally. Unpacking the issues in relation to the different types of IP will be important for developing a coherent policy.

The way that international trade agreements have consistently augmented IP rights was also highlighted. In relation to electronic data, the copyright holder now has so much control over the use of the information, particularly through digital rights management systems protected by the criminal law, that purchasing such products is increasingly more like renting than owning. This augmentation should be tracked and highlighted in an advocacy campaign.

Advocacy Strategy
It was also noted that developing a human rights perspective on IP is not only an intellectual pursuit but needs to be viewed in terms of a citizen movement capable of achieving outcomes. Participants identified several further issues that should be considered when developing an advocacy strategy.

One consideration would be how we develop campaigning alliances. Some industries are potential allies, in particular Internet intermediaries that are increasingly under pressure to be the private police of copyright holders. Some artists themselves are also sympathetic to FoE arguments. More obviously, consumers and information users should be mobilised by a campaign. It is important to develop distinct strategies for targeting identified groups that reflects our understanding of their diverse interests; this would allow us to build commonalities between actors who may normally be regarded as having divergent objectives, and mobilise each to push for change in a direction that supports our ultimate goal.

Central to a campaign strategy is also the idea of having a clear message as to what the problem is and how it impacts people on a day to day basis. The utility of graphics illustrating the inequitable geographic distribution of IP interests was recommended as a useful tool to demonstrate the scale of this global problem. Ways of countering campaigns conducted by IP holders over the last two decades were also discussed, in particular how to push back against the idea of copyright infringement as “theft”, as has been promoted through slogans such as “you wouldn’t steal a handbag.” Illustrative analogies were discussed, including viewing IP infringement as mere trespass rather than theft and as “copying” rather than depriving a person of property. However, it was concluded that these analogies were helpful for developing our understanding of the issues, but would not be as effective as campaign tools. An effective campaign would have to distinguish between background issues and our actual advocacy points, which would be focussed on a clear set of key fundamental principles.

Participants also identified the importance of engaging governments and the media on the inconsistency of their policies and coverage of FoE and IP. The US, in particular, is loudly proclaiming its commitments to FoE on-line whilst simultaneously promoting aggressive enforcements mechanisms for IP that directly undermine FoE rights.

The campaign against ACTA in the European Parliament (EP) was also recommended as a platform from which to launch further dialogue on FoE and IP. Since the meeting, ARTICLE 19 has released a statement on ACTA that we have shared with all participants, and plans to circulate this statement to various EP committees and MEPs in the coming weeks.[1]

Opportunities for strategic litigation were also identified. In particular, there are a number of Article 10 ECHR cases pending before the European Court of Human Rights on the blocking of websites, many being from Turkey.

Session 2: The tension between freedom of expression and IPR

The second session began with a presentation by Gabrielle of the background paper on intellectual property and freedom of expression. Participants gave feedback on issues raised in the paper and suggested ways of developing it into a policy paper to compliment an advocacy campaign.

Gabrielle’s opening comments acknowledged that the background paper is very much focussed on FoE in the digital age, and is centred more on copyright rather than trademarks and patents. Gabrielle outlined the way in which conflicts between tangible property rights and freedom of expression have been dealt with by the ECHR. She also identified key challenges to reframing understandings of IP, in particular in relation to the notion that the public domain and information sharing should be the norm while information monopolies should be the exception. Gabrielle also highlighted the timeliness of this discussion as significant changes to the enforcement agenda are taking place; including the criminalisation of copyright infringement and DRMS circumvention.

Participants agreed that the policy paper was an excellent starting point for discussions on FoE and IP, and recommended a number of areas for further elaboration in future drafts:

The objective tone of the paper, placing ARTICLE 19 as an impartial arbiter, is a productive starting point.
The legal framework for IP/FoE should be elaborated to acknowledge the right to culture as contained in Article 27 of the UDHR and Article 15 of the IESCR. The ways that states periodically report their IESCR compliance could be explored.
Intermediaries should be referred to in broader terms than just as ISPs. “Information society service providers” is an umbrella phrase that includes search engines, advertisers, payment services.
The Scarlett decision by the ECJ should be incorporated once it is released.[2]
The concept of “filtering” is essentially a type of “blocking”, both may be referred to as censorship to clarify their immediate impact on FoE.
Some participants felt that explaining why the FoE implications are different for civil and criminal law would be helpful.
Participants felt that the section on the implications of the ACTA regime could be built upon.[3]
In developing the section on FoE rights, the Latin American view of FoE as a collective right may also be worth emphasising. It may also be worth comparing the potential balance between IP and FoE to other balancing exercises related to privacy or reputational rights.
The differences between copyright, trademarks and patents should be explained.
A section outlining the philosophical foundations of these protections, in particular the difference between the US (incentivise creation) and European (natural rights) approach to IP might also be helpful.
It should be stressed that the failure of IP law to adapt to new technologies is the problem, not new technologies themselves. This failure undermines the justifications for protecting IP rights.
Greater emphasis should be placed on the way in which the current legal framework is based on an ideal of an 18th century author, and does not acknowledge the impact of IP on scientific research and collaboration, indigenous knowledge, peer-to-peer sharing, the creative power of new technology etc.
Positive examples of IP infringement would be useful for illustrating why IP protection shouldn’t be safeguarded at all costs. In particular, efforts to make works more accessible to minority language speakers (crowd-sourcing methods in particular) and the impact that IP law has on blind people’s access to information.
Similarly, examples of censorship that make the impact of IP protections of FoE clearer to policy makers would be helpful in debunking the myth that the interests of the IP industry giants are synonymous with those of the individual creators.
It would also be helpful to illustrate that IP protection is also a geographic concentration of wealth issues as much as a moral issue.[4]
The role of de minimis exception regimes in protecting FoE should also be explored in greater depth.
Several sources were also recommended, including the Association littéraire et artistique internationale (ALAI)[5], the International Federation of Libraries Association (Stuart Hamilton identified as a contact)[6] and the OSCE study on Internet Freedom.[7]

Session 3: Key questions, issues and challenges

Dave chaired a third session to elaborate upon the key issues discussed prior to lunch, with a view to reaching some level of consensus on the appropriate scope of restrictions on freedom of expression in defence of IPR.

Gabrielle offered comments on the balance that could be applied between the right to property (Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the ECHR) and the right to freedom of expression (Article 10 of the ECHR). However, as the European Court of Human Rights has not ruled on the balance that ought to be struck between these two rights in the context of intellectual property, it is difficult to speculate on how it would be litigated.

Participants agreed that the ‘public interest’ is central to assessing when property rights can be restricted to promote other rights, including FoE. The need to stress the importance of the Internet as a public forum was also identified.

The participants also discussed what limitations are appropriate to place on IP rights. Various ideas were suggested, but it was concluded that any recommended framework on the substance of IP rights would have to be compliant with the Berne Convention. This means that in terms of copyright duration, the minimum that could be recommended is 50 years. It was also stated that any system that recommends a default public domain with a system of registration for copyright “exceptions” would not be compliant with Berne. The augmentation of IP rights through these international agreements was again referenced, as there appears to have been a pattern of the US and EU exporting the worst aspects of their IP regimes abroad through trade arrangements without elaborating on how exceptions to IP rights should be developed. It was also noted that copyright holders will continue to support this process, as their business model depends upon having as much control over the use of information as possible.

Again participants identified the need to distinguish between the limitations that are imposed on FoE by the IP rights themselves, those limitations imposed by preventative technological measures and those imposed by enforcement mechanisms.

The importance of distinguishing the different actors involved was also emphasised, i.e. whether we are discussing competing rights between private creators (e.g. original creator vs. derivative creator) or the direct relationship between the state and individuals (e.g. enforcement of criminal provisions against an individual infringing IP). It is important that our analysis does not conflate private actors with state actors, and that it is clear what positive and negative obligations are on these parties and the rationale for their application.

It was suggested that an approach that balances competing human rights is appropriate where the interests of two creators are in conflict, but perhaps not when the state intervenes to prevent or punish IP infringements. Where the state acts to restrict an individual’s access to the Internet, it is not a balance issue but an unnecessary and disproportionate interference with the right to freedom of expression.

Participants stressed the economic and social significance of blanket (and even many specific) restrictions on Internet access. Blanket prohibitions on access to the Internet was compared to solitary confinement, and participants agreed that sanctions such as these are never necessary or proportionate responses to IP infringement. An analogy was made to a statement recently issued by ARTICLE 19 on services to counterfeit mobile telephones being shut down in Kenya.[8] Participants also indicated that these blanket measures are increasingly rare, but that states still violate the principles of necessity and proportionality through limitations that they impose.

Further FoE concerns were raised in relation to the enforcement of IP rights in the digital environment. In order to monitor the Internet for IP infringement, it is necessary to monitor the content of all Internet communications. This has implications for FoE rights and privacy rights, and has a potential chilling effect on all on-line expression.

There was also some discussion on defining what our working definition of FoE should be in this context, particularly in relation to use of new technologies and DRMS. Does FoE necessarily include the right to scan a document, to use translation technology on it, to copy and paste, to save in various formats etc?

Participants also discussed that the ordinary de minimis exceptions cannot simply be transplanted and applied as ‘exceptions’ or defences to DRMS circumvention offences. DRMS limit the use of works severely, and unless you have the technical knowledge to circumvent these devices, it is not possible to take advantage of exceptions or defences.

There were also discussions on access to justice issues, due to the prohibitively expensive cost of contesting litigation against large corporations.

Several participants mentioned that discussions on these issues have a tendency to become too narrow in their focus. Examples given were that the focus drifts to copyright rather than trademarks and patents, that peer2peer sharing gets more attention than other technology uses, and that artistic expression is talked about but not technical or scientific forms of expression. At the same time, some participants expressed an aversion to a “kitchen sink” approach in any campaign, as it may result in an incoherent message.

Various sources were recommended for further reading. These included a report by Consumers International on best state practices (Brazil, Canada and South Africa mentioned for enacting progressive legislation recently),[9] and the UN guidelines on consumer protection.[10]

Session 4: Measures for protecting and enforcing IP rights on the Internet: finding a better balance with FOE

At the fourth session, Barbora chaired a discussion on procedural issues that pose a threat to freedom of expression and Internet freedom. Key issues identified at the outset were whether sticking to a human rights view that judicial oversight is the best option or is there a human rights compliant alternative model? As it was decided in the previous session that disconnection is disproportionate, are all forms of criminal liability for Internet use disproportionate? And what limits should be placed on civil remedies, such as damages-award ceilings.

Discussions began on whether an administrative model for notice and takedown would be appropriate. Advantages that were identified of non-judicial models include:

An administrative system is more effective in terms of time and cost. The number of notice and takedown requests that happen on-line would overwhelm a traditional judicial organ.
Protections for intermediaries from liability can be built into the system.
Guidelines can ensure compliance with legal certainty, transparency, due process, specificity of remedies, protections for the identities of users.
Could also be subject to judicial oversight.
That limitations on cost would also “disarm” corporations who would not be able to threaten expensive court procedures that intimidate individuals into prematurely settling civil actions.
The need for fast remedies in digital infringements was also stressed. For example, a website may be created only for the 90 minutes of a football game and then disappear – traditional judicial methods cannot be used to provide redress in these circumstances. Although this may appear to be a “shoot first, aim later” approach, one needs to consider these pragmatic concerns. An administrative model is better suited to this than a judicial system.
Alternatives to an administrative model included the use of non-legal ombudsmen or arbitration proceedings. These measures could also keep costs low.

A number of participants disagreed that an administrative model was appropriate. Their concerns focussed on the following issues:

That the independence of an administrative body could not be guaranteed.
That an administrative procedure should never be used to impose criminal liability.
The procedural guarantees in an administrative system are less robust, particularly in countries that do not have a strong separation of powers.
That the time and cost of a judicial system is necessary to comply with international human rights standards.

Concerns were also raised about recommending any boilerplate solution that should be ‘copy and pasted’ into all national contexts without adequate consideration being paid to that country’s legal system or traditions. In terms of accuracy of language, it was also commented that notice and takedown affects hosts of content, and not ISPs, who are mere conduits.

Systems in place in Canada and Japan for “notice and notice” were also discussed. In these systems, the IP holder notifies the intermediary, who notifies the user, who has a time to reply before action is taken. The role of the intermediary in this system is to facilitate communications and they are not subject to liability. The accommodation of “emergency requests” could also be considered within this system.

With any notice and takedown system it would also be important to make it clear to those controlling the content how you object to a takedown notice. Access to justice principles are important here, particularly considering the amount of misinformation that has circulated in recent years on the nature of IP infringement.

Various examples were given of forum shopping by IP owners in provincial courthouses where judges are less experienced in IP law and therefore more responsive to the arguments of IP holders.

There was also a discussion on why copyright holders would favour criminal sanctions as opposed to civil remedies. On the one hand, it seems intuitive that the rights holder would rather receive damages than have a person fined or imprisoned by the government. It was suggested that the criminal law has the advantage of having a more significant chilling effect. Also, in criminal cases, the costs of detection and enforcement can be placed on the state.

A number of initial principles were identified through this discussion:

Intermediaries should be immunised from civil liability.
There should not be liability for hyperlinking. It must be distinguished from “re-publication”.
Non-commercial infringement should not be criminalized. It was noted that TRIPS requires commercial scale infringement to be criminalized. Narrowly defining what is meant by “commercial” is important:

Peer-to-peer sharing should not be considered commercial.
IP infringement committed by individuals should not be considered commercial.

The need for clarity in the law and for information on IP law to be available to end-users facing litigation threats from copyright holders. In particular, states should educate individuals in the exceptions to copyright protections that serve the public interest.
Possible limitations on damages could be developed.

Session 5: Political developments and strategies of response

The purpose of the fifth session was to provide participants with the opportunity to discuss developing strategies for working together to better combat governments’ attempts at restricting FoE on the basis of protecting IP.

The first priority that was identified was to finalise a policy paper on the issue. This would perhaps take some time to formulate, and may require further meetings to discuss key issues.

A second priority for advocacy was identified in relation to ACTA, which will be voted upon by the European Parliament in the coming months. ARTICLE 19 has issued a statement on ACTA that will also be circulated among participants.

A third discussion concerned the possibility of uncovering a wikileaks-type “scandal” in which the hypocrisy of copyrights holders, and their true motivations, could be exposed. Receiving internal emails from whistleblowers interested in exposing such a story would provide a good media storm in which to launch an advocacy campaign. Examples of IP industries illegally lobbying governments or interfering with the administration of justice would be helpful. The involvement of the British Phonographic Industry in lobbying for the Digital Economy Act was referenced in this discussion.

The utility of engaging with the copyright industries was also discussed. These industries have a reputation for not negotiating– they want as much control over information as possible, as control is essential to their business model. There may be some utility in identifying who our enemies’ enemies are. It was mentioned that the occupy movements may be interested in pursuing a human rights narrative against corporate property interests. These groups are very much engaged in promoting FoE rights. The traditional media was also identified as a group that may be interested in supporting a movement for greater FoE protections against IP.

In terms of developing strategy, it was also recommended that we look at successful human rights campaigns from the past, particularly any in the field of cultural rights. Potential partners for coalition building need to be looked at, and many of these partners may be within emerging economies such as BRIC or South Africa.

As we develop a strategy, we need to remain focussed on framing this battle as a human rights fight. We need to identify victims, perpetrators, and a call to action. A different plan may be needed for each audience that we identify. From the experience of activists at the meeting, theoretical arguments will not succeed in rousing a people-driven campaign. The use of new media, such as campaign videos on youtube, that clearly outline the human rights case would be helpful. It is also necessary to bridge the gap between popular campaigns and videos, and getting those campaigns into the mainstream media and creating a political issue out of it. As technology users that would be interested in this campaign tend not to vote, making this a political issue means making people who do vote understand the issue as one that is a mass-scale human rights violation.

Concluding comments and closing

Agnès closed the session by identifying several key steps:

The need to revise the policy paper in light of discussions throughout the day’s sessions.
The need to meet again to discuss the revised policy paper and to continue these discussions.
The objective of developing our role as advocates, identifying what we can initiate, what existing efforts we can support, and what our overall strategy should be.

[1].ARTICLE 19 statement “European Parliament must reject ACTA”, see: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2901/en/european-parliament:-reject-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-%28acta%29

[2].This judgment has since been released. See ARTICLE 19 press release: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2872/en/landmark-digital-free-speech-ruling-at-european-court-of-justice

[3].ARTICLE 19 has since released a statement on ACTA. See: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2901/en/european-parliament:-reject-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-(acta)

[4].http://www.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/167.png was recommended for its map of patent distribution in 2002.

[5].ALAI homepage: http://alaiorg.vincelette.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid=24

[6].See a list of publications at: http://www.ifla.org/en/publications

[7].OSCE study “Freedom of Expression on the Internet” (2010): http://www.osce.org/fom/80723

[8].ARTICLE 19 statement on FoE and counterfeit mobile telephones: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2762/en/kenya:-free-expression-standards-should-guide-fight-against-%E2%80%9Ccounterfeit%E2%80%9D-mobile-phones

[9].http://a2knetwork.org/watchlist

[10].http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/publications/consumption_en.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/freedom-of-expression-and-ipr-meeting

Patented Games

sunil — 2012-03-08T12:14:22Z

Some prefer Steve Jobs, patron saint of perfection, others prefer Nicholas Negroponte, messiah of the masses. While Mr Jobs may be guilty of contributing to the digital divide, Mr Negroponte may have contributed to bridging it with his innovation: the One Laptop Per Child, also known as the $100 laptop or XO. Sunil Abraham's column was published in the Economic Times on 8 March 2012.

Much ink has been spilt celebrating the contributions of both, but if we were to judge them by utilising evidence from the market, their technologies are used by a rather thin section of the pyramid.

For this writer, however, the real heroes are entrepreneurs from China and Taiwan who make technology that is used by millions of Indians and other consumers across the globe. Sometimes it comes with domestic branding and with all the right peripherals - for example, in India, the Popkorn, which costs only Rs 6,699. It features support for two SIM cards, a receiver for analogue terrestrial television, a receiver for FM radio, a 3.2-megapixel camera, boom-box style internal speakers and, most impressively, a pica projector. It ships with a tripod stand, external speakers, a torch and a laser pointer. It is a classroom in a box. At other times, it comes as a Shanzhai clone of a branded product - for example, the Blackcherry, at one-sixth the price-point with twice the number of cameras as the Blackberry. Some Shanzhai phones support four SIM cards and ship with a spare battery.

Dual- and quad-SIM support is critical in developing countries, especially Africa, where regulation has failed to rationalise interconnection costs. Most of the global south is yet to harvest the digital dividend, so TV reception is very useful indeed. And the additional battery is invaluable for rural entrepreneurs who are not sure whether their next halt will sync with the local load-shedding schedule.

The same with the focus on audio capabilities, reflecting the communal usage patterns. Unlike many expensive big-brand phones that require purchase of additional software, these phones often have in-built support for a wide variety of proprietary and open file formats.

These products are unavailable in the US and Europe because they would be sued out of the market by rights-holders or snuffed out by enforcement activities. David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, says "smartphones might involve as many as 2,50,000 (largely questionable) patent claims". But there are three important differences for the Indian consumer. One, many of these patents are registered in the US, Europe and Japan and, therefore, prevent others from securing those patents in other jurisdictions. But it does not prevent Indian or Chinese entrepreneurs from using the patents. Two, unlike the US patent law, the Indian Patent Act does not consider "mathematical or a business method or computer program per se or algorithms" as inventions. And three, Indian courts, unlike their US and European counterparts, are less likely to grant injunctions preventing sale or use of any device.

Patent pools are a century-old policy tool for reducing royalties and uncertainty for manufacturers and consumers. In 1917, the US government forced aircraft patent-holders, including the famous Wright Brothers, into a patent pool that allowed 60 firms to produce planes at reduced royalty costs without worrying about litigation. Since then, the US government has issued thousands of compulsory licences in many different domains. Patent pools do exist in some areas of mobile technologies such as GSM and video file formats, but more patent pools are needed.

The Chinese government has used standards policy in the past to reduce outgoing royalties on information and communication technologies. They promoted or mandated indigenous standards either as a negotiating tactic with rights-holders or to benefit from cross-licensing of domestic IP. Some standards include TD-SCDMA, as an alternative to Qualcomm's CDMA, EVD as an alternative to the DVD standard, and CBHD as an alternative to Sony's Blu-ray. The potential savings were quite significant. In the words of Ma Jun, Deutsche Bank's chief China economist, "There is almost no profit for Chinese DVD makers as they have to pay about $7 in licensing fees to foreign patent holders per DVD player, which are sold at around $20 only - both at home and abroad."

In addition to patent and standards policy, royalty caps have been used to ensure access to innovative technologies. Till the end of 2009, the Indian government had imposed a royalty cap of 5% on domestic sales and 8% on exports. If a company wanted to pay higher royalties, permission had to be secured from an inter-ministerial Project Approval Board. Between 1991 and 2009, only 8,062 approvals were granted, indicating our government was keen to reduce outgoing royalties. Policymakers could reconsider reintroducing such royalty caps for devices that cost less than $200.

(The author is with the Centre for Internet and Society)

Read the original published in the Economic Times

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/patented-games

Consumers International Global Meeting 2012

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T07:54:56Z

Pranesh Prakash participated in the Consumers International Global Meeting held in Kuala Lumpur on March 8 and 9, 2012. He spoke on UN Consumer Guidelines. Robin Brown, Tobias Schönwetter and Guilherme Varella were the other speakers in the session.

Wednesday 7 March

6:45pm	Anwar Fazal speech on 50th anniversary of JFK Consumer Rights
7:00pm	Dinner hosted by FOMCA

Thursday 8 March

8:30am	Registration
9:00am	Welcome (Helen McCallum)
9:30am	Introduction and overview (Jeremy Malcolm)
10:00am	Introduction to Digital Personal Property (Paul Sweazey)
11:00am	Break
11:30am	UN Consumer Guidelines (Robin Brown, Tobias Schönwetter, Pranesh Prakash, Guilherme Varella)
1:00pm	Lunch
2:00pm	Consumer Protection and IP Abuse Prevention under the WTO Framework (George Tian)
3:00pm	Internet governance and consumers (Peng Hwa Ang)
4:00pm	Break
4:30pm	Public Interest Representation in the Information Society (Norbert Bollow)
5:30pm	Consumers in the information society (Jeremy Malcolm)
6:30pm	Break
7:30pm	Cultural and culinary outing to pasar malam

Friday 9 March

8:30am	Registration
9:00am	M-Lab (Lih Shiun Goh from Google Singapore)
10:00am	Internet and human rights (Alan Finlay from Association for Progressive Communications)
11:00am	Break
11:30am	Global consumer survey on broadband (Jeremy Malcolm, Veridiana Alimonti, Elise Davidson, Marzena Kisielowska-Lipman)
1:00pm	Lunch
2:00pm	Cyber-security concerns for consumers and businesses (Raj Kumar, IMPACT)
3:00pm	Broadband nutrition label (Benjamin Lennett, New America Foundation)
4:00pm	Break
4:30pm	Reporting back – open time for member presentations
6.00 pm	Close

Abstracts and biographies

United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection

This paper provides background to the proposed amendments to update the United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection for the digital age. A soft-law instrument, the Guidelines provide an influential standard for the dissemination of good practices in consumer protection, as a mechanism to foster and promote social and economic development. They outline eight areas for developing policies for consumer protection, which are reflected by the eight consumer rights declared by the global consumer movement: rights to satisfaction of basic needs, safety, choice, information, consumer education, redress, representation and a health environment.

The paper outlines the current global regime of public policy developmment and regualtion relating to access to knowledge. Indicating that many of the issues of concern in terms of access to knowledge are essentially consumer issues it argues that amendments to the Guidelines would form the basis for progress. The paper then details the proposed amendments explaining the basis for each one.

Joining Robin Brown on the panel will be representatives from our research partners in India, Brazil and South Africa who will be contributing to our research on the Guidelines.

Robin Brown has 25 years of experience in consumer and business regulatory affairs. He spent 10 years as the chair and chief executive of Australia’s national consumer body, the Australian Federation of Consumer Organisations. Robin has been involved in projects to advance consumer protection and competition policy and regulation in a number of developing countries. In recent years Robin has served as a Councilor of the Australian Consumers’ Association. He holds a BA and a Master of Public Policy from the Australian National University.

Pranesh Prakash is Programme Manager at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. He is a graduate with a degree in Arts and Law from National Law School, Bangalore, with a keen interest in the law, economics, and culture of intellectual property rights. He helped found the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, and was part of its editorial board for two years. He is most interested in interdisciplinary research on IP and property law, freedom of speech, and privacy. He has worked with practising lawyers, civil society organizations, and law firms.

Tobias Schönwetter is a Senior Manager within PricewaterhouseCoopers' South African practice performing legal advisory services specifically relating to innovation, technology and intellectual property (copyright and trademarks). Tobias has studied and practised law in Germany, the US and South Africa and he has led the copyright division at UCT's Intellectual Property Law and Policy Research Unit for several years. His international experience, together with his leadership roles in a number of intellectual property-related projects and research collaborations such as the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project and the Open AIR (African Innovation Research and Training) project, has secured his place as an industry expert within the intellectual property and technology sector.

Guilherme Varella is a lawyer at Idec (Brazilian Institute for Consumer Defense) in telecomunications, Internet and access to knowledge and Master's student in public policies of culture in the Law School of Universidade de São Paulo (University of São Paulo - USP).

The event was sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute and IDRC/CRDI. For more information, see here on the Access to Knowledge website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/consumers-international-meeting-2012

The 2G Supreme Court Judgment

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-03-13T08:21:49Z

The Business Standard published Shyam Ponappa's two-part article deconstructing the assumptions in the Supreme Court's 2G judgment, and suggesting possible ways forward. The first one was published on March 1, 2012, and the second on March 4, 2012.

The 2G Supreme Court Judgment - 1

Time for a review [Flawed assumptions: auctions]

The judgment cancelling 2G licences was based on demonstrably incorrect assumptions about auctions, writes Shyam Ponappa in an article published in the Business Standard on March 1, 2012. This first of two articles starts out with identifying the false premises of the judgment, particularly relating to the consequences of auctions.

The Supreme Court judgment of February 2, 2012, cancelling 122 2G licences needs a detailed review. This is because it is based on faulty premises relating to economics, finance and technology. If the Supreme Court entertains review petitions on this judgment, it is imperative that the judges be aware of these false premises, and that they be correctly informed regarding these issues. This article gives a few instances of such errors and explores the logic of auctions.

First, as an example of an error, the judgment states, “Spectrum has been internationally accepted as a … renewable natural resource which is susceptible to degradation in case of inefficient utilisation.”

The fact is that spectrum is not renewable, nor is it degraded. Spectrum is completely unaffected by use, unlike the degradation of land or water through use. However, use of a particular range of frequencies in a given space and time can block another user’s effective access to the same spectrum in that space and time — hence the need for considering efficient societal use.

Second, the judgment states that “the Government of India has already taken a decision to ... allot the same [spectrum] by auction”, quoting Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal. The fact is that the government had not announced such a policy decision before the judgment.

Third, the judgment prescribes auctions as being in the public interest. Are they?

The assumption that auctions are in the public interest warrants a detailed review. Amidst a cacophony of confused opinion based on little knowledge and less understanding, here is the evidence:

a) Maximum public revenues: auctions or revenue share?

Assume for a moment that public revenues are indeed the appropriate measure in the public interest. What does the evidence show? An estimate from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in 2005, of auction fees foregone after the transition to revenue-sharing, was Rs 19,314 crore from March 1999 to March 2007. In fact, actual revenue-share collections by March 2007 amounted to double that number, or Rs 40,000 crore. Further, the amount collected by March 2010 was Rs 80,000 crore.

Sources: Auctions - TRAI, 2005:
http://www.trai.gov.in/trai/upload/StudyPapers/2/ir30june.pdf
Revenue Share: CAG, 2010: http://cag.gov.in/html/reports/civil/2010-11_19PA/Telecommunication%20Report.pdf

These data demonstrate that over seven and 10 years, revenue-share collections far exceeded auction fees foregone. Over the entire life-cycle (20 years or more with extensions?), the revenue-share collections will overwhelm even the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG’s) imaginary lost revenues.

b) Public interest: revenues, or access and usage?

What is really in the public interest — revenue collections or the benefits of usage? The CAG report and the clamour for auctions assume that revenue collections reflect the public interest. However, the draft National Telecom Policy 2011 (NTP-2011) states as its first objective: “Provide high quality, affordable and secure telecommunication services to all citizens.” It states that revenue generation will be secondary.

In other words, the policy objective is to provide the benefits of accessible, affordable services to users, not to maximise revenues collected. This was the first time the government unequivocally stated an objective that appeared emphatically in the public interest. The Supreme Court has thus far seen it differently, although this has nothing to do with upholding the law.

The confusion is made worse because the preponderance of literature is by “auction experts” focusing on high fees — and not at all on the services that should have followed but didn’t, because the capital went into the auctions instead of building service capability. A notable exception is a more balanced study of spectrum auctions worldwide that considers social gains as well as fees — which estimates social gains at an overwhelming 240:1 (“What really matters in spectrum allocation design”, Thomas W Hazlett and Roberto E Munoz, April 9, 2010: http://ideas.repec.org/p/reg/wpaper/372.html).

c) Are auctions in the public interest?

There was one successful auction in India in 2001 – because the market was dead – for a fourth mobile operator per circle. Other auctions in India and abroad resulted in the failure of network rollout and services, but were hailed as successes because of high auction fees. For cases of “operation successful, but patient dead”, read on.

Auction failures

US, 1994: The first US auction netted huge bids. Soon after, a number of “successful” bidders declared bankruptcy. This was repeated in the 1995-1996 “C”-Block auctions.

India, 1994: This auction in 1994 was followed by chaos from overbidding and default. The sector recovered only after many years, when the bids were set aside in favour of revenue-sharing with NTP-99. It took almost a decade before a reduction in revenue share (lower fees) and tariffs (calling party pays) led to explosive growth in mobile telephony from mid-2003.
UK, 2000/European Union, 2001 (3G): Considered a spectacular success, netting about $35 billion in the UK, followed by high bids in Austria, Germany and Italy that netted over $100 billion, these auctions raised about ten times the amount expected. The markets collapsed thereafter, and the bidders couldn’t service the debts incurred. Companies have taken a decade to recover, moving cautiously even now on 4G.
India, 2010 (3G and broadband wireless access): Hailed as a success, with over Rs 1,00,000 crore bid, lacklustre performance has followed, as companies struggle with the “winner’s curse” of paying too much to corner spectrum.

Auction experts have written disparagingly of “failures” (low fees) in countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and non-auction countries like South Korea, Japan and Finland (until 2009). However, these disparaged countries have the best broadband services, according to a 2010 study by Saïd Business School at Oxford (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/newsandevents/releases/PublishingImages/3 - Broadband quality ranking - by economic development.jpg). That is not surprising, considering that the capital was invested in service delivery, instead of in vying for spectrum.

Read the original from the Business Standard

The 2G Supreme Court Judgment - 2

Open access is the future [Flawed assumptions re technology; way forward?]

This article addresses erroneous technological assumptions, and explores possible ways forward.

The first part of this article (‘Time for a review’, BS, March 1) dealt with erroneous assumptions, especially regarding auctions. This part covers misplaced assumptions about technology, and explores constructive alternatives going forward.

Errors in technical assumptions
An assumption underlying the prescription of auctions is that spectrum must be assigned to operators for their exclusive use. This was how wireless evolved during the first half of the 20th century, when radio frequency interference was the predominant problem in wireless communications.

With developments in technology, some advocate open spectrum predicated on the use of “cognitive radio” or “software-defined radio”, by which user equipment avoids interference by sensing unused channels automatically. In this model, open-access spectrum is a commons.

Another approach is to use a database-driven open-access model, whereby devices register with a database, and are dynamically assigned spectrum as needed. If this were possible in 1959, when Ronald Coase first recommended auctions, it would not have been necessary to parcel out spectrum. Even in America’s developed economy, the first auction was in 1994, and it failed.[1]

Now, technological developments enable spectrum sharing and dynamic assignment. America’s FCC has appointed 10 database administrators for dynamic spectrum allocation, with Spectrum Bridge being the first — in operation from January 2012.

America restricts this approach to unused spectrum in the TV bands, and a portion of the 700 MHz band, called “TV white spaces” (TVWS). The UK’s Ofcom is taking similar steps, with implementation planned for 2013. While all licensed frequencies could be pooled, sharing is restricted to TVWS because of conventions and legacies, and operators’ and governments’ preference for auctions. This judgment rules out sharing, blocking other technologies if the spectrum were available.[1]

The lure of auctions

For markets like India, there is every reason from a technology perspective to share not only TVWS and 700 MHz, but all commercially licensed spectrum. There is a technological basis for pooled spectrum, without exclusive assignment and auctions. Yet people love auctions: liberals, because business must pay its way, and governments get revenues; conservatives, because market mechanisms substitute for government controls.[2] Operators prefer exclusive assignment to the uncertainties of open access and compensation for their holdings. Governments want auction revenues. So neither governments, nor big operators, nor the uninformed public, see incentives for pursuing what is in the public interest: shared spectrum.

For Technology leaders in OECD markets, shared spectrum was not a priority, because more spectrum was available to fewer operators. For instance, in 2010, operators in many US cities had 55-90 MHz according to gigaom.com, and AT&T was using only about half its available spectrum, whereas in Delhi and Mumbai, operators had only 10 MHz.

First-come-first-served

Can the FCFS policy be abrogated on the basis of unconstitutionality? If so, the induced turmoil and far-reaching changes in procedures required for everything from tickets for railways or airlines, state-owned assets such as land, mining concessions, even government housing (including for judges?!), and all previous licences granted by FCFS procedures, defy imagination. This urgently needs review by the Supreme Court in the public interest.

Irregularities, outcomes, contracts and cancellation

The same 11 companies whose licences were cancelled qualified according to the FCFS principle, except that their sequence was changed, apparently through procedural irregularities. In other words, without malfeasance, the same companies would have got the licences, except for S Tel getting Delhi and someone else not. Malfeasance deserves penalisation. However, as changes resulting from irregularities are limited in the sense that the same candidates would have won, must all licences be cancelled? Is there a judicial option of annulling the award, and placing the issue before the executive for equitable resolution in the public interest? After all, it is against the public interest to induce turmoil in markets and development capabilities, which the present ruling is likely to do not only in telecom, but in other sectors like energy, mining, manufacturing and transportation. Also, if foreign companies acquired legitimate stakes in licence holders, can these contracts be nullified without proof of their malfeasance? Or could erring parties be penalised, while legitimate parties are enabled to reconstitute their position as required by law?

The way forward
Unfortunately, it is for our discredited and dispirited government to pick itself up and dig us out of this hole. Focused, goal-oriented action on the following lines would help.

First, review petitions: A first step is structured review petitions to the Supreme Court seeking relief, without grandstanding, bluster, or abdication of responsibility.

Second, an alternative to spectrum auctions exists in open access with payment. Both public revenues as well as public usage can be well served by treating access to spectrum as an open-access right-of-way. India’s policy makers need to consider the US and the UK’s shared spectrum approach. Spectrum can be paid for as it is used, as are oil pipelines, roads, or airports and ports.

Open access could create tremendous opportunities in India, including for other technologies, e.g., a revival of WiMAX, if Intel grasps the nettle.

Third, on the cancelled licences. This has different problem sets. One set comprises parties who abused the system, punishable under due process of law. If there are parties in a second set that did no wrong, they should suffer no penalty.

What of a subset of the first, in which a foreign partner invested legitimately and built out, provided they were within the law? If these investors acted in good faith, perhaps a legal recourse could be to place their cases before the government for resolution and rehabilitation in the public interest conforming with the laws, if need be by a dispensation from the court, or even by fresh legislation. After all, good faith investors have contractual rights. Possible solutions might be (a) to penalise the guilty partner, while absolving the innocent, or (b) cancelling the licences of the guilty, while allowing the innocent to reconstitute as required by the law.

Above all, there is need for problem-solving that is systematic, transparent and participative, with expert inputs in domains and processes, to place the sector on a firm footing.

Read the original published in the Business Standard

[1].http://www.benkler.org/Open_Wireless_V_Licensed_Spectrum_Market_Adoption_current.pdf

[2].Paraphrasing Eli Noam: http://www.citi.columbia.edu/elinoam/articles/beyond_auctions.htm

[3].For details, see: http://organizing india.blogspot.com/2011/06/ntp-2011-objective-broadband.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/2-g-supreme-court-judgement-1

An Interview with Stephen Song

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan — 2012-02-29T14:08:54Z

Stephen Song, the founder of Village Telco, an initiative to bring practical and inexpensive communication network infrastructure to rural and remote areas, speaks about factors that catalyzed the initiative, the benefits of the network, some challenges, and the Mesh Potato.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: When and how did the Mesh Potato come about?

Stephen Song: It came about after I joined the Shuttleworth foundation in 2008. I was aware of the potential of low cost wireless mesh technologies to create affordable infrastructure, but there seemed to be a challenge in getting these technologies to scale, and we had done some interesting pilot work, but nothing had really taken off. And so I convened a workshop in the middle of 2008 with some of the smartest wireless networking people I knew and so began to explore what were the key barriers.

There seemed to be at least a couple of key barriers – one was that setting up a wireless mesh network was a complex procedure that required expertise. And second was that in many areas where we were interested in providing services, people were as interested in voice services as they were in data. Simply delivering data to a particular community, at least to rural communities anyway, seemed to be only solving half of the problem. So the result of that workshop was that we came to the realization, the conclusion, that what we needed was a hybrid of technologies, something that didn’t exist yet, which was a combination of voice and data technologies together.

We were lucky enough to have a brilliant open hardware designer from Australia attending the workshop almost by coincidence, and he said, “Well, why don’t we build our own?” Up until that point I think our dominant way of looking at the world was by asking what sort of North American or European technologies could we take and repurpose in Sub-Saharan Africa to address this issue of access in a more affordable way. The notion of actually manufacturing our own technology wasn’t on the chart at all and it took a little while for the idea to sink in, because it just seemed infeasible at the time. But sink in it did, which led through my fellowship at the Shuttleworth foundation to the funding of a pilot project to see whether it was feasible to complete at least a prototype design. The created prototype design led to a partnership with the manufacturer in Shenzhen, China, and to a short run of production which led to a bigger run of production. And so one thing led to another and now we have our own device that we manufacture.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And how would you describe this device to a regular consumer?

Stephen Song: Well, it is a wireless networking device that works with similar units of its kind to form an autonomous wireless network that delivers voice and data services. So you can open a box of Mesh Potatoes, plug them all in, and instantly have a voice and data network. It is a network for which you don’t require a special voice technology. All you need to do to be able to start making calls is to plug in an ordinary phone into the Mesh Potato. So it doesn’t require any sort of additional smart VOIP hand set technology or anything like that. We deliberately chose to do that because analog handsets are very cheap and lots of people have them already or they cost less than $10 to buy. So it seemed like a very affordable way of creating a voice network.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And how much does a Mesh Potato cost?

Stephen Song: They are about a $100 each.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And how much does it cost to set up a network and what is the largest distance that it can cover?

Stephen Song: The cost of the network is literally just the cost of the Mesh Potatoes and so once you have them and they are powered up, you have network infrastructure that is yours for as long as the technology lasts, which should be many years. So that’s really the core cost; it’s just the cost of the devices. Then if you connect your network to the Internet or to the public switched telephone network you might have to pay for the access to the Internet or for access to voice services.

Each Mesh Potato has a range of about three to four hundred meters but the way the Mesh Potatoes work is each device acts as a repeater for the next one. So as long as the next house that you can see is less than three to four hundred meters away, you can actually build quite a large network, because if you have two houses that are six or seven hundred meters away, as long as you have one house in the middle that’s got a Mesh Potato, then all three of them are connected. Mesh networking has been around for a while but just hasn’t become as mainstream as WiFi hotspots.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And in what frequency range does this technology operate in?

Stephen Song: It works in the 2.4GHz range which is your standard WiFi technology, which means that for most countries you can use it without requiring a spectrum license.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: So in what countries, other than South Africa, has this technology been deployed in?

Stephen Song: Our biggest network is in the capital of East Timor in Dili. There is an NGO there called FONGTIL that has set up a large Village Telco network and there are a number of other smaller networks – one in Brazil, some networks in Nigeria and Cameroon, and then multiple other smaller more informal networks as opposed to formal Village Telcos.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: Have there been barriers in terms of deploying this technology?

Stephen Song: A barrier for us is bringing the cost of manufacture down. So one of the downsides of being a very small organization is that in terms of negotiating with manufacturers and arranging deals we have very little leverage. So we will want to bring the cost of the Mesh Potatoes down by another 50 percent, which is completely feasible, but it’s a challenge to actually build the relationships with the manufacturers to get things done quickly.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: So what company currently manufactures this technology?

Stephen Song: A company called Atcom.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: Can you provide a successful case study of this technology being deployed where it has made a difference in the village or where it helped create other social endeavors because people had access to this technology?

Stephen Song: Yeah, I think Dili in East Timor is probably the most successful example, in that the NGO that is running the network, FONGTIL, is kind of an umbrella organization for other NGOs in the region that need to connect and talk to each other on a regular basis. However mobile communication is quite expensive in Dili. So the NGOs have really valued being able to communicate easily and cheaply with their partner organizations through the Mesh Potato network.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: Sounds good. Thank you very much for your time.

Stephen Song: All right, bye for now.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/interview-with-stephen-song

Francis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World

praskrishna — 2013-08-03T05:36:54Z

The Electronic Publishing Trust recently announced a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developed countries who have made significant contribution for the cause of open access and free exchange of research findings. There were 30 nominations from 17 countries around the world and Dr. Francis Jayakanth from the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was selected for the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access in the Developing World by a committee that went through all the nominations.

The award function organised by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore was held at the Sambasivan Auditorium, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai on 14 February 2012. Leading luminaries such as Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Prof. G Baskaran and Prof. K Mangala Sunder participated in the award felicitation ceremony.

Giving the welcome speech, Prof. Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at CIS said that Dr. Jayakanth works for the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has trained many students and helped a number of institutes to set up open access repositories. Prof. Arunachalam added that the event is being celebrated in India as the winner is from India and specified that it is being held at the MS Swaminathan Foundation as this was the institution that hosted the first workshop to promote open access. Prof. Swaminathan had a vital role in arranging funds for the workshop. About 50 people had learnt what open access was, how to set up open access repositories, how to use the EPrints software, etc. For this very reason it was decided to hold the event in Chennai and not Bangalore where Dr. Jayakanth is based.

Felicitating Dr. Jayakanth, Prof. Swaminathan who presented the award added that it is important to highlight the contributions of those who really convert the concept of social inclusion to reality. He said that today every politician talks about inclusive growth. What is this inclusive growth, how do you convert exclusion to inclusion? Exclusion creates large problems, social problems, economic problems, etc. On a concluding note, Prof. Swaminathan said that the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh has declared 2012-13 as the year of science and he hopes that there will be a new science policy and technology policy and that he hopes that a very important component of that should be methods of ensuring open access including open access to knowledge and open access to literature.

In his award acceptance speech, Dr. Jayakanth said that the atmosphere was very overwhelming and never in his two-and-a-half decade old career he had the opportunity to speak amidst such luminaries and added that it was a privilege and prestige to have received the award from Prof. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution in India. He also added that no event in India or elsewhere is complete without the active participation and mentioning of the name of Prof. Arunachalam, the greatest advocate of open access that India has seen so far, and that he wouldn’t have been here at the award ceremony but for the timely intervention of Prof. Arunachalam.

Dr. Jayakanth concluded by saying that he would like to thank Prof. NV Joshi, Prof. Derek Law, Prof. Alma Swan, Prof. Balaram, Prof. N Balakrishnan, Prof. Giridhar, and Prof. TB Rajashekar, and particularly the students of the information and knowledge management programme at the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, who were responsible for the growth of a repository granting more visibility to the 32,000 publications that are part of the repository.

Prof. Mangala Sunder of IIT Madras and Prof. G Baskaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, also participated in the event. Prof. Sunder said that it is for the kind of information that we talk about, which we want to make public for which champions like Dr. Jayakanth have been working on the sidelines but working so efficiently to get institution after institution to convert what is known as a rigid framework into a flexible more open policy of bringing their scientific content to their intellectual information content. He said that he works in the area of content development from the point of view of education and he understands the difficulty of bringing material to the public.

There are many issues, such as issues about copyright, issues about people owning the information, issues about people feeling very rigid on what they want to say in the public, etc. Dr. Jayakanth has gone through all these exercises for the last 30 years in slowly creating the “little after little” what are called the waterways to finally see that everyone benefits. The linking of science, knowledge and sustainable development to open access to information, open access to research and open access to content completes the whole cycle of knowledge.

Prof. Baskaran said that it is a very well deserved award and Dr. Jayakanth has definitely raised the bar for future awardees. Prof. Baskaran stressed upon the aspects of open access. He said that as a theoretical physicist he understands the need for open access very well. Physicists, when they have new research results place them in arXiv, the open access repository for preprints in physics. Some people wonder what if some physicists deposit all kinds of articles in the arXiv. Experience has shown that 99 per cent of the articles appear in good journals later. He added that once it is put in the arXiv, the whole world gets access and a bad paper will be noticed and commented upon by many. No one likes to be the author of such a paper! He urged that other sciences, especially the life sciences should have a repository similar to arXiv and requested Prof. Swaminathan to take the intiative at MSSRF.

Dr. Francis Jayakanth

Dr. Francis Jayakanth is a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. He has played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and open access journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, open access journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, and the benefits of open access to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. Dr. Jayakanth can indeed be considered an open access ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of open access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.

See Francis's presentation on Who Benefits from Open Access to Scholarly Literature? [Powerpoint, 1523 KB]

See the video of the award function below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award

Comments on Technical Standards for Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (Phase II)

pranesh — 2012-02-29T09:44:07Z

The e-Governance Standards Division has called for public comments on the draft of the Technical Standards IFEG Phase II. We from the Centre for Internet and Society have given our comments.

The present document is — as the draft IFEG Phase I document was — an excellent step in the right direction, following very ably the policy guidelines laid down in the National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance.

The Expert Committee and other contributors have made excellent choices as to the 29 standards that have been laid down in this phase of the IFEG. It is praiseworthy that the majority of these (20) are designated as mandatory, and only nine are designated as interim standards. Furthermore, the system has been quite transparent with the selection of standards, providing concise descriptions for each.

That said, the document could be improved by providing greater detail for those standards which are said to violate the National Open Standards Policy. In the current document, every interim standard is said to violate “clause 2”, rather than providing the more specific details (sub-clause, one-line explanation) about the violation.

It is unfortunate that yet again accessibility-related standards have been passed over in the presentation and archival domain.

As we have mentioned in earlier feedback, many other governmental interoperability frameworks are going beyond merely listing technical standards. Some governments, such as Germany and the EU, go beyond technical interoperability, and also have documents dealing with organizational, informational, and legal interoperability. These are equally important components of an interoperability framework. Other governments also also lay down best practice guides, and other aids to implementation, sometimes even including application recommendations. Further, there are many which lay out standards for the the semantic layer, business services layer, etc.

We at the Centre for Internet and Society are currently advising the government of Iraq on development of their e-Governance Interoperability Framework, and would be glad to extend any support that the Department of IT may require of us, including comments on all further phases.

Section-specific Comments

Section 5.2.8

It is unclear whether by IEEE 802.11-2007, the base version is being referred to or the amended version, since IEEE 802.11-2007 has been amended by IEEE 802.11n-2009 to include the IEEE 802.11n standard. As IEEE 802.11n has also become an established standard, it is suggested that section 5.2.28 make it clear that the amended standard is being referred to.

Section 5.2.13

It is recommended that IMAP v4rev1 (IETF RFC 3501, updated by RFCs 4466, 4469, 4551, 5032, 5182, 5738, 6186, supplemented by RFCs 2177, 4550) be used instead of POP3 (IETF RFC 1939). It is critical that governmental messages be preserved on government servers, and should not simply be downloaded and then deleted as is the default with POP3 implementations. IMAP allows for downloading and offline access to mails as well. Any deletion on the server from the client would be recorded in the server logs, hence allowing for transparency. Given this, and the more advanced features available in IMAP, it should be preferred to POP3. In other government interoperability frameworks where an e-mail access protocol is specified, including those of Germany, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, IMAP is provided as a standard and never is POP3 provided as the sole standard.

Section 5.2.15

SAML 2.0 is a standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, and is not a ‘Wireless LAN Authentication’ standard. Indeed, section 5.2.8 (IEEE 802.11-2007) talks about ‘Wireless LAN Security’.

Section 5.2.23

WML v1.3, as noted, is a declining standard that is deprecated due to the recommendation by W3C of XHTML Basic v1.1. If it is at all included, it should be included not as “Mandatory – Watchlist”, but as “Additional Standard”, as it is a direct competitor to XHTML Basic v1.1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/interoperability-framework-for-e-governance

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T09:12:10Z

Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.

Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.

Download the PDF

But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.

Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals.

Boycott

Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all.

"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers.

India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free.

Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate.

Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable.

Trustworthy

The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.

Read the article in Hindu. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models

The High Level Privacy Conclave

Natasha Vaz — 2012-03-01T06:09:21Z

India in dire need of privacy law; experts say government is ironically creating huge national security risks in attempts to prevent crime and terrorism.

Privacy India, the Centre for Internet and Society and the Society in Action Group, with support from Privacy International, have spent 18 months studying the state of privacy across India, conducting consultations in Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Chennai and Mumbai. Today, the results of their research were discussed by representatives from government, industry, media and civil society at a high-level conclave in Delhi. In attendance were Manish Tewari MP, Microsoft Director of Corporate Affairs Deepak Maheshwari and P.K.H. Tharakan former Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing. A privacy symposium open to the general public will be held tomorrow afternoon at the Indian International Centre.

The 130-page long Country report details how government bodies like the National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) engage in pervasive and frequently unauthorized wiretapping, listening in on the private conversations of politicians and ordinary citizens alike. The Cabinet Secretary himself, in a report last year, noted that a body like the Central Board of Direct Taxes should never have been authorized to conduct telephone tapping, as the Supreme Court had long ago made clear. Privacy problems are arising from UID, NPR, and other e-governance projects that involve the creation of databases and the collection of personal information. Indian citizens are losing the ability to control who has access to their information, what that information says about them and how that information is used.

Overall, the study paints a picture of a dysfunctional system, with multiple pieces of legislation dealing with sectoral privacy-related issues like health, banking, phone tapping etc and no overarching legal guarantee of privacy. As Manish Tewari observed today, there is a nationwide lack of understanding about new technologies and judges are very rarely technologically literate. This has created a situation in which the government's efforts to fight crime and terrorism by intercepting communications has horribly backfired. By building backdoors into communications systems to allow lawful access, and by restricting cryptography to a 40-bit limit, the authorities have created serious vulnerabilities in India's communications system that can be easily exploited by any malicious third party or foreign government.

Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International: "In their efforts to preserve and defend democratic society, India has undermined the very thing it wanted to protect. Both citizens and state are now at serious risk of being spied upon by anyone with a small amount of technological know-how and a computer."

Usha Ramanathan, social and political activist, said: "In the name of state transparency, government projects are in fact rendering citizens transparent to the State, rather than the other way round. A comprehensive privacy law for India cannot come soon enough."

Privacy India

Privacy India was established in 2010 with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. One of our goals is to build consensus towards the promulgation of comprehensive privacy legislation in India through consultations with the public, policymakers, legislators and the legal and academic community.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/the-high-level-privacy-conclave