Centre for Internet and Society

WIPO Broadcast Treaty and Webcasting

pranesh — 2011-08-04T04:42:10Z

On Friday, 8 May 2009, at Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting held a stakeholders' briefing meeting on the Broadcast Treaty that has been on the table at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The purpose of that meeting was to inform the relevant stakeholders of the developments in Geneva, as well as to garner input from them regarding the stance to be adopted by India at the WIPO. Pranesh Prakash from the Centre for Internet and Society participated and made a presentation on webcasting, highlighting the differences between webcasting and broadcasting, and arguing that webcasting should not be part of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty.

First, we wish to applaud the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for holding this stakeholders' meeting, which is a definite step towards greater transparency, and are grateful for having been invited to provide our input. The meeting was attended by representatives from various government offices and ministries, including the Ministry of Human Resource Development (which administers the Indian Copyright Act), broadcasters, broadcast associations, law firms, and civil society organisations. The Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting inaugurated the session by talking of how the Broadcast Treaty involved the assessment and balancing of various interests while keeping 'public interest' foremost. This was followed by Mr. N. P. Nawani, Secretary General of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), presenting on the concerns of the broadcasting industry. After this Prof. N. S. Gopalakrishnan, head of the School of Law, Cochin University of Science and Technology, spoke.

Prof. Gopalakrishnan covered many areas of relevance: the concept of broadcasting and the legal rights involved; the scheme of legal protection over broadcast signals and over the content of the signals, and the difference between the two; gaps in the international law covering broadcasting; details of the proposed broadcast treaty; the implications of the broadcast treaty and concerns of the Indian government; and unresolved issues.

Amongst the unresolved issues mentioned by Prof. Gopalakrishnan was that of webcasting and the problems related to that. The discussion below aims to shed some light on some of the problems created by the inclusion of webcasting in the broadcast treaty.

Legal regimes for broadcasting

At the national level, the law governing broadcasting is the Indian Copyright Act, 1957. Broadcasting is covered by many sections of the Indian Copyright Act, including: ss. 2(dd) (definition of "broadcast"), 2(ff) (definition of "communication to the public"), 37 (the section granting a special "broadcast reproduction right"), and 39A (containing exceptions to s.37). At the international level, broadcasting is covered by the Rome Convention, 1960 (which India has signed, but hasn't ratified); the Brussels Convention, 1974 (only pre-broadcast satellite signals); the TRIPS Agreement, 1994 per Article 14 (which doesn't mandate that broadcasting rights be granted directly to the broadcasters); the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, 1996 (WPPT) in Articles 2(f) and 15; and the proposed WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations ("Broadcast Treaty"). In May 2006, provisions for webcasting were brought back into the Broadcast Treaty as part of the non-mandatory Appendix after having been excised in 2004 owing to protests by many countries on their inclusion. The current draft (SCCR/15/2 rev.) was prepared in September 2006 as an attempt to put together an all-inclusive document (with alternative versions of proposed provisions present in the document), and a diplomatic conference was planned to push the treaty through. In August 2007, WIPO released a 'non-paper' (SCCR/S2/Paper1) and dropped plans for the diplomatic conference, as there was still significant disagreement about the treaty. In November 2008, the WIPO chair released an informal paper (SCCR/17/INF/1), which advocated technological neutrality, and hence, presumably, that webcasting to be covered by the treaty.

Meaning of broadcasting and netcasting

Broadcasting is generally taken to be a point-to-multipoint transmission of audio-visual content. Hence, cable transmissions and Internet/Web transmissions (which are point-to-point) are usually not included when one uses the term "broadcasting". But there is no one common definition of "broadcasting". As things stand in the WIPO Broadcast Treaty, the definition of broadcasting (Art. 5(a)) does not cover cablecasting, which is separately defined in Art. 5(b), neither does it cover webcasting. However, the definition of "retransmission" as provided in the draft treaty is broad enough to cover Internet-based transmission, and hence could provide a backdoor via which webcasting is included. The rights covered by the all-inclusive draft WIPO Broadcast Treaty include the rights of and over: retransmission; communication to the public; fixation; reproduction; distribution; transmission following fixation; making available of fixed broadcasts; and pre-broadcast signals. The treaty also mandates legislative protection to systems of digital rights management (DRM) and technological protection measures (TPMs). This, coupled with post-fixation rights, grants broadcasters the rights to dictate what one can and cannot do with a broadcast, thus negating all fair dealing rights and possibly restricting the public domain as well. It may be noted that even content creators are not provided such rights in the vast majority of the world, and that fair dealing rights are much better safeguarded by copyright law. The latest proposal by the U.S. on the term "netcasting" is to be found in an informal paper presented at SCCR 15 [MS Word document], and has been criticised as overly expansive by civil society organisations such as Consumer Project on Technology (now Knowledge Ecology International).

Non-justifications for webcasting's inclusion

Webcasting is sought to be included within the Broadcast Treaty for a number of reasons, all of which are problematic. Firstly, there is the argument of technology neutrality, which advocates say is to ensure that the treaty is relevant into the future as well. However, adopting technology neutrality as the basis for doing so amounts to wilful blindness to technological advancements, and the benefits that such advancement provides, including lowered costs of infrastructure. Secondly, advocates argue that thanks to media convergence, the same content (which is usually digital) can be delivered through various communication networks. This disregards the need to establish the requirement for a new right to be created, and simply assumes that just because the function that the two (broadcasters and webcasters) perform are similar means that they operate in similar economic and social environments. In fact, webcasters work in a very different environment from broadcasters.

This is an environment where intense innovation and competition already exist, and don't need to be artificially created by means of a new property right in an international treaty. Furthermore, the United States, a country with extremely large and hugely profitable broadcasting networks, does not have a specific statute to protect broadcasters’ rights. Even it only has laws protecting the conditional-access regime. Second, much less investment is required to reach a set number of people through webcasting than through broadcasting -- and these people can be spread throughout the globe. Typically, a computer with a fast internet connection is all that is required. Given this, anyone can become a 'broadcasting organisation'. Additionally, IP addresses (in IPv6) are not limited, unless one considers 340 undecillion addresses to be 'limited'. This is a big difference from terrestrial broadcasting, where Hertzian frequencies are limited, and hence one has to pay a premium for them. Lastly, signal appropriation does not happen for sake of the signal, but for the content. Protection, thus has to be given to the content (and already is given, in the form of copyright law). Copyright owners who object to such appropriation, and who are often large multinational corporations, have proven more than willing to pursue those who appropriate their works – broadcasters are not necessarily in a better position to do so. This situation is aggravated with webcasting. Indeed, on the Web, something akin signal appropriation is not only not frowned upon, but often encouraged: embedding of audio and video from other servers on your own website is prevalent.

Problems if webcasting is included

Apart from the lack of justifications for going ahead with the treaty, especially when it seeks to create a separate property right over signals instead of merely providing for signal protection and includes webcasting (at least upon 'retransmission'), there are many problems that the treaty creates. Firstly, transaction costs will increase vastly, leading to a tragedy of the anticommons where no one ends up using the content because clearing all the surrounding rights is too difficult. On top of clearing and making payment for rights from the copyright holders, a person wishing to use parts of any content that has been broadcast/webcast would have to get the rights cleared from the first broadcaster/webcaster as well. This is inevitable if property-like rights are bestowed upon the act of distributing signal in the form of a broadcast or hosting audio and visual content for webcasting.

Secondly, materials in the public domain and openly-licensed content will become more difficult to gain access to, and the exercise of fair dealings with copyrighted content will be hampered. Since rights over signal are independent of rights over content, a copy of the public-domain work will have to be procured from an archive, which negates the very purpose of broadcasting and webcasting, which is to make content more easily accessible to a large number of people located over great distances. Additionally, limitations and exceptions are extremely difficult to negotiate and are of the 'ceiling' kind, limiting the limitations and exceptions that national legislatures can prescribe. Thus, the fair dealing rights over the signal will probably end up being more limited than the fair dealing rights over content. This makes the situation akin to anti-circumvention measures, which (in countries where they are legally recognised) have fewer limitations and exceptions than the content they protect.

Thirdly, public benefit and access will seriously be harmed. It is conceivable that this treaty might hamper the Indian legislature's ability to pass statutes such as the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act, 2007, which mandate sharing of certain kinds of signals. Lawyers will claim that such statutes go against India's international obligations.

Differences between webcasting and broadcasting

To sum up, there are a large number of differences between broadcasting and webcasting.
Infrastructure: The expenditure required to establish the infrastructure for a webcasting unit is much less than that required for an equivalent (in terms of reach in terms of listeners). Even traditional broadcasting is not that expensive: fixed-frequency radio transmission kits have been known to cost as little as Rs. 50 (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4735642.stm>. Thus, one of the biggest arguments for protection ('to recover investment') is taken away. The content producers' 'investment' is protected by copyright law.
Competition: Providing incentives to increase competition and hence public benefit is often a reason cited as a reason for introduction of a new property-like right. However, such incentives seem utterly redundant in the online market where becoming a webcasting organisation is trivial, and immense competition already exists.
Broadcasting vs. Uni- and Multicasting: The notion of 'broadcasting' does not exist in IPv6. The closest that a webcaster can come to broadcasting is 'multicasting' to a specific range of IP addresses. What one sees on the Web today is "unicasting", which is initiated by a request from the recipient and not by the webcaster.
Temporal limitations: Unlike traditional broadcasting (which does not include cable), content on demand is possible over the Web. By this, the temporal limitations faced by traditional broadcasting, which is ephemeral, are overcome. This opens up many possibilities that should not be hampered by creating an excessive legal regime (and that too a property regime) over webcasting.
Geographic limitations: While terrestrial broadcasting is limited in geographic scope (which satellite and cable-casting are less susceptible to), webcasting knows no geographic limitations. As long as an Internet connection is present, the content can be viewed anywhere. Additionally, granting a separate webcasting right will open up a jurisdicational can of worms.
Marginal costs of subscribers: While in terrestrial broadcasting, adding an additional receiver does not cost the broadcaster anything, in satellite television (direct-to-home), cable television and webcasting, each additional receiver means either additional infrastructure (cables and set-top boxes) or additional server load. In the case of webcasting, this marginal cost is small enough to ignore, especially given all the other reasons mentioned previously.

Conclusion

There are still a number of uncertainties surrounding the inclusion of webcasting in the Broadcast Treaty. Michael Nelson of the Internet Society points out that questions such as who the broadcaster is in a download grid, in distributed gaming, for webcasts of surveillance videos, etc., are unanswered. As the example of the download grid (a situation where the 'casting' is multipoint-to-point) shows, many Internet-specific scenarios have not been contemplated by the treaty negotiators. Situations which might soon be reality, such as peer-to-peer relaying of webcasts are also not contemplated, and the treaty would become a policy document preventing such technological innovations. Whether IPTV would be included within webcasting is also unclear. The WIPO chair in his informal paper noted, 'Finally, if after consideration of the options above (A/B) and possible other options, it will not in the present situation be possible to decide on the establishment of a new treaty, the SCCR should end these discussions through an express decision in order to avoid further spending of time, energy and resources to no avail. Such a decision could include a timetable for later revisiting and reconsidering the matter.' (SCCR/15/2 rev) SCCR should end these discussions which have gone on for more than a decade without any progress.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wipo-broadcast-treaty-and-webcasting

Seminar on Exceptions and Limitations in Copyright

sachia — 2011-08-17T08:50:52Z

This is a report on a seminar organised by the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, and Government of India on 14 and 15 May 2009, in Kochi, Kerala, to look at exceptions and limitations in copyright. Programme Manager Nirmita Narsimhan, of the Centre for Internet and Society, attended the seminar.

CIS Programme Manager Nirmita Narsimhan attended a seminar on exceptions and limitations in copyright, organised by the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, and Government of India on 14 and 15 May 2009, in Kochi, Kerala. The seminar was intended to bring up key issues affecting access to knowledge, which are to be taken up by the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) later this month. Resource persons identified for different topics were eminent scholars, academicians and practitioners across India. The seminar covered eight topics. On each topic, a paper was presented by a resource person with commentary by an expert in the field, after which there was an open discussion.

The first day featured, amongst others, a paper presented by Lawrence Liang, Distinguished Fellow, CIS. He spoke at length on the exceptions and limitations for education.

The second day featured a paper by Mr. Madhukar Sinha, former Registrar of Copyright. Mr. Sinha presented on the topic 'Use of works by visually impaired and other miscellaneous exceptions of use of works under Indian Copyright Act: Section 52(1) (q), (r), (s), (t), (u), (v), and (x), (y), (z)'. His paper went into great length on definitions of visual disability and tried to evolve an economic model to support conversion of books into accessible formats for the visually challenged. The paper drew parallels with existing laws and best practices in different countries, made a detailed analysis of exceptions for the blind in the light of the Berne three-step test and the TRIPS agreement, and concluded by recommending that the Copyright Act should be amended to include exceptions and limitations which would permit conversion of books into formats in certain special cases. Mr. Sinha also recommended that India should look at solutions which go beyond the limits of the Copyright Act to solve such problems.

The response to this was prepared by Mr. Rahul Cherian of Indo Juris Law offices. The response paper drew attention to the fact that half of the total blind population of the world is in India and that amounts to a population of more than a crore. In the light of the economic and logistic considerations of our country, the Copyright Act should

Expressly include a limitation to permit conversion of books into accessible formats for visually challenged persons;
Permit conversion by stakeholder organizations as well as interested family members and friends of beneficiaries;
Adopt a functional definition of disability and not a medical one as is currently the case in the Persons with Disabilities Act 1995, and extend the benefit of the exception to all persons, who by reason of any disability are unable to access the work in its original format;and
Not restrict conversion only to those formats which are exclusively for the use of blind persons. Visually challenged persons should be able to make use of available mainstream formats like PDFs or Word as well.

The paper also dealt extensively with the Treaty for Improved access for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Other Reading Disabled, which was proposed by the World Blind Union in WIPO last year and is coming up again for discussion later this month.

Please click here to see the complete text of the paper.

The seminar was extremely productive because there was a strong recommendation and support for the inclusion of a limitation for conversion into accessible formats for persons with disabilities in the Indian Copyright Act. All the members present came to a consensus that the Indian Government should take a supportive stand towards the Treaty for the Blind proposed by the WBU at the SCCR this month. A representative of a leading publishing house committed himself to working towards providing books to certain organizations for the blind, if they could assure him that those books would be circulated only to blind persons and not to others.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/seminar-on-exceptions-and-limitations-in-copyright

Letter to Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, Advocating Adoption of FOSS in State IT Academies

sachia — 2011-08-23T02:55:16Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is a signatory to a letter being sent to the Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of FOSS at state IT academies.

The state of Karnataka has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft under which three IT academies have been established in the state, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga, in 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained at these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum at these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers. This MOU will expire in the coming academic year. Therefore, Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India are sending a letter to the Education Secretary for the state of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of a FOSS-based curriculum in these IT academies, and explaining why this would be a useful move.

The Centre for Internet and Society is one of the signatories to this letter, which is reproduced below.

-----

The Education Secretary

Government of Karnataka

MS Building

Bangalore, Karnataka.

Sub – Microsoft IT Academies in Karnataka

Dear Sri Nadadur,

Karnataka has a MOU with Microsoft under which three 'IT Academies' have been established in the State, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga during 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained in these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum in these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers.

There are a couple of issues with this program.

Firstly Microsoft does not allow the teaching of software other than their own proprietary products. This deprives the teachers from learning alternative Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There are compelling pedagogical, economic, social and political reasons why the education system needs to adopt and promote FOSS. Free software is software which gives the users the freedom to use, study, modify and share, while in the case of proprietary software, the vendor prevents the study, modification and distribution of the software. The freedoms of FOSS provide users and the rest of society with several important advantages, which are briefly listed below:

a. With proprietary software, the teachers only learn be superficial 'users'. This is because, proprietary software companies prevent access to the “source code” that goes into the creation of software. With FOSS, students can learn not only how to use software, but also how create and modify the software applications. Hence with FOSS, students will not just be passive users but will actually construct knowledge. As we know, 'Constructivism' is a key feature of the National Curriculum Framework 2005.

b. FOSS supports the creation of local language versions of the software. For example, Kerala has locally created software in Malayalam for its IT@School program. Similarly the Kannada community Sampada has created a complete Kannada distribution by customising existing FOSS software.

Though Microsoft has provided Windows and Microsoft Office gratis at these academies, it does not provide the same software to the teachers who are trained at the centre. Hence the teachers who intend to purchase computers would need to shell out considerable amounts for the software which they have become used to in the schools. However, if the teachers are trained on FOSS alternatives to Windows and Office, at at negligible price (the cost of a CD which is around Rupees ten), each teacher can be a given a copy of the software. The training can also cover the installation of the software, if required. In this way, the teacher training can lead to the actual use of computers in the schools and teachers homes and make the training meaningful and lead to the greater dispersion of ICTs. Currently, most teachers learn to use these products but have no continuity of learning which makes the training futile.

Of course, the issue of FOSS is not only one of cost. Even if proprietary software were offered free of cost, our nation will eventually have economic losses, due to permanent dependency on software monopoly.

These are some of the reasons why Karnataka has chosen FOSS in its own ICT@Schools program. The computers in Karnataka schools run on GNU/Linux platform under this program. We would like to submit that the teacher training in the IT Academies at Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga also need to be aligned to the IT@School program, and hence teachers should be taught on the same FOSS software platforms as well.

We had a meeting with Ms Vandita Sharma last November, along with Dr Richard Stallman, the founder of the global Free Software movement, and explained these issues. She was sympathetic to these arguments on the public benefits from FOSS and mentioned that the department would take appropriate action in this regard as is consistent with the public interest and those of the teachers and children in our government schools. She mentioned that the MOU with Microsoft is expiring in the coming academic year and and requested us to formally write to her in this regard, hence this letter.

We request that the Government take a firm stance in favor of adopting and promoting FOSS and chose FOSS in its software procurement to align the department to the government schools.

A few months back, organisations that are working to promote FOSS came together to establish a 'Coalition of the FOSS Community in India' whose goal is to collaborate with governments and other organisations to promote the adoption of FOSS, specially in the public sector. Several of the member of this coalition are based in Bangalore, including the Centre for Internet and Society, Sampada, Swatantra Malayalam Computing, Deeproot Linux, IT for Change etc. Faculty from IIM-B, Bangalore University as well as other academic institutions are also members of this coalition. Members of this coalition are willing to provide any technical support or guidance that the government may require in this regard. For eg, FOSS curriculum for both schools and for teacher training is available in Kerala and can be adapted to Karnataka schools. It should be noted that FOSS is already being used in many institutions in Karnataka, including IISC, IIIT-B, IIIT-H, IITK and many engineering colleges.

We hope our submission will be considered by the education department as well as by the government and we look forward to working with you to help bring these ideals into reality. If you think it would be useful, we could plan a small workshop / interaction, or even a series of workshops for different stakeholders, to discuss the issue in more detail and look at the implications of the choice of the software platforms for the ICT programs in the department.

We look forward to your response.

Yours truly

Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India (list of signatories is provided overleaf)

May 9^th 2009.

Copy - Commissioner for Public Instruction, Sri Kumar Naik

Copy - State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Sri Selva Kumar

Copy - Principal Secretary, DPAR (Dept of Personnel and Administrative Reforms) e-Governance

Copy - Principal Secretary, Department of IT

enclosed:

Why Government of Karnataka should adopt and promote FOSS

Kerala IT@Schools project

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/letter-to-education-secretary-may-2009

Metaphors and Narratives

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:47:52Z

A course designed for Christ College, Bangalore

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II

Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs.
Course Objectives

The course will serve as an introductory study of Internet technologies and the various social phenomena associated with them to investigate how the Internet becomes a catchall word for contemporary times. Students will explore the several layers of internets to look at the basic debates around questions of identity, subjectivity, gender, and governance, as they have emerged in the last four decades of cybercultures theory. The course will try and initiate new pedagogic practices of thought and research, looking at the several narratives of the internets available to us – from online communities, gaming and pornography to the wider debates around censorship, surveillance and privacy. The emphasis of the course is to de-mystify and consolidate the various narratives of the internet that are available to us from different disciplines and to provide a comprehensive and pedagogic frameworks to make meaning of the digitally inflected world that we live in.

Course Evaluation: Individual assignments from a list of topics or a topic worked out in consultation with the course instructors, depending upon the individual choice of the student.

Course Pedagogy: Contact session class room teaching, film screenings, seminars and discussion groups.

Course Content:

Module 1: Surfing the internets

The ‘Internet’ has become one of the most persuasive and prevalent metaphors of our times. As more and more sections of life and being get inflected by Information and Communication Technologies, more narratives of the ‘Internet’ are produced. These narratives often mystify the Internet – through misnomers or through frameworks from earlier technological paradigms which fail to understand or explain the ‘Internet’ – and are not in synchrony with one another. The first Module introduces the internets in their plurality and looks at the various disciplinary approaches to disentangling the internets.

A brief history of the internet technologies

· Origin and intentions

· The principles that built the internet

· The emergence of the WWW

Internet - Cyberspace

· Understanding Cyberspaces

· Convergent Histories of earlier technologies

· Bridging the virtual-real divide

Pre-Lecture Readings:

Gibson, William. Neruromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Huston, Geoff. “A Decade in the Life of the Internet”. The Internet Protocol Journal. Volume 11 No. 2. 2008.

Lyon, Katie Hafner and Matthew. Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New york: Simon and Shuster, 1996.

Robbins, Kevin. "Cyberspace and the World We Live In." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 1992.

Manovich, Lev. “The Database as a Symbolic Form” in The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.

Michael L. Benedikt, 1991, Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge: MIT Press

Module 2: The body in the digital paradigm

One of the most significant debates, across disciplines trying to engage with internet technologies, is on the site of the body. With cyberspaces providing multiple conditions within which the narratives of the body can be produced, there has been a radical revisiting of what it means to be human, to be gendered, to be sexual, and to be subject to various kinds of regulation and processes of censorship. This module looks at some of the seminal debates around these issues, by exploring various sites of cyberspatial identity and networking.

The body in the cyberspace

· The real body and the virtual body

· Spaces of regulation and bodies of surveillance

· Anthropomorphisation and the need to be human

Gender and Sexuality Online

· Obscenity, pornography and the sexual body

· The gendered being and the cyborg

· Subject to punishment: Role playing and fantasizing online

Pre-lecture readings:

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1996.

Balsamo, Anne. "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Dibbell, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitan Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." The village voice (1994).

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Social-Feminist in the Late 20th Century." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Shah, Nishant. "Material cyborgs; asserted boundaries" European Journal of English Studies 12.2 .2008.

Sengupta, Suddhabrata. Signatures of the Apocalypse”. Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net. (2003)

http://www.metamute.org/en/Signatures-of-the-Apocalypse 5th July, 2005

Module 3: Circulation, Regulation and Intellectual Property

The economics of being online is closely related to the circuits of transmission, the viral networking and the questions of ownership and possession. As the boundaries between the State and the Market blur, there is an increased public and legal discourse on Intellectual Property, the processes of piracy and the need for regulation and intervention. The third module in the paper brings to the fore, the questions of freedom, of open access and equality, and the conditions of regulation that restrict a free flow of information online.

The value of Information

· Knowledge and Copyright

· Notions of possession and value of information online

· Digital Commons and the freedom of expression

Intellectual Property and the law

· Theft and piracy online

· Ownership and usage rights

· IPR and the role of digital technologies

Pre-Lecture Readings:

Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin. 2005.

Liang, Lawrence and Mayur Suresh. “Copyright/Copyleft : Myths about Copyright”.

(2006) http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-suresh010205.htm 21st August, 2008.

Rosemary J. Coombe. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property. Duke University Press.

1998.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/metaphors-and-narratives

Access India Meet-Up, May 2009

sachia — 2011-08-31T10:50:37Z

Meet-up of members of Access India mailing list (open to invitees only)

Access India is an informal mailing list for the visually impaired community in India, in which subscribers primarily discuss technology and various aspects of its accessibility. Although the Access India mailing list, originally started in 2002, was intended to be a forum for discussing technology-related issues for the blind, it has over the years expanded to cover a whole range of social, educational, cultural, political and other issues of significance to the visually impaired community in India. It is one of the largest mailing lists of blind persons in India and has roughly 500 members from all over the country. Members of the Access India community in various cities hold informal gatherings from time to time. An annual national meeting of Access India members is also held, where various issues affecting the community are discussed in detail.

Agenda

2 PM: Welcome address by CIS, hosts of the meet.

2:05 PM: A round of introduction by participants.

2:30 PM: Presentation by representatives from AreaPal, a Bangalore-based social networking group founded by students. areapal allows users to locate and connect with people on the basis of their area and neighborhood. It is a genuine neighbourhood networking service. Apart from that, they also provide user-generated news, events and marketplace based information about a user’s area. For further information, please visit www.areapal.com.

2:40 PM: Question time.

2:50 PM: Presentation by representatives from 3I Infotech, a company which recently launched e-Mudhra, an initiative to roll out digital signatures. The main focus of the discussion will be the accessibility of their product. For additional information, please visit http://www.e-mudhra.com/

3:00 PM: Question time.

5. 3:10 PM: Presentation by representatives from iVolunteer, an organization that matches volunteers seeking volunteering opportunities
with organizations and individuals looking for volunteers in Bangalore. To learn more about the organization, please visit www.ivolunteer.in

3:20 PM: Question time.

6. 3:30 PM: Introduction to Inclusive planet. Inclusive Planet is in the process of building the largest online portal for disabled persons in India. It is intended to be a comprehensive portal containing various resources including employment resources, educational resources, a match-making
channel, accessible books section, discussion boards, resources for medical facilities, sports and entertainment center, etc. We hope to have a
representative from Inclusive Planet demonstrate the site for us, inform us about its scope and expansion plans, and tell us about how we can contribute toward making the site totally accessible. Please visit http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/

3:50 PM: Question time.

4:00 PM: Tea followed by open discussion on technology.

4:45 PM: Vote of thanks and conclusion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/access-india-meet-up-may-2009

Does India need its own Bayh-Dole?

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:58:46Z

Article by Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager at Centre for Internet and Society in the Indian Express, 24 April 2009

Across the world battlelines are being drawn in the normally quiet areas of academia and research. The opposing sides: those in favour of open and collaborative research and development as a means to promote innovation, and those in favour of perpetuating the profits of big pharma companies and academic publishers. Currently before a Select Parliamentary Committee is a controversial law that will deny basic healthcare to millions by making medicines much more expensive, lock up academic knowledge, and help privatise publicly-funded research. The law titled the Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill 2008 (“PUPFIP Bill”, http://bit.ly/pupfip-bill) was tabled last December in the Rajya Sabha by the Minister for Science and Technology. It was created in utmost secrecy by the Department of Science and Technology, without so much as a draft version having been shared with the public for comments.

The PUPFIP Bill is an Indian version of a 1980 US legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act, and as per its statement of objects and reasons, it seeks to promote creativity and innovation to enable India “to compete globally and for the public good”. It aims to do so by ensuring the protection of all intellectual property (meaning copyright, patent, trade mark, design, plant variety, etc.) that is the outcome of government-funded research. The IP rights will be held by the grant recipient, or by the government if the recipient does not choose to protect the IP. This might seem like a good way to enable technology transfer from research institutes to the industry, but that would be a very myopic view, disregarding all evidence related to the failure of the Bayh-Dole Act. Last year Prof. Anthony So of Duke University co-authored an extensive analysis of the Bayh-Dole Act, and warned of the consequences of such legislation in developing countries.

First, such a law will shift the focus of research. Researchers will be inclined to to concentrate their efforts on issues of interest to industry, and which can have immediate benefit. This would force vital fundamental research into neglect since it cannot be commercialised with ease. Research by Saul Lach and Mark Schankerman shows that scientists are influenced by royalty rates, and will thus tend to work on industrial research rather than fundamental research. This creates, or at least exacerbates, what is popularly known as the “90/10 gap”: the fact that ninety per cent of medical research money goes into problems affecting ten per cent of the world’s population, since that ten per cent is richer.

Secondly, this law will have chilling effects on scholarly communications and promote secrecy. The Bill has requirements of non-disclosure by the grantee and the researcher to enable the commercialisation of the research, and requires researchers and institutions to inform the government before all publication of research. Such bureaucratisation of research publications will stultify intellectual pursuits. Such secrecy and permission-raj culture is anathema to intellectual and academic pursuits, where knowledge is sought to be freely disseminated, to be criticised and further revised by others. In South Africa, academics affected by the recent passage of a PUPFIP-type legislation there are questioning its constitutionality as it restrains freedom of speech.

Thirdly, this will lead to our pillars of learning and research becoming like businesses. US universities like Columbia and Duke have found themselves at the receiving end of criticism for their brazen commercialism, encouraged by the Bayh-Dole Act. Instead of promoting greater access to health for the poor, and spending money on research, the universities were spending money on patent litigation in court. The outcome of one of these cases was the rejection of Duke University’s research exemption defence (universities are generally not bound to observe patents when they wished to conduct research). The court held that the university had “business interests” which the research unmistakably furthered. This points at a fundamental divide between universities as places of learning and as places of profiteering. The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSSD) project that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is currently pursuing is a good attempt at promoting a culture of openness and transparency and collaboration, and thus ensuring cheaper and more efficient drug discovery. Even the US government is currently seeking to clear the way for generic versions of biotech drugs. In such an environment, it is counter-intuitive to bring in a regressive law, and goes against innovative efforts such as the OSSD, and will harm the generics industry.

Fourthly, the Bill assumes — erroneously, as an ever-growing amount of research demonstrates (Boldrin & Levine, Bessen & Meurer, etc.) — that intellectual property is the best and only way to promote creativity and innovation. All forms of intellectual property are state-granted monopolistic rights. At a basic level, competition promotes innovations while monopoly retards it. Much of modern science developed without the privilege of patents. Surely, Darwin and Newton were not encouraged by patents. And even whole industries — like the software industry — flourish without patent protection in most of the world.

The commendable aim of ensuring knowledge transfer can be accomplished much better if we refrain from giving away to private corporations (whether pharmaceutical manufacturers or publishers) exclusive rights to the product of publicly-funded research. Scientists and researchers can be encouraged to be consultants to various industrial projects, thereby ensuring that their expertise is tapped. Importantly, open access publishing which helps to ensure wide distribution and dissemination of knowledge is surely more desirable. That is the trend being followed the world over currently. The US president recently signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Bill which makes permanent the National Institutes of Health’s open access policy. By doing so, he symbolically rejected calls (such as the much-criticised Conyers Bill) to privatise publicly funded research outputs. Thus, there are many ways by which the government can encourage innovation and creativity, and further public interest. The PUPFIP Bill, which will have deleterious unintended consequences if it is passed, is not one of them.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/does-india-need-its-own-bayh-dole

An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:53Z

In an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Dutch open source activist Arjen Kamphuis discussed his experience of successfully working with the government for a policy mandating open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands.

In 2002 Arjen Kamphuis co-authored a parliament motion to mandate open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands. The motion was unanimously accepted and, in 2007, became policy. The Netherlands thus became the first western country to make the use of open standards in public sector IT mandatory. Arjen is now working to e xport this set of policies to other European countries with the help of local political parties and business partners.

Arjen discussed his experience of lobbying for this policy change and some other questions related to his work as a consultant on IT strategy and the implications of nanotechnology and biotechnology in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society.

The Centre for Internet and Society: What is the Dutch government's policy on FOSS and Open Standards specifically and intellectual property rights in general? Provide some history, name the main lobbying factions in the Netherlands and their policy positions. What was your role in the formulation of these policies?

Arjen Kamphuis: The national action plan 'The Netherlands in Open Connection' is the government's answer to a unanimous vote in parliament in November 2002. The parliament stated that the market for desktop software was not functioning as it should and that significant vendor lock-in effects were harming both individual citizens and society as a whole. It requested maximum efforts from the government to change this situation. The suggested method for changing was mandating open standards in all public sector IT and actively supporting the adoption of open source software wherever functionally and technically feasible.

I was one of the people who got this process started by contacting a member of parliament from the Green Party. This was triggered by my inability to access the website of the national railway on 1 January 2002. The website had been redesigned and only allowed access to visiters with Internet Explorer. As a Linux user, I had previously had comparable problems with local government websites and electronic tax forms (usage of which was mandatory for small businesses like my consulting start-up).

After the unanimous vote in parliament, several people in the Dutch open source community, including me, kept the pressure on the government by monitoring major procurements and writing questions for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ask the government. In 2004 this led to a breakthrough when the Justice Ministry ran a project to procure 147 million euros' worth of desktop software without going through a proper multi-vendor selection process. They only talked to one vendor, and that is against European Union regulations. Since some of the civil servants working on this project were gagged, we can conclude that some people were aware they were breaking the law, yet went ahead anyway.

When the news broke we made sure the MEPs were armed with the proper questions the next day, and the contract was dropped. In reply to questions asked to the government by the MEPs, the responsible ministers admitted that the government was very dependent on Microsoft for basic functioning of its office environments; that this was a problem; and that the government would take active steps to remedy this situation by moving forward with the requests made in 2002 by parliament.

Two-and-a-half years and an election later, a new under-Minister for Economic Affairs, Frank Heemskerk, took up the challenge and promised a comprehensive policy. I gave input for this plan in mid-2007 and it was formally published and adopted later that year as a national policy for all government and public-sector (i.e. tax funded) organisations.

The policy has three objectives:

improving interoperability between public sector organisations;
lowering the vendor-dependence of the public sector;
improving the functioning of the software market and supporting the Dutch knowledge economy

Some of the practical measures are the mandating of the use of open standards in all public sector organisations. Whenever software is procured, open source should be considered and preferred whenever functionally adequate. These two very basic rules change the entire market for IT in the Dutch public sector (40% of the entire market) and is having a profound effect on the way software vendors offer their products as well as the negotiating power of the client organisations.

I continue to advise both the decision makers and the civil servants overseeing the implementation of the policy.

CIS: What is the current status on the implementation of these policies?

AK: After a slow start the government organisation that is responsable for overseeing the implementation is now up and running. The basic problem is lack of awareness about both the practical value that open standards and open source software can contribute and the underlying political reasons for making it the preferred option for government information processing.

Thus a lot of the work for the next few years will be communicating these ideas to civil servants (be they IT professionals or managers who have other jobs). The policy helps a lot because it puts some serious weight behind the whole process. The fact that government organisations have to support Open Document Format for instance significantly heightens their interest in the technical subject matter!

So the policy gives the drive needed to get things moving and now it is up to us to communicate the how and the why in a way that is understandable for people who are new to these concepts. I have no doubt it will be a long process, we have over 20 years of proprietary legacy built up in our public institutions. Replacing those systems with open alternatives will take many years. All the greater a reason to proceed with some urgency.

The complete policy document has been translated into English and released under Creative Commons Licence:
http://appz.ez.nl/publicaties/pdfs/07ET15.pdf

In December 2007 I gave a talk in Berlin. Here a summary, slides and video are available:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2387.en.html

CIS: What can a country like India learn from the Dutch government's experience in eGovernance and ICT in Education?

AK: I am not familiar with the Indian political process but these are some of my lessons learned:

- The government will not do anything unless constant and significant pressure is applied by citizens. Politicians and civil servants only act if the pain of acting is less than the pain of not acting. Change is achieved by citizens standing up and working on these problems without guarantee of any reward or even achieving any results (it took us five years to get from a unanimous vote in parliament to an actual policy).

- Big IT companies may be your friend or your enemy. But even if they are your friends they generally will not be at the forefront of political action that could be seen as controversial. Once policies are pushed beyond the controversial stage and have been adopted as official policy some of them will support it. Others, with much to lose, will fight you and the policy every step of the way. The more money or loss of market share is involved the more radical the methods that are employed. Massive lobbying, applying political pressure through foreign governments, bribery and all kinds of other activities are well-funded, well organised and very common.

- In moving forward with these policies it's the lack of knowledge and vision with the the management of institutions that is by far the biggest bottleneck. Without a clear policy from the top it is impossible to get things moving in most organisations.

- Another big problem in switching over local governments and other smaller organisations is the fact that many of the advantages of such a switch is national and/or macro-economic in nature while the initial cost and risk is micro-economic in nature. Hence again the need for a national policy.

- The funding required to make significant improvements is often not that large compared to the existing operational budgets. Investing in the smart use of IT in education for instance is something that can pay for itself very quickly. This is generally also true for adoption of open source and open standards in general. By just reducing the yearly spend on software licences by 1% the entire government program can be funded.

- Simply stopping the procurement of new licences (while continuing the use of those already paid for) can often free up enough money to finance a migration process. This has been the case in the city of Amsterdam and the French Gendarmes.

- The actual value of better government services or education is hard to quantify in monetary terms. How do we value improved responsiveness, transparency, national sovereignty in information processing and supporting local service companies instead of foreign software companies?

- IT education should focus on understanding methods and principles, not products. The product life-cycle is 18-36 months, the educational process takes many years and the length of a career is decades. Any education with a focus on products leads to knowledge that is irrelevant by the time the degree is finished. Teach people to drive a car, not just a Volkswagen or Tata.

- The cost of physical books per student per year in the Netherlands is now greater that the cost of a laptop. This is insane since the content of those books is generally written by teachers who get paid very little for it. Using the funds to pay those teachers instad of the publishers and releasing the content under a free licence will free up resources to develop better educational programs and provide all students with computational tools to use them. All without increasing the total cost compared to our current situation. The financial numbers will be different for India but the basic principle is the same and works even better given the larger scale of India. The cost of producing and distributing electronic educational content will drop practically to zero when compared to physical on a per-student basis. Using funds to support teachers in the use of e-learning with open content is the way forward.

CIS: How can a local support environment for open technologies be created? Can local SMEs ever substitute for the transnational proprietary giants?

AK: Whether SMEs can supplant multinationals depends on the product being replaced. CPU manufacturing requires a very high upfront investment in R&D and manufacturing capability. This is usually far beyond any but a handful of companies. With software development and services things are very different. Software development only requires a human with programming skills, a good idea and a computer. The Free Software Movement has shown clearly that distributed methods of software development can lead to high quality products with excellent local support systems. Local organisations (or communities that are not even organisations) can often understand local needs and respond to local changes much better, faster and cheaper than large, lumbering corporations. If local organisations work together globally to share knowledge (and code) for those parts they all need they can beat any centralised system.

What many senior business and government leaders are struggling with is the realisation that many of the 'truths' they have learned while studying economics or business management or some such subject turn out to be empirically incorrect. For example: it has become clear there is no causal relationship between the cost of software and its quality or utility. This must be a fact that is difficult to truly understand and accept if you have been brought up believing the gospel of the Anglo-Saxon economic worldview. The current economic crisis is a great help in questioning some of those beliefs and opens up room for new ideas about economic vs. societal value of technology and its relationship to businesses trying to earn a living.

CIS: Could you tell us about the Dutch government's rollback on electronic voting machines? What is your opinion on the use of electronic voting machines in the upcoming elections in India?

AK: From the mid '80s onward, voting computers were introduced in the Netherlands. By 2006, the vast majority of all elections were being performed by proprietary computer systems. Citizens would press a button and then go home to watch TV. Some software that no-one could control, monitor or properly audit would spit out a result and that would be it -- new government. Only a handful of engineers (all working for the companies that made the voting computers) actually knew what the software did and could make the computer system say anything they wanted.

When the city of Amsterdam (the last holdout using paper ballots) announced in 2006 that it was moving to voting computers, a group of activists organised a campaign to ban voting computers. We felt that the very nature of democracy was under attack by running the election process in a way that makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to check the validity of the election. It also makes fraud a lot harder to detect. Detectability of fraud is the one of the primary properties any election process should have. We all know election fraud is also possible with non-electronic means but keeping it a secret is much harder in such cases (as we saw in the US and Zimbabwean election over the last years). There was a actual case of suspected voter fraud in a Dutch municipal election and the judge concluded that while the fraud seemed likely it could not be proven. Regrettably for the suspected council member the fraud could also not be disproven. This shows very clearly that such a method is wholly unsuitable for application in real democratic processes.

Through lots of media attention, a few spectacular hacks showing the technical insecurity of the systems, and legal pressure, we forced the government in 2007 to reverse the approval of the voting computers and go back to an all-paper balloting system. This reversal is part of a global backlash against electronic voting systems. Comparable changes have been going on in many US states and all over Europe.

I think India should have voting process that can be understood and monitored by its citizens. This understanding and monitoring should be possible without requiring advanced degrees in computer science, software engineering and electronics. The only way to have such a process is when there is a paper ballot involved. Such a ballot could be printed by a computer to increase the ease of use but all-electronic solutions are ruled out by the basic demands of what a democracy is.

India should move to either all paper systems or voting computer backed-up by a voter-verified paper trail.

Are more extensive telling of the tale can be found here: http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

This is a link to the Berlin CCC conference of Rop Gongrijp's 2007 presentation (with video): http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2342.en.html

http://www.blackboxvoting.org has a wealth of information on this subject.

CIS: What are the services provided by Gendo? Could you describe some of the projects that you have undertaken?

AK: My company (gendo.nl) also provides consulting services in the area of IT strategy, development of open IT architectures and implementing those in mixed open source/proprietary environments. We are currently advising both national and local government organisations in the implementation of policies and plans to move to open standards and open source software. We are also involved in projects where we do the actual development and implementation of new systems to enable innovation and lessen the dependance of our client on proprietary systems. Currently we are involved with a healthcare organisation where we are assisting in re-architecting their entire IT environment to allow service innovation, lower cost and increase information security.

We have also been involved in information security work and other auditing in the financial services and government sector. Here our activities focus on the grey area between technology and process.

Outside the field of IT we also do other consulting work such as scenario planning and strategic future studies, mostly for large corporate clients. Most of the big Anglo-Dutch multinationals such as Shell or Unilever are on our client list. We also have a large number of clients in the financial services and insurance sector.

For all of these clients we organise presentations and brainstorming sessions, often preceded by research. This helps the leaders in those organisations think about the nature of rapid, technology-driven changes in their markets and the world in general. These insights are then translated into new products, services and ways of delivering them.

Forgive me if this all sounds a bit vague but with many of these clients there is some confidentiality agreement involved.

CIS: Could you tell us more about yourself? Maybe you would like to share some formative experiences.

AK: Writing my first paper on black holes at age 11 showed me that grown-ups usually also don't know what is going on in the universe either. Despite rumours to the contrary parents, teachers, senior managers and politicians are not all-knowing and are stumbling about just like most two-year-olds where complex issues are concerned.

Over the last quarter century I've had this intuition reconfirmed again and again. In a world that is changing faster and faster experience becomes obsolete rather quickly and wisdom is no longer the sole purview of older, more senior, people. We need young smart-asses who have not yet learned what is impossible, so they go out there and do it.

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Arjen Kamphuis (born 1972) studied Science & Policy at Utrecht University and worked for IBM as Unix specialist, Tivoli consultant and software instructor. As IT-strategy consultant at Twynstra Gudde he was involved in starting up Kennisnet, the Dutch educational network. Since 2001 he is operating as an independent adviser of companies and governments. He co-authored, in 2002, a motion in parliament that ultimately turned, in 2007, into a full-fledged policy of the Dutch government mandating the use of open source software in all government and public sector IT operations.

Arjen at present divides his attention between IT-policy and the convergence of IT, biotechnology and nanotechnology and its social and economic implications. His customers include: Shell, Unilever, Pfizer, Stork, and various hospitals, governmental institutions and insurance companies. Arjen guest lectures on technology policy at various universities and colleges.

When not consulting Arjen is actively involved in (digital) civil liberties, the open source movement and criticizing the war on terror.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-arjen-kamphuis

International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:34Z

Open Access activist Madhan Muthu recently attended the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, held in Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009, in company with CIS Distinguished Fellow Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. In this entry, as a guest blogger for CIS, he files a report on the proceedings at the workshop.

I was in Amsterdam for the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, with Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam of CIS and other participants from UK, USA, Japan, and Australia. The workshop was funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER Project. The aim of the workshop was to draft plans for the future course of international repositories’ action.

The workshop started with a keynote speech by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project. Much of his talk focused on DRIVER experience. Beyond individual repositories and related services, he explained the need for an internationally coordinated repositories infrastructure. Soon after the keynote, participants were divided into four breakout groups to enage in parallel discussion and to draft action plans on the following topics:

International Organization
Identifier Infrastructure
Citation Services
Repositories Handshake

I participated in the Repositories ‘handshake’ group. The handshake group, which consisted of mostly repository practitioners and service providers, was moderated by Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh. Initially, there was a bit of effort in reaching the definition of ‘repositories handshake’ and what it was actually intended for. After deliberations on service requirements, ingest support services, machine interoperability and workflow enhancement, the group settled on 'deposit opportunities' as its focus. Two-side handshakes were considered: one with authors, where the handshake action naturally twisted to a ‘begging’ action (in the present global repository scenario) and on the other side, handshakes with service developers by ensuring (minimally sufficient) quality metadata and interoperability.

On the second day, our group continued its discussions on creating conducive 'deposit opportunities' on the principles of more (content), better (quality metadata), easy (uploading) and rewarding (for depositor). The group agreed upon eight purposeful handshake use cases and multiphase action plan. There was a consensus on a first phase work plan which would achieve, in six months' time, at least a few key use cases like:

Easy deposit method for multi-authored papers, with different affiliations from different countries, in multiple repositories
Communication between institutional, subject and funding repositories
Publisher deposits in repositories (IR/SR)
Institute induced deposits

We had two breakout group presentations during the course of the workshop, in which moderators discussed the progress made by each group. This helped members of the groups to understand what the other groups were doing.

Finally, all participants assembled at the plenary session of the workshop, at which moderators of each breakout group presented the product of the one and a half day deliberations. In my view, there was considerable progress made by the Citation Services group. Leslie Carr, who was the moderator of the group, talked about the plan of setting up a repository based citation test bed and developing a competitive text mining algorithm to cull references from a document in repositories.

The next impressive development came from the Repository Identifiers group. The moderator of the group talked about strategies of using existing resources to build identifiers for people, repositories, organisations and objects (see presentation here). Dale Peters acknowledged the contribution of Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam at the ‘International Organisation’ group’s final presentation.

Clifford Lynch of CNI summed up of the outcomes of the break out groups in his closing remarks. He envisioned repositories as a component of a larger knowledge sharing infrastructure rather than as mere archives of institutional outputs. He also prioritised 'Identifier Infrastructure' as the need of the moment and asked for a quick action on it.

There was a funders' meeting after the workshop, the outcomes of which are yet to surface. With pre-workshop wiki discussions on repository use cases and tweets (Twitter messages) during the program, the very form of the workshop was different from anything I had previously experienced.

During the workshop, I met a few key people involved in the DRIVER project, particularly Dr Paolo Manghi from ISTI-CNR, Italy, an organisation that takes care of repository validation. I learned a little about DRIVER, which has come up with a set of crisp metadata and interoperability guidelines to ensure smooth exchange of data between European repositories and service providers. The guidelines have been translated into three other languages, showing their international acceptance. To streamline repository developments in India, the time is right (since the number of repositories are small) to start a DRIVER-like initiative to ensure metadata uniformity in Indian repositories for easy exchange.

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Guest blogger Madhan Muthu has a Masters in Library and Information Science, and has worked at the National Institute of Technology as an Assistant Librarian since March 2004. He is heavily involved as a volunteer in India's open access movement. Presently, he is coordinating the Oriya Books Digitisation project in partnership with other libraries. Prior to NIT, he was at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, for about six years.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report

Archive and Access: The Inalienable Right to the Archives - Entering the Capital

rochelle — 2011-08-23T04:42:13Z

This entry complements the prior discussion by Aparna Balachandran of the Delhi State Archives and its status as a repository of records. Her discussion compares the place of the user and that of the document in the Delhi State Archives as opposed to in the National Archives. This post by Rochelle Pinto discusses questions relating to the National Archives of India and other archival entities.

Though one approaches all state archives with apprehension about possible obstacles in the way of research, it would be a mistake to think that all have the same self-perception or anxieties as the Delhi-based National Archives of India. The NAI, one of the largest repositories of colonial and post-independence records, is overseen by the Ministry of Culture, but also, by default, by the Home Ministry. Since it is the repository of ‘non-current records’, the NAI becomes the recipient of de-classified documents and receives directives from time to time from the Home Ministry regarding restrictions to be placed on public viewing of documents.

This fact generates an over-hanging awareness of potential reprimands and memos that could issue from these Ministries, asking for explanations for why certain documents were released. A direct result of this is the pro-active censorship of materials such as maps of disputed territories or documents that ‘may incite communal disharmony’ by the archival staff themselves. One member of the staff, for instance, disallowed the reproduction of a map of the Tibetan region on the grounds that it would ‘jeopardise the geo-political interests of the country’, and recounts how he was responsible for withholding certain documents that were asked for in the Emergency period, that would have impacted the then office of the leader of the opposition, Charan Singh.

The NAI thus sees itself as closely wedded to the state and as a responsible guardian of potentially impactful documents that would have dire consequences in the wrong hands. No other state archive quite sees itself as the official concealer of the state’s dirty linen, and the Delhi archive, in that sense, is the apex institution in the degree to which it alone manifests emotions displayed typically by state archives across the country: secrecy, responsibility, control, paternalism, righteousness as the arbiter of access.

This is in direct contrast to the functioning and world view of many of the archivists, who in fact declare that the archives are technically open to all citizens, and are a public repository. This legal fact is predictably enough mediated through other legal qualifications about sensitivity and interests of the nation, and looped through a relay of permissions solicited from various authorities. A search for a conspiracy of concealment would draw a blank in most state archives. What works is a sort of relay of apprehensiveness and bureaucratic lag, with most staff looking over their shoulders to watch who sees them hand over any document from a list of publications available in their bookshop, to a list of documents acquired from the British Library through official exchange agreements. Save those who are higher up in the hierarchy and more secure in their positions, acquiring information could necessitate an RTI application purely to surmount the anxiety generated by informal questioning.

Archivists themselves are aware of this. They point to the fact that the maximum difficulty is encountered at the gate, where it can take a full half-hour or more to get past the security, get a daily pass issued, etc. Senior members of at least two prestigious archives in the capital pointed to the security guard’s authority at the gate as being the biggest hurdle to accessing the archives. Some point to the ‘caution exercised by the hatchet’ at the Ministry level, even before documents arrive in the public domain.

Pramod Mehra, the Assistant Director of the Archives indicates that little has changed since 1923 in the form of record-keeping, a consciousness brought in by the colonial government. The strife over public access can be recounted from the time of the colonial government with differing views exercised by changing governor-generals. The archives, he states, function as a mediator between the creating agency such as the Ministries, and scholars. But, he insists, all who carry bona fide documents proving their identity as citizens have an inalienable right to enter the archives.

Technically therefore, there seem to be sufficient spaces for intervention by users, and in fact, as the earlier post states, the increase in the number and kind of users has in itself forced an expansion in the categories of users permitted. It would appear that this is the trend everywhere. Where archival records accidentally have non-historical functions, as in the Delhi Archives, the archive alters eventually to accommodate users and it would seem that generating such users and uses is the easier way to pragmatise the question of access.

The other mechanism is to find hooks within the system through which to enable access. Take the case of the Central Secretariat Library which is housed within the Secretariat complex in New Delhi. The Library sees itself as a repository of government records and documents, open to government employees by right, for any research they may want to conduct. As a transition from the colonial period, this library stores official documents that pertain to the past of the current state. Since the library views itself as open to the public for generalised reading, there is not much anxiety over making older books and documents available. A student working on the North East, for instance, will find it cumbersome to enter the National Archives and to access maps of the region which may be far more easily traced in the Central Secretariat Library.

What is of even greater interest is that this is the library that holds any document acquired by a foreign entity in collaboration with a state institution. So, for instance, the online Digital South Asia Library, a consortium that is housed by the University of Chicago website, collected a range of literary works in Indian languages based on the compilations of a national librarian. A copy of this collection lies with the Central Secretariat, as do microfilms that have been received as part of an exchange programme with the British Library. The current director of this Library appears only too willing to encourage collaborations from historians towards the cataloguing of these collections, which once again are closed to the public merely because adequate cataloguing procedures are not in place. In an interview that appeared to open doors, he insisted that generating public pressure around the significance of the collection would work as a persuasive force, as evidence that the funds allocated for digitisation or preservation are in fact needed, and that an audience exists for such material.

It seems as though appealing to abstract principles of access, citizenship and rights calls forth nameless and immovable blocking mechanisms inbuilt in the state, whereas tinkering with minor functions that do not invoke its broader raison d’être allows one to enter unnoticed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-inalienable-right-to-the-archives-entering-the-capital

Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:28Z

Prof N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, discusses open access in his keynote address at the 26 March 2009 one-day conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons'.

On 26 March 2009, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Aeronautical Laboratories, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, organised a day-long conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons', as a way to highlight the need for Open Access in Indian academia and research. The speakers and panellists included Prof N. Mukunda of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Prof John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dr D.K. Sahu, MD and CEO of Medknow Publications, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow with CIS, Dr A.R. Upadhya, Director of NAL, Mr N.V. Sathyanarayana, CMD. of Informatics, and Mr Sunil Abraham, Director of Policy at CIS.

Prof N. Mukunda gave the keynote address, which is reproduced below.

“Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories – Some Viewpoints from an Academy”

Invited key note address at the Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons (Open Access)’ on 26 March 2009, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore

N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore

1) Dr. Upadhya, Dr. Goudar, Prof. Arunachalam, Dr. Poornima Narayana, Prof. Chan, Prof. Willinsky, Prakash, Chandramohan from the Academy, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen, may I on behalf of the Indian Academy of Sciences express a warm welcome to all of you to this one day Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons’. This is the Academy’s Platinum Jubilee Year, and for NAL it is the Golden Jubilee; and it is a pleasure for the Academy to join NAL and the ‘Centre for Internet & Society’ in hosting this meeting. Thanks also to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for their initiatives in organizing this event. I am here substituting for Prof. D. Balasubramanian, President of the Academy, as he has to be at a meeting at Chennai today. If only the fanciful Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics were correct, the world could have split into two copies, and Prof. Balasubramanian also into two copies, one in Chennai and one here; and he could have spoken in both places simultaneously! In the tea break, I can tell you more about this interpretation of quantum mechanics, if any of you are interested.

I am used to giving seminars and colloquiua, on subjects of my research, but never have I given a key note address or an Executive Summary. These are new to me. Also, as you all know, President Obama always needs a teleprompter while giving his fine speeches. Similarly, I cannot speak without a written text in front of me, so please permit me this luxury. Let me also add that I believe in the well-known saying — levity is the soul of wit.

2) The Academy’s efforts in the Open Access direction go back to 1998. It was then that the journal Pramana was made available on the Academy website completely free for all to read. Thereafter all the other Academy journals have also been made freely available online, so now all ten Academy journals are available. Quite recently the speed of access has been considerably improved. In 2006 the Academy entered into an agreement with Springer to co-publish the international online and print editions of the ten journals, but with the proviso that world-wide open access on the Academy website would continue. So now there is the version on the Academy site, which is accessible world-wide and free, and also the value-added SpringerLink version available to paid subscribers. This arrangement is working quite well. The download figures from both sites are quite encouraging, and in any case the visibility of the journals world-wide is much better than it used to be. INSA by the way has signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration and its journals are also freely accessible.

3) Two important things happened in April 2008, just about a year ago. INSA arranged a meeting on Open Access and Copyright issues on 26th April, 2008, again thanks to Prof. Arunachalam’s initiative; and Prof. Balaram wrote an editorial in Current Science on 10th April 2008 on the subject ‘Science Journals: Issues of Access’. I must confess I am completely ignorant and totally naive in all these matters, so whenever necessary I turn to one of Prof. Balaram’s numerous beautiful editorials – and get educated about the finer points of English literature at the same time – I also read some of the steady stream of emails from Prof. Arunachalam which arrive each day. He is constantly exhorting us to do various things – like Mr. This or Mr. That we should give him the honorary title “Mr. Open Access”, it is a onepoint agenda with him. So I learn a lot from both these sources which are at least openly accessible to me. Incidentally a collection of Prof. Balaram’s editorials is likely to be published soon, and several of us have been asked to write editorials to introduce his editorials on various subjects. Science journals are proliferating in number and spiraling in costs. So these raise difficult problems of affordability for libraries and institutions. There are also issues of judging quality, and looking at the economics of the entire process, the whole information chain – overall costs of dissemination of research results, journal publishing and production, refereeing, circulation… who pays for what, who profits, is it reasonable or exorbitant? There is the impact of technologies on all this – these are times of extremely rapid changes, with new undreamt of opportunities appearing all the time. These are true of other arenas of life as well – in education, governance, entertainment, in news communication and so on. As a physicist I cannot help remembering that all this began in 1948 with Claude Shannon’s Classical Theory of Information – a major conceptual revolution which showed that information could be measured, and so could its transmission and fidelity and so on. Such a beautiful set of ideas – a fascinating mathematical structure embedded within the classical theory of probability. And this was accompanied and later followed by technical advances, transistors (1947), semiconductors and so on. Balaram’s view is that Institutional Repositories are more easily achievable than Open Access. This may greatly change the structure and traditional roles of libraries as we know them, at least as far as the sciences are concerned. He mentioned the recent much-heralded Harvard University faculty decision which ‘authorizes Harvard to place a faculty member’s work in a repository that will be available to all at no cost’. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken a similar even wider step very recently, on the 18th of this month.

There is also discussion of who pays – or should pay – for the costs of publishing research results – a shift from the traditional ‘researcher pays’ era through ever increasing subscription costs to a new ‘author pays’ arrangement. The idea is that agencies that fund research – whether private or public – should include costs of publication in their support. Balaram mentions that for some high impact journals, the cost to the author for one paper can be as much as Rs. 2.5 lakhs! When I saw this, I could not help wondering – what would someone like Albert Einstein do in such a situation? He was working in a Patent Office in Berne as an assistant third class about a hundred years ago, and of course he had no research funding of any kind; but in his spare time he wrote papers that revolutionized physics! His papers were all published, he even received free reprints – but how would he fare today? One gets the impression that subscription costs for well-known journals in those days were quite reasonable; and in historical accounts one reads that people like Julius Springer were in frequent contact with figures like Arnold Sommerfeld and others in a mutually beneficial and enlightened atmosphere.
It seems we have to accept and acknowledge that the methods of doing science, the costs, the sociology of the scientific enterprise, have all changed enormously. It has become intensely competitive, one can even say that cut-throat methods are common, it seems the scientific enterprise is no longer the domain of scholars alone. Claims for priority are severe. In a piece that appeared on 9th February 2009 in the New York Times, celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, the writer said:

“One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; and for 12 years more before its sequel, ‘The Descent of Man’, which explored how his theory applied to people.”

The old times are gone forever, the times of Darwin and Einstein. The game has become a game, with new rules of play. The new patterns and methods however seem more natural for the younger generation to adjust to, but some of us of an older generation cannot forget the past so easily.

4) The INSA meeting discussed many aspects including the need to educate working scientists about their rights with respect to copyright. There is a recent email from Arunachalam on this from Amsterdam. Again I think younger scientists are aware of their rights more than old fogeys like me, we are the ones needing education. There is a need for change in Copyright patterns, especially for books out of print, to decide when something should move into the Public Domain, and so on. Some of the major INSA recommendations are to granting agencies to mandate Open Access for results of publicly funded research, and to scientists to publish in Open Access journals by choice.

Some tasks are set for the Academies too, such as setting up Institutional Repositories, and to work toward Open Access in all possible ways. In this context, it is possible that the three national Science Academies of India – IASc, INSA and NASI – may try to cooperate in these matters, as they have been doing in the case of science education recently.

5) From its inception, publication of journals has been a major effort of the Indian Academy of Sciences. There has always been a striving to maintain standards. Today we can say about our ten journals, they are reasonably good, about the best from India. The main concerns – in these times of very rapid change and impact of new technologies – are: how do we maintain refereeing and review standards, how to tackle increasing cases of plagiarism, and while coping with all these how do we move in the Open Access direction? Quality of journals is most precious for the Academy, this is hard to achieve and to maintain, the whole enterprise seems to be under pressure.

6) Let me end by returning to Balaram and INSA and mention a recent initiative of the Academy. With generous help from the Indian Institute of Science, we are trying and hoping to set up an Institutional Repository covering all publications of all Fellows past and present. Starting since 1934 – the total number of Fellows is about 1500, 900 present and 600 past. And the total number of research publications may be around 60,000 or 75,000. The hope is that in this Platinum Jubilee year this effort should get started and make some progress. We should try to get a substantial number of entries into the Repository within this year, catch up as soon as possible, then make it an ongoing automatic process. Otherwise many of us here today will also become past Fellows before the job is done. Getting titles and abstracts seems easy, with full text there may be problems, but here Arunachalam tells us authors have more rights than they realize. Let us see what we can do. It seems about 50 institutions in India already have set up such repositories, but we have miles to go before we sleep!

I am happy to have given the first key note address of my life today – I am sure the day’s discussions will be full of ideas and fruitful. It has been a pleasure to have been here, my thanks to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for inviting me, and most of all to Prof. Balasubramanian for asking me to be here in his place.

Thank you.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journals-open-access-copyright-repositories

Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:23Z

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.

This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.

In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.

Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.

Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.

Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes (7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).

In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.

'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.

Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter. There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The placement of the Ashoka Chakra or the States in the painting is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of the arguments advanced.

It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' (9)

A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.

Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.

Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.

Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.

I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television).

Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane

In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography.

'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".

However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'

The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.

The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into Secret Games 3 and Dark Dancers is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be classified hard or near-hard'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.

Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all.

Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane

In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as Dev.D does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.

After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.

The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself).

Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.

*****
Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?

Endnotes:

1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'.
2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005
3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity
4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp
5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms
6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.
7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc.
8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.
9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008

10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999
12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996
13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.
14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with Jamie King and Peter Mann

siddharth — 2011-08-04T04:41:31Z

Film-makers Jamie King (producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series) and Peter Mann, in conversation with Siddharth Chadha, on 'Dark Fibre', their latest production, being filmed in Bangalore

'Dark Fibre' is a documentary/fiction hybrid by J. J. King, producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series, which has already reached over six million people online and is working towards achieving international television distribution, and Peter Mann, a British film-maker whose most recent work is titled 'Sargy Mann'.

'Dark Fibre' is set amongst the cablewallahs of Bangalore, and uses the device of cabling to traverse different aspects of informational life in the city. It follows the lives of real cablewallahs and examines the political status of their activities.The fictional elements arrive in the form of a young apprentice cablewallah who attempts to unite the disparate home-brew networks in the city into a grassroots, horizontal 'people's network'. Some support the activity and some vehemently oppose it -- but what no one expects is the emergence of a seditious, unlicensed and anonymous new channel which begins to transform people's imaginations in the city. Our young cable apprentice is tasked with tracking down the channel, as powerful political forces array themselves against it. Not only the 'security' of the city, but his own wellbeing depend on whether he finds it, and whether it proves possible to stop its distribution. Meanwhile, mysterious elements from outside India -- possibly emissaries of a still-greater power -- are appearing on the scene. This quest for the unknown channel is reminiscent of a modern-day 'Moby Dick', with the city of Bangalore as the high seas and our cable apprentice a reluctant Ahab. The action is a combination of verite, improvisation and scripted action.

In conversation with Jamie and Peter in Bangalore

Q: How did you get the idea to make Dark Fibre, a fiction film?

Peter:

We first met through BritDoc--British Documentary--and they run Channel 4 which is a Film Foundation. They have been good to us. They funded both Steal This Film and 'Sargy Mann'--a film on my father who is a blind man. They organised a meeting of all the directors they had funded and we met there. We were both thinking about what to do next and felt frustrated because we were making documentaries but really wanted to make fiction. We both shared the same ideas, with regard to shooting something completely as it is but presenting it in a fictional context.

Jamie:

And furthermore, we agreed that documentaries are not really real life. Because at the end of the day, I will keep only what I like, make you look at the way I want you to, I would cut you out of the picture if I don't agree with you. This happens even with the most worthy of the films. And you can be more truthful in fiction because its always a subjective truth. Fiction allows things to remain more real. I don't need an argument in the film. If I can just say, here is one guy's story and this is his story, then you can see the city with no bullshit. The story would allow you to look at things as they are; it's partly that idea behind Dark Fibre.

Peter:

This is in some way related to the concept of the artistic truth. You use all the tools at your disposal to tell a story, not just literal facts. This is about presenting things within an atmosphere, presenting things in a context. This then adds up to someone understanding something about the world, and I think fiction serves that better than documentary.

Q: What brings you to India to make Dark Fibre?

Jamie:

I think the cablewallah networks are unique. I have never seen anything like this anywhere else myself. India is also in a very, very interesting time and place. The idea of information as a commodity is alive here as it isn't in many other places. The value of information is very high here. There is a western imaginary of Bangalore which is immediately fascinating. It's the place where our information is processed. This is where our credit card and our phone data goes. And it enters a weird black market that we don't understand. This is the cliché. We already have cliché films about Bombay and call centers. We do not want to put a call center into the film because that is already the imagined cliché vision of Bangalore. It is obviously far more sophisticated than that. And in some ways it is far patchier than that. Who are these information workers? What are they doing and at which level are they doing it? Are they the street workers putting cables into walls or is it the guy at Infosys who is hiring people and teaching them to fake English accents? Which is the real information worker? That variegation of information life in Bangalore is interesting, not just to us, but, I think, to everybody. Information dexterity is perceived as the signature of Northern dominance. The ability to manipulate information, to move intellectual property, to transform an idea into a product, to transform someone else's idea into your property. That kind of dexterity is seen as the keynote of western dominance. And watching a developing country transform into an information dextrous economy, seeing information dextrous people is amazing. And then there is the patchiness of it--who gets left behind? Who gets included? Whats missed out and what is added in that vision? How is it manipulated in favor of big businesses? And all of this is fascinating not only from an orientalist's point of view but from a general economic-socio-political point of view.

Q: What is the underlying concept that brought about Dark Fibre?

Jamie:

While making 'Steal This Film' we spent a year on a 36 minute film trying to make an argument that would be staunch, impactful, and radical. What we learned is that it's very difficult to set out to argue your way to the truth. It's relatively easier to let the world itself speak and in the meanwhile observe it in detail. The kind of issues we are engaging with in Dark Fibre are around people's relationships with information and their relationship with freedom. These are very, very hard to nail down and speak about in a radical way. These are things left to the Intellectual Property lawyers, it's already happening, it's already cliché. All the arguments are already written. And even after a year of Steal This Film, it's shown in liberal universities – Wait! Liberal universities? I was supposed to be an anarchist! We want to go further. We want to tell people things through an image.

Peter:

Our idea of relationships is exploring the parallel physical communications networks and the virtual networks. In a city like Bangalore you see it. The traffic here is chaotic but it works. How? There is no answer to that. But it provokes questions. Through Dark Fibre, we are trying to say that there is a potential network in the city (cablewallahs) which is currently being unused and asking what it would take to unlock that potential and where would it take us if that really happens.

Q: Why the cablewallahs? What is so fascinating about them?

Jamie:

Yes, we are interested in the cablewallah network and I think it's quite perverse that it makes people from around here laugh. You see cablewallahs as a fact of life, probably a mundane fact of life. Westerners, Europeans, who are used to orderly deployments of information technology are completely blown away when you tell them that this is how it works in India. Ad hoc, grassroots, messy, out of control.

Peter:

To the West, it is just unthinkable that the government would allow something like these networks, which supply 24 hours television. To not have these under government control is unthinkable.

Jamie:

So, obviously, we are at a point of transition where it's unthinkable to the Global North and it would become unthinkable here too. We are in the middle of that shift and thats one of the things we are trying to document; the network form, which is horizontal, ad hoc and on the street, becomes not only regulated but seditious.

Q: Why would you call it seditious?

Jamie:

Because it begins to be seen as almost dangerous. As the regulators move in, they take Direct to Home control of all the deployments of their intellectual properties. The older networks start to look not only like intellectual property right infringements, but their disorder is also seen to be terrorist.

Q: What is the film trying to propose through linking these cablewallah networks?

Jamie:

Our proposal in this film is - "What if instead of just dying peacefully, someone had the idea of transforming these networks that used to deliver international and local content, by connecting them together, and turning them in to massive local media networks which are used for media sharing, file sharing, your own local channel?" There is a potential because the network is already there.

Peter:

In a way, if you think about the microcosm idea of the Internet as a whole, that essentially is what our plot is. On a certain level you would say that it's just a network but then the internet is the most important driving force of the world today.

Jamie:

The point is that once this idea is out, we can create the infrastructure to connect the entire city, infrastructure we can all use. Everyone starts to have a stake in it, be it the newspapers, TV channels, pirate markets (they will say, "No one is buying our shit anymore because they can share it over the network"), the computer manufacturers, the importer of Chinese routers, a gangster who thinks he can advertise on the network, the intellectual property lawyer... different people start getting the idea that they might have something to do with this network. Basically this is a chaos scenario, from which arises the plot. It is a fictional scenario but is set in the reality of information sharing here today.

Q: What is the technique you use to make the plot hybrid fictional?

Jamie:

The main character is played by an actor and he will be an embedded actor, working with the real cablewallah. Parts of it will be documentary, seeing how the cablewallah works and the viewer, through watching this actor, will understand how the network works. We have already spoken to some cablewallahs. And they have been very happy about all this. We see this as sort of embedded journalism, where the embedded actor takes the place of an interviewer. The film is not going to be historical. The characters will have a background and the film is going to have a background, but what we are trying to do is show the 'now'. We want to make it speak about the past and speak about the future. About our future.

Q: 'Steal This Film' was a critique of the international intellectual property regimes. Would this film also be similarly advocative?

Jamie:

We are going to the next level from 'Steal This Film', and this is more of my argument than Peter's -- that the conversation about Intellectual Propery is over or the film is the last word at all. But I personally need to go somewhere else to say more. I am interested in information in general. And how information affects what we can think, what we can dream, what we can be, how it forms all of us -- that is what we are working on in 'Dark Fibre' and the question of intellectual property is a subset of that question. We spend a lot of time talking about ideas and that's one of the things that connects us. We want to articulate a lot of the philosophical, abstract ideas in this film. And we will see if we can manage to do it in a new context. 'Steal This Film' interested a few people and this will be the next point of departure for discussion.

Q: Peter, do you share Jamie's passion for Intellectual Property?

Peter:

Not in the same way. I am very interested in the subject. Anybody who creates work is interested in it. In my last film, there is a constant commentary of a test match going on and as a result of it, it is almost impossible to sell it to television; people who own the rights to the cricket say that we have to pay them thousands of pounds! I am interested in documenting the world as it is and not what is cleaned up for TV. I am interested in the specifics. If you get on a bus in London, the ringtone everyone has on a mobile phone is not a ringtone but a particular song. But you can't put that on film because Mick Jagger, or whoever the artiste is, will want ten thousand pounds for it. The frustration that I face is that it is impossible to put the world that I see in front of me on film. I used to work with TV commercials and you would never see anything in commercials that is not the product being sold. I was once working on a Coca Cola commercial in New York and there was a person who was appointed by Coca Cola to go around the whole set to ensure that no one is drinking anything that is not made by Coca Cola, whether that is water or juice. Anything. And I think all that is about creating a creased world that we don't live in. I am interested in the world, through documentaries or fiction, that we live in. And it is bits of music, it is referenced films, we reference music, we reference sport. Just because people have rights over these, you never see them on film. That is my main area of interest, more than what is happening on the legal front.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files

Open access conference seeks to free research

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:10:58Z

Article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan in the Indian Express (New Delhi), 26 March 2009

When Newton famously remarked that if he had seen further than others, it was by “standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wasn’t just being modest. He was stating the simple fact that knowledge builds on previous knowledge, that the back and forth of ideas is vital for scientific achievement. Though the current proprietory publishing model is stacked against scholars, an emerging open access movement across the world aims to free scientific content - and India has big stakes in it.

A conference in New Delhi brought together open access evangelists including Prof. John Willinsky of Stanford University, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Surendra Prasad of IIT Delhi, Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications, and Narendra Kumar of CSIR.

Now, all research papers published from CSIR labs will be made open access, either by putting the full text on freely available institutional repositories or publishing directly in open access journals. Meanwhile, across the world, MIT has become the first university to throw open all its research papers through the online repository software DSpace.

Globally, academic tenure and promotion is traditionally linked to research published in reputed, peer-reviewed journals. These journals are owned by commercial behemoths like Springer and Reed Elsevier, who own stables of journals in various disciplines, and dictate terms to university libraries. But in recent years, journal prices have shot through the roof.

Now, after years of weary negotiation, and empowered by new digital infrastructure, universities are teaming up via free institutional repository systems, to pool and circulate their collective research. In India, institutes like NIT Rourkela have adopted super-archives like DSpace for another reason — to showcase their scientific output to global peers. “NIT doesn’t have the research legacy of IIT or IISC — they needed the visibility,” says NIT director Sunil Kumar Sarangi.

Such a knowledge commons is especially valuable to developing countries — for instance, in agricultural research or public health, it is inexcusable that countries which could benefit most from the scientific debate are left out of the loop, simply because of prohibitive pricing (some journals cost up to 20,000 dollars, annually). This only widens the gulf between the state of research here and the US or Europe.

Even research produced in India with our taxpayer money is sent to big-name commercial journals and all copyright signed away, putting it out of reach for the Indian scholarly community. But all that could change if open access journals become the norm. S K Sahu, who runs MedKnow publications (over 80 open access journals), also busted claims that content on such journals tends to vanish into the ether after a few years online.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-conference-seeks-to-free-research

'The Dark Face of Google'

sachia — 2009-03-24T06:51:47Z

Talk by Patrice Riemens

The extraordinary rise of Google Inc. from a 'confidential' search site in the late nineties, the heydays of Altavista, to its present preminent status on the internet, has attracted a lot of attention. The admirers see Google as the incarnation of things to come, not only in information retrieval & management, and not even on the Internet only, but in the economy and society as a whole. The nay-sayers variously view Google as a flattening behemoth of digital information, or as a cultural war machine, bent on the Americanisation of the planet, and generally as a mendacious commercial monopoly pretending to 'do no evil' while hypocritically promoting open source, access, and life in general.

Outside this discussion stand an ever growing mass of millions of users who ask no questions, profess neither admiration or hatred (and if so, rather the former), but are happy to use the search engine and the many other services provided by Google. That they hereby gladly if unwittingly contribute to reinforcing the assets of Google, in the words of Yann Moulier Boutang, "the only company in the world that is able to make 14 million people work for it at any given moment, for free", is one of the many starkly under-lighted aspects of this Internet giant's operative mode.

'The Dark Face of Google' is the title of the book written two years ago by the Italian Ippolita Collective, which Patrice Riemens is currently translating. Ippolita's brief is neither eulogizing nor demonising Google, but to understand it, especially in its less advertised aspects. Their aim is to educate Google's users, not to wean them away from it, and to politicise the discussion about search, digital services, and the management of information and knowledge in general. Patrice Riemens will discuss a few points in this context.

* The ways in which Google determines, undermines, or enforces existing power and knowledge structures

* The Google Books Project and how it reinforces IPR tyranny

* Google's local policies and how they affect fundamental civil liberties

This talk, like Ippolita's book, is intended as a general, informed introduction to an issue that has been insufficiently discussed, due to media hype, and the apparent innocuousness of a readily available, extremely fast and effective, free, Internet service.

Speaker

Patrice Riemens is a social geographer by education and a private intellectual and internet activist by choice. He is a promoter of Open Knowledge and Free Software, and has been involved as a "FLOSSopher" (a 'philosopher' of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movements) at the Asia Source and Africa Source camps, held to promote FLOSS among non-governmental organisations. He is a member of the Dutch hackers' group Hippies from hell.

He has formerly worked with De Waag Center for Old and New Media, an institute housed in an old castle in Amsterdam, on the cutting edge of technology, culture, education and industry. Patrice has also been on the staff of Multitudes, a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/the-dark-face-of-google

Open Access to Science Publications--Policy Perspective, Opportunities and Challenges

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:39:39Z

One-day conference on Open Access

Open Access to scientific literature means the removal of barriers, including price and legal barriers, from accessing scholarly work. With the advent of the internet, widespread and easy access to scientific information is facilitating research and innovation, crucial in today‘s knowledge based society. Open Access is not only changing the nature of scholarly communication but even that of scientific work.

To take stock of the current developments as regards Open Access and to highlight some of the issues that would need to be addressed to enable a wider access to scientific information, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) is organizing a Conference on 'Open Access to Science Publications: Policy Perspective, Opportunities and Challenges' on 24 March 2009 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.

The conference will cover the emerging global trends in Open Access and focus on what needs to be done in India. This event would be of interest to scientists, social scientists, policy makers, funding agencies, heads and senior managers of academic and research institutions, editors of research journals, etc.

The Conference will have sessions focused on:

Open source and changing research
Research Impact through Open Access
Open Access around the World
The Economics of Open Access

Date and Time

24 March 2009; 9.00 am - 5.30 pm

Venue

India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi - 110003

Speakers

Speakers at the event include:

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto and Bioline International http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~chan/
John Willinsky, Stanford University and Public Knowledge Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Willinsky
Samir K Brahmachari, CSIR http://www.csir.res.in/External/Heads/aboutcsir/leaders/DG/igib/bio1.pdf
Subbiah Arunachalam, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore http://cis-india.org/about-us/people/distinguished-fellows

Please see the programme below for names of the other speakers.

Contact

Dr Naresh Kumar

Head, R&D Planning Division

Council of Scientific & Industrial Research

2 Rafi Marg, New Delhi - 110 001

Fax: (+91) 11 23710340, 23713011

Phone: (+91) 11 23710453, 23713011

Email: headrdpd@csir.res.in

Programme

0900 – 1000	Registration
1000 - 1100	Inaugural Session
1000 – 1005	Lighting of Lamp
1005 - 1010	Welcome: Naresh Kumar
1010 - 1025	Inaugural address: Open Source & changing research Prof. Samir K. Brahmachari, DG,CSIR and Secretary DSIR
1025 - 1100	Keynote address 1: Global and Local Support for Making Research and Scholarship Publicly Available: Prof. John Willinsky, Stanford University, USA
1100 - 1130	Tea

1130 - 1300	Plenary Session I :
	Chair: Prof. Surendra Prasad
1130 - 1205	Keynote address 2: From Institutional Repositories to a Global Knowledge Commons: Prof. Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Canada
	Presentations:
1205 - 1225	Eight facts and myths about open access journals: An experience of eight years and eighty journals: Dr. D. K. Sahu, Medknow Publications
1225 - 1240	Prof. Sunil Kumar Sarangi, Director, National Institute Technology-Rourkela :
1240 - 1300	Chair & Q&A

1300 – 1400	Lunch

1400 – 1530	Plenary Session II :
	Chair: Dr. Gangan Prathap
	Presentations:
1400 - 1420	Prof. V. N. Rajasekaran Pillai, VC , IGNOU
1420 - 1440	Prof. Mangala Sunder Krishnan, (NPTEL), IITM
1440 - 1500	S. Arunachalam:
1500 - 1530	Chair & Q&A

1530 – 1600	Tea

1600 - 1700	Panel Discussion on “Open Access to Science and Scholarship”
	Moderator: Prof. Leslie Chan
	Prof. John Willinsky
	Prof. K L Chopra
	Prof. A S Kolaskar
	Dr. RR Hirwani
1700 – 1730	Valedictory : Dr. Naresh Kumar / Dr. R. R. Hirwani

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/oasp

Centre for Internet and Society

WIPO Broadcast Treaty and Webcasting

Legal regimes for broadcasting

Meaning of broadcasting and netcasting

Non-justifications for webcasting's inclusion

Problems if webcasting is included

Differences between webcasting and broadcasting

Conclusion

Seminar on Exceptions and Limitations in Copyright

Letter to Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, Advocating Adoption of FOSS in State IT Academies

Metaphors and Narratives

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs. Course Objectives

Access India Meet-Up, May 2009

Agenda

Does India need its own Bayh-Dole?

An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis

International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report

Archive and Access: The Inalienable Right to the Archives - Entering the Capital

Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories

Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with Jamie King and Peter Mann

In conversation with Jamie and Peter in Bangalore

Open access conference seeks to free research

'The Dark Face of Google'

Speaker

Open Access to Science Publications--Policy Perspective, Opportunities and Challenges

Date and Time

Venue

Speakers

Contact

Programme

Video

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II

Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs.
Course Objectives