Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Activism in Asia Reader

sumandro — 2015-10-24T14:36:44Z

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. It is our great pleasure to present the Digital Activism in Asia Reader.

The Book

The Reader took shape over two workshops with a diverse range of participants, including activists, change-makers, and scholars, organised by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in June 2014 and March 2015. During the first workshop, the participants identified the authors, topics, and writings that should be included/featured in the reader, based upon their relevance in the grounded practices of the participants, who came from various Asian countries. The second workshop involved open discussions regarding how the selected readings should be annotated, from key further questions to strategies of introducing them, followed by development of the annotations by the participants of the workshop. The full list of contributors, annotators, and editors is mentioned at the end of the book.

We are grateful to the Meson Press for its generous and patience support throughout the development process of the book.

Please download, read, and share this open-access book from the Meson Press website.

The Reader has been edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun.

Excerpt from the Foreword

Compiling this Reader on Digital Activism in Asia is fraught with compelling challenges, because each of the key terms in the formulation of the title is sub-ject to multiple interpretations and fierce contestations. The construction of ‘Asia’ as a region, has its historical roots in processes of colonial technologies of cartography and navigation. Asia was both, a measured entity, mapped for resources to be exploited, and also a measure of the world, promising anorientation to the Western World’s own turbulent encounters. As Chen Kuan-Hsing points out in his definitive history of the region, Asia gets re-imagined as a ‘method’ in cold-war conflicts, becoming the territory to be assimilated through exports of different ideologies and cultural purports. Asia does not have its own sense of being aregion. The transactions, interactions, flows and exchanges between different countries and regions in Asia have been so entirely mediated by powers of colonisation that the region remains divided and reticent in its imagination of itself. However, by the turn of the 21st century, Asia has seen a new awakening. It finds a regional identity, which, surprisingly did not emerge from its consolidating presence in global economics or in globalised structures of trade and commerce. Instead, it finds a presence, for itself, through a series of crises of governance, of social order, of political rights, and of cultural productions, that binds it together in unprecedented ways.

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn, because with the new networks of connectivity, with Asian countries marking themselves as informatics hubs, working through a circulated logic of migrant labour and dis-tributed resources, there came a sense of immediacy, proximity, and urgencythat continues to shape the Asian imagination in a new way. In the last decade or so, the rapid changes that have emerged, creating multiple registers of modernity, identity, and community in different parts of Asia, accelerated by a seamless exchange of ideas, commodities, cultures, and people have created a new sense of the region as emerging through co-presence rather than competition and conflict. Simultaneously, the emergence of global capitals of information, labour and cultural export, have created new reference points by which the region creates its identities and networks that are no longer subject to the tyranny of Western hegemony...

While the digital remains crucial to this shaping of contemporary Asia, both in sustaining the developmental agenda that most of the countries espouse, and in opening up an inward looking gaze of statecraft and social organisation, the digital itself remains an ineffable concept. Largely because the digital is like a blackbox that conflates multiple registers of meaning and layers of life, it becomes important to unengineer it and see what it enables and hides. The economic presence of the digital is perhaps the most visible in telling the story of Asia in the now. Beginning with the dramatic development of Singapore as the centre of informatics governance and the emergence of a range of cities from Shanghai to Manilla and Bangalore to Tehran, there has been an accelerated narrative of economic growth and accumulation of capital that is often the global face of the Asian turn. However, this economic reordering is not a practice in isolation. It brings with it, a range of social stirrings that seek to overthrow traditional structures of oppression, corruption, control, and injustice that have often remained hidden in the closed borders of Asian countries. However, the digital marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being excavated by the ICT4D logic, of the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself. These are questions that emerge from the ground, as more people interact with progressive and liberal politics and aspire not only for higher purchase powers but a better quality of rights. The digital turn has opened up a range of social and political rights based discourses, practices, and movements, where populations are holding their governments and countries responsible, accountable, and culpable in the face of personal and collective loss and injustice...

In the face of this multiplicity of digital sites and usages that are reconfiguring Asia, it is obvious then, that the very nature of what constitutes activism is changing as well. Organised civil society presence in Asia has often had a strong role in shaping modern nation states, but more often than not these processes were defined in the same vocabulary as that of the powers that they were fighting against. Marked by a strong sense of developmentalism and often working in complement to the state rather than keeping a check on the state’s activities, traditional activism in Asia has often suffered from the incapacity to scale and the inability to find alternatives to the state-defined scripts of development, growth and progress. In countries where literacy rates have been low, these movements also suffer from being conceived in philosophical and linguistic sophistry that escapes the common citizen and remains the playground of the few who have privileges afforded to them by class and region. Digital Activism, however, seems to have broken this language barrier, both internally and externally, allowing for new visualities enabled by ubiquitous computing to bring various stakeholders into the fray... At the same time, the digital itself has introduced new problems and concerns that are often glossed over, in the enthralling tale of progress. Concerns around digital divide, invasive practices of personal data gathering, the nexus of markets and governments that install the citizen/consumer in precarious conditions, and the re-emergence of organised conservative politics are also a part of the digital turn. Activism has had to focus not only on digital as a tool, but digital also as a site of protest and resistance...

The Reader does not offer an index of the momentous emergence with the growth of the digital or a chronological account of how digital activism in Asia has grown and shaped the region. Instead, the Reader attempts a crowd-sourced compilation that presents critical tools, organisations, theoretical concepts, political analyses, illustrative case-studies and annotations, that an emerging network of changemakers in Asia have identified as important in their own practices within their own contexts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader

Data Lives of Humanities Text

sneha-pp — 2020-12-23T13:07:43Z

The ‘computational turn’ in the humanities has brought with it several questions and challenges for traditional ways of engaging with the ‘text’ as an object of enquiry. The prevalence of data-driven scholarship in the humanities offers several challenges to traditional forms of work and practice, with regard to theory, tools, and methods. In the context of the digital, ‘text’ acquires new forms and meanings, especially with practices such as distant reading. Drawing upon excerpts from an earlier study on digital humanities in India, this essay discusses how data in the humanities is not a new phenomenon; concerns about the ‘datafication’ of humanities, now seen prominently in digital humanities and related fields is actually reflective of a longer conflict about the inherited separation between humanities and technology. It looks at how ‘data’ in the humanities has become a new object of enquiry as a result of several changes in the media landscape in the past few decades. These include large-scale digitalization and availability of corpora of materials (digitized and born-digital) in an array of formats and across varied platforms, thus leading to also a steady prevalence of the use of computational methods in working with and studying cultural artifacts today. This essay also explores how reading ‘text as data’ helps understand the role of data in the making of humanities texts and redefines traditional ideas of textuality, reading, and the reader.

This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (2020) edited by Sandeep Mertia, with a Foreword by Ravi Sundaram as part of the Series on Theory on Demand by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Read the open access book here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text

Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:03:09Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

Sadaf Khan: Media Matters for Democracy and Twitter

...By now there are a number of questions buzzing around my head, most of them unasked. Are users comfortable with so much of their data being collected? Are there really algorithms that string together all this data into medically-relevant trends? How reliable can these trends be when usage is erratic? Are period tracking apps pioneering, fundamental elements of a future where medical aid is digital and reliable data is inevitably linked to the provision of medical services? And if so, are privacy and health soon to become conflicting rights?

I also want to find out how users understand data collection and privacy before giving apps consent to utilize their data and information as they will. Hareem says she gives apps informed consent. ‘If my data becomes a part of the statistics aiding medical research, why not? There is no harm in it. I am getting a good service, and if my data helps create a better understanding as a part of a larger statistical pool, they are welcome to use it.’

But is she really sure that this information will be used only as anonymised data for medical research? ‘Look at the kind of information that is being collected,’ she answers. ‘Dates, mood, consistency of mucus, basal temperature. What kind of use does one have for this data?’

Naila, in turn, says: ‘Honestly, I have never really thought about what happens to the data the application collects. Obviously I enter detailed information about my cycle and my moods and my sex life. But a), my account is under a fake name and b), even if it wasn’t, who would have any use for stuff like when my period starts and ends and what my mood or digestive system is like at any given moment?’

In fact, this sentiment is shared among all the women interviewed for this piece — what use would anyone have for this data?

As users, we often imagine our own data as anonymised within a huge dataset. But as users, we don’t have enough information about how our data is being used — or will be used in future. The open and at times vague language of a platform’s terms and conditions allows menstrual apps to use data in ways that I may not know of. Some apps continue to hold customer data even after an account is deleted. Even though I may technically ‘agree’ to the terms and conditions, is this fully informed consent?

One of the big concerns around this kind of medical information being collected is the potential for collaborations with big pharmaceuticals and other health service providers. With apps sitting on a goldmine of users’ fertility and health information, health service providers might mine their data for potential consumers and reach out directly to them. While this is like any targeted marketing campaign, the fact that the advertiser is likely to be offering medical services to women suffering from infertility and are at their most vulnerable, raises totally different ethical concerns.

And these apps and their businesses might grow in directions that users haven’t taken into consideration. Take Ovia’s health feature for companies to buy premium services for their employees. While the gesture is packaged as a goodwill one, it also means that an employer has access to extremely private and intimate medical information about their women employees. And while the data set is anonymised, it is still possible to figure out the identity of users based on specific information. For example, how many women in any company are pregnant at any given time?...

Pregnant a year after my miscarriage, I initially downloaded multiple apps in a bid to find a good fit. I don’t know which one of these was in communication with Facebook. But almost immediately, my Facebook timeline started becoming littered with ads for baby stuff — clothes, shoes bibs, prams, cribs, ointments for stretch marks, maternity wear, the works.

It makes me think of those old school clockwork-style videos. You drop a ball and off it goes: making dominos fall, knocking over pots and pans, setting in motion absurd, synchronized mechanisms. Similarly, I drop my data and watch it hurtle into my life, on to other platforms, off to vendors. Maybe to stalkers? To employers? Who knows.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers

Comments on the Draft Rules under the Information Technology Act

pranesh — 2011-09-21T06:13:42Z

The Centre for Internet and Society commissioned an advocate, Ananth Padmanabhan, to produce a comment on the Draft Rules that have been published by the government under the Information Technology Act. In his comments, Mr. Padmanabhan highlights the problems with each of the rules and presents specific recommendations on how they can be improved. These comments were sent to the Department of Information and Technology.

Comments on the Draft Rules under the Information Technology Act as Amended by the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008

Submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Prepared by Ananth Padmanabhan, Advocate in the Madras High Court

Interception, Monitoring and Decryption

Section 69

The section says:

Where the Central Government or a State Government or any of its officer specially authorised by the Central Government or the State Government, as the case may be, in this behalf may, if satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence, it may subject to the provisions of sub-section (2), for reasons to be recorded in writing, by order, direct any agency of the appropriate Government to intercept, monitor or decrypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or decrypted any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource.
The procedure and safeguards subject to which such interception or monitoring or decryption may be carried out, shall be such as may be prescribed.
The subscriber or intermediary or any person in-charge of the computer resource shall, when called upon by any agency referred to in sub-section (1), extend all facilities and technical assistance to-

(a) provide access to or secure access to the computer resource generating transmitting, receiving or storing such information; or

(b) intercept, monitor, or decrypt the information, as the case may be; or

The subscriber or intermediary or any person who fails to assist the agency referred to in sub-section (3) shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years and shall also be liable to fine.

Recommendation #1
Section 69(3) should be amended and the following proviso be inserted:

Provided that only those intermediaries with respect to any information or computer resource that is sought to be monitored, intercepted or decrypted, shall be subject to the obligations contained in this sub-section, who are, in the opinion of the appropriate authority, prima facie in control of such transmission of the information or computer resource. The nexus between the intermediary and the information or the computer resource that is sought to be intercepted, monitored or decrypted should be clearly indicated in the direction referred to in sub-section (1) of this section.

Reasons for the Recommendation
In the case of any information or computer resource, there may be more than one intermediary who is associated with such information. This is because “intermediary” is defined in section 2(w) of the amended Act as,

“with respect to any electronic record means any person who on behalf of another person receives, stores or transmits that record or provides any service with respect to that record, including telecom service providers, network service providers, internet service providers, webhosting service providers, search engines, online payment sites, online-auction sites, online-market places and cyber cafes”.

The State or Central Government should not be given wide-ranging powers to enforce cooperation on the part of any such intermediary without there being a clear nexus between the information that is sought to be decrypted or monitored by the competent authority, and the control that any particular intermediary may have over such information.

To give an illustration, merely because some information may have been posted on an online portal, the computer resources in the office of the portal should not be monitored unless the portal has some concrete control over the nature of information posted in it. This has to be stipulated in the order of the Central or State Government which authorizes interception of the intermediary.

Recommendation #2
Section 69(4) should be repealed.

Reasons for the Recommendation
The closest parallels to Section 69 of the Act are the provisions in the Telegraph Rules which were brought in after the decision in PUCL v. Union of India, (1997) 1 SCC 301, famously known as the telephone tapping case.

Section 69(4) fixes tremendous liability on the intermediary for non-cooperation. This is violative of Article 14. Similar provisions in the Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure, which demand cooperation from members of the public as regards production of documents, letters etc., and impose punishment for non-cooperation on their part, impose a maximum punishment of one month. It is bewildering why the punishment is 7 years imprisonment for an intermediary, when the only point of distinction between an intermediary under the IT Act and a member of the public under the IPC and CrPC is the difference in the media which contains the information.

Section 69(3) is akin to the duty cast upon members of the public to extend cooperation under Section 39 of the Code of Criminal Procedure by way of providing information as to commission of any offence, or the duty, when a summons is issued by the Court or the police, to produce documents under Sections 91 and 92 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The maximum punishment for non-cooperation prescribed by the Indian Penal Code for omission to cooperate or wilful breach of summons is only a month under Sections 175 and 176 of the Indian Penal Code. Even the maximum punishment for furnishing false information to the police is only six months under Section 177 of the IPC. When this is the case with production of documents required for the purpose of trial or inquiry, it is wholly arbitrary to impose a punishment of six years in the case of intermediaries who do not extend cooperation for providing access to a computer resource which is merely apprehended as being a threat to national security etc. A mere apprehension, however reasonable it may be, should not be used to pin down a liability of such extreme nature on the intermediary.

This would also amount to a violation of Articles 19(1)(a) as well as 19(1)(g) of the Constitution, not to mention Article 20(3). To give an example, much of the information received from confidential sources by members of the press would be stored in computer resources. By coercing them, through the 7 year imprisonment threat, to allow access to this computer resource and thereby part with this information, the State is directly infringing on their right under Article 19(1)(a). Furthermore, if the “subscriber” is the accused, then section 69(4) goes against Article 20(3) by forcing the accused to bear witness against himself.

Draft Rules under Section 69

Rule 3
Directions for interception or monitoring or decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource under sub- section (2) of section 69 of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 (hereinafter referred to as the said Act) shall not be issued except by an order made by the concerned competent authority who is Union Home Secretary in case of Government of India; the Secretary in-charge of Home Department in a State Government or Union Territory as the case may be. In unavoidable circumstances, such order may be made by an officer, not below the rank of a Joint Secretary to the Government of India, who has been duly authorised by the Union Home Secretary or by an officer equivalent to rank of Joint Secretary to Government of India duly authorised by the Secretary in-charge of Home Department in the State Government or Union Territory, as the case may be:

Provided that in emergency cases –
(i) in remote areas, where obtaining of prior directions for interception or monitoring or decryption of information is not feasible; or
(ii) for operational reasons, where obtaining of prior directions for interception or monitoring or decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource is not feasible;

the required interception or monitoring or decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource shall be carried out with the prior approval of the Head or the second senior most officer of the Security and Law Enforcement Agencies (hereinafter referred to as the said Security Agencies) at the Central Level and the officers authorised in this behalf, not below the rank of Inspector General of Police or an officer of equivalent rank, at the State and Union Territory level. The concerned competent authority, however, shall be informed of such interceptions or monitoring or decryption by the approving authority within three working days and that such interceptions or monitoring or decryption shall be got confirmed by the concerned competent authority within a period of seven working days. If the confirmation from the concerned competent authority is not received within the stipulated seven working days, such interception or monitoring or decryption shall cease and the same information shall not be intercepted or monitored or decrypted thereafter without the prior approval of the concerned competent authority, as the case may be.

Recommendation #3
In Rule 3, the following proviso may be inserted:

“Provided that in the event of cooperation by any intermediary being required for the purpose of interception, monitoring or decryption of such information as is referred to in this Rule, prior permission from a Supervisory Committee headed by a retired Judge of the Supreme Court or the High Courts shall be obtained before seeking to enforce the Order mentioned in this Rule against such intermediary.”

Reasons for the Recommendation
Section 69 and the draft rules suffer from absence of essential procedural safeguards. This has come in due to the blanket emulation of the Telegraph Rules. Additional safeguards should have been prescribed to ensure that the intermediary is put to minimum hardship when carrying on the monitoring or being granted access to a computer resource. Those are akin to a raid, in the sense that it can stop an online e-commerce portal from carrying out operations for a day or even more, thus affecting their revenue. It is therefore recommended that in any situation where cooperation from the intermediary is sought, prior judicial approval has to be taken. The Central or State Government cannot be the sole authority in such cases.

Furthermore, since access to the computer resource is required, an executive order should not suffice, and a search warrant or an equivalent which results from a judicial application of the mind (by the Supervisory Committee, for instance) should be required.

Recommendation #4
The following should be inserted after the last line in Rule 22:

The Review Committee shall also have the power to award compensation to the intermediary in cases where the intermediary has suffered loss or damage due to the actions of the competent authority while implementing the order issued under Rule 3.

Reasons for the Recommendation
The Review Committee should be given the power to award compensation to the loss suffered by the intermediary in cases where the police use equipment or software for monitoring/decryption that causes damage to the intermediary’s computer resources / networks. The Review Committee should also be given the power to award compensation in the case of monitoring directions which are later found to be frivolous or even worse, borne out of mala fide considerations. These provisions will act as a disincentive against the abuse of power contained in Section 69.

Blocking of Access to Information

Section 69A

The section provides for blocking of websites if the government is satisfied that it is in the interests of the purposes enlisted in the section. It also provides for penalty of up to seven years for intermediaries who fail to comply with the directions under this section.
The rules under this section describe the procedure which have to be followed barring which the review committee may, after due examination of the procedural defects, order an unblocking of the website.

Section 69A(3)
The intermediary who fails to comply with the direction issued under sub-section (1) shall be punished with an imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years and also be liable to fine.

Recommendation #5
The penalty for intermediaries must be lessened.

Reasons for Recommendations
The penal provision in this section which prescribes up to seven years imprisonment and a fine on an intermediary who fails to comply with the directions so issued is also excessively harsh. Considering the fact that various mechanisms are available to escape the blocking of websites, the intermediaries must be given enough time and space to administer the block effectively and strict application of the penal provisions must be avoided in bona fide cases.

The criticism about Section 69 and the draft rules in so far as intermediary liability is concerned, will also apply mutatis mutandis to these rules as well as Section 69A.

Draft Rules under Section 69A

Rule 22: Review Committee
The Review Committee shall meet at least once in two months and record its findings whether the directions issued under Rule (16) are in accordance with the provisions of sub-section (2) of section 69A of the Act. When the Review Committee is of the opinion that the directions are not in accordance with the provisions referred to above, it may set aside the directions and order for unblocking of said information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in a computer resource for public access.

Recommendation #6
A permanent Review Committee should be specially for the purposes of examining procedural lapses.

Reasons for Recommendation
Rule 22 provides for a review committee which shall meet a minimum of once in every two months and order for the unblocking of a site of due procedures have not been followed. This would mean that if a site is blocked, there could take up to two months for a procedural lapse to be corrected and it to be unblocked. Even a writ filed against the policing agencies for unfair blocking would probably take around the same time. Also, it could well be the case that the review committee will be overborne by cases and may fall short of time to inquire into each. Therefore, it is recommended that a permanent Review Committee be set up which will monitor procedural lapses and ensure that there is no blocking in the first place before all the due procedural requirements are met.

Monitoring and Collection of Traffic Data

Draft Rules under Section 69B

The section provides for monitoring of computer networks or resources if the Central Government is satisfied that conditions so mentioned are satisfied.

The rules provide for the manner in which the monitoring will be done, the process by which the directions for the same will be issued and the liabilities of the intermediaries and monitoring officers with respect to confidentiality of the information so monitored.

Grounds for Monitoring
Rule 4
The competent authority may issue directions for monitoring and collection of traffic data or information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource for any or all of the following purposes related to cyber security:
(a) forecasting of imminent cyber incidents;
(b) monitoring network application with traffic data or information on computer resource;
(c) identification and determination of viruses/computer contaminant;
(d) tracking cyber security breaches or cyber security incidents;
(e) tracking computer resource breaching cyber security or spreading virus/computer contaminants;
(f) identifying or tracking of any person who has contravened, or is suspected of having contravened or being likely to contravene cyber security;
(g) undertaking forensic of the concerned computer resource as a part of investigation or internal audit of information security practices in the computer resource;
(h) accessing a stored information for enforcement of any provisions of the laws relating to cyber security for the time being in force;
(i) any other matter relating to cyber security.

Rule 6
No direction for monitoring and collection of traffic data or information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource shall be given for purposes other than those specified in Rule (4).

Recommendation #7
Clauses (a), (b), (c), and (i) of Rule 4 must be repealed.

Reasons for Recommendations
The term “cyber incident” has not been defined, and “cyber security” has been provided a circular definition. Rule 6 clearly states that no direction for monitoring and collection of traffic data or information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource shall be given for purposes other than those specified in Rule 4. Therefore, it may prima facie appear that the government is trying to lay down clear and strict safeguards when it comes to monitoring at the expense of a citizens' privacy. However, Rule 4(i) allows the government to monitor if it is satisfied that it is “any matter related to cyber security”. This may well play as a ‘catch all’ clause to legalise any kind of monitoring and collection and therefore defeats the purported intention of Rule 6 of safeguarding citizen’s interests against arbitrary and groundless intrusion of privacy. Also, the question of degree of liability of the intermediaries or persons in charge of the computer resources for leak of secret and confidential information remains unanswered.

Rule 24: Disclosure of monitored data
Any monitoring or collection of traffic data or information in computer resource by the employee of an intermediary or person in-charge of computer resource or a person duly authorised by the intermediary, undertaken in course of his duty relating to the services provided by that intermediary, shall not be unlawful, if such activities are reasonably necessary for the discharge his duties as per the prevailing industry practices, in connection with :
(vi) Accessing or analysing information from a computer resource for the purpose of tracing a computer resource or any person who has contravened, or is suspected of having contravened or being likely to contravene, any provision of the Act that is likely to have an adverse impact on the services provided by the intermediary.

Recommendation #8
Safeguards must be introduced with respect to exercise of powers conferred by Rule 24(vi).

Reasons for Recommendations
Rule 24(vi) provides for access, collection and monitoring of information from a computer resource for the purposes of tracing another computer resource which has or is likely to contravened provisions of the Act and this is likely to have an adverse impact on the services provided by the intermediary. Analysis of a computer resource may reveal extremely confidential and important data, the compromise of which may cause losses worth millions. Therefore, the burden of proof for such an intrusion of privacy of the computer resource, which is first used to track another computer resource which is likely to contravene the Act, should be heavy. Also, this violation of privacy should be weighed against the benefits accruing to the intermediary. The framing of sub rules under this clearly specifying the same is recommended.

The disclosure of sensitive information by a monitoring agency for purposes of ‘general trends’ and ‘general analysis of cyber information’ is uncalled for as it dissipates information among lesser bodies that are not governed by sufficient safeguards and this could result in outright violation of citizen’s privacy.

Manner of Functioning of CERT-In

Draft Rules under Section 70B(5)

Section 70B provides for an Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which shall serve as a national agency for performing duties as prescribed by clause 4 of this section in accordance to the rules as prescribed.
The rules provide for CERT-In’s authority, composition of advisory committee, constituency, functions and responsibilities, services, stakeholders, policies and procedures, modus operandi, disclosure of information and measures to deal with non compliance of orders so issued. However, there are a few issues which need to be addressed as under:

Definitions
In these Rules, unless the context otherwise requires, “Cyber security incident” means any real or suspected adverse event in relation to cyber security that violates an explicit or implied security policy resulting in unauthorized access, denial of service/ disruption, unauthorized use of a computer resource for processing or storage of information or changes to data, information without authorization.

Recommendation #9
The words ‘or implied’’ must be excluded from rule 2(g) which defines ‘cyber security incident’, and the term ‘security policy’ must be qualified to state what security policy is being referred to.

Reasons for Recommendation
“Cyber security incident” means any real or suspected adverse event in relation to cyber security that violates an explicit or implied security policy resulting in unauthorized access, denial of service/disruption, unauthorized use of a computer resource for processing or storage of information or changes to data, information without authorization.

Thus, the section defines any circumstance where an explicit or implied security policy is contravened as a ‘cyber security incident’. Without clearly stating what the security policy is, an inquiry into its contravention is against an individual’s civil rights. If an individual’s actions are to be restricted for reasons of security, then the restrictions must be expressly defined and such restrictions cannot be said to be implied.

Rule 13(4): Disclosure of Information
Save as provided in sub-rules (1), (2), (3) of rule 13, it may be necessary or expedient to so to do, for CERT-In to disclose all relevant information to the stakeholders, in the interest of sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence relating to cognizable offence or enhancing cyber security in the country.

Recommendation #10
Burden of necessity for disclosure of information should be made heavier.

Reasons for the Recommendation
Rule 13(4) allows the disclosure of information by CERT-In in the interests of ‘enhancing cyber security’. This enhancement however needs to be weighed against the detriment caused to the individual and the burden of proof must be on the CERT-In to show that this was the only way of achieving the required.

Rule 19: Protection for actions taken in Good Faith
All actions of CERT-In and its staff acting on behalf of CERT-In are taken in good faith in fulfillment of its mandated roles and functions, in pursuance of the provisions of the Act or any rule, regulations or orders made thereunder. CERT-In and its staff acting on behalf of CERT-In shall not be held responsible for any unintended fallout of their actions.

Recommendation #11
CERT-In should be made liable for their negligent action and no presumption of good faith should be as such provided for.

Reasons for the Recommendation
Rule 19 provides for the protection of CERT-In members for the actions taken in ‘good faith’. It defines such actions as ‘unintended fallouts’. Clearly, if information has been called for and the same is highly confidential, then this rule bars the remedy for any leak of the same due to the negligence of the CERT-In members. This is clearly not permissible as an agency that calls for delicate information should also be held responsible for mishandling the same, intentionally or negligently. Good faith can be established if the need arises, and no presumption as to good faith needs to be provided.

Draft Rules under Section 52

These rules, entitled the “Cyber Appellate Tribunal (Salary, Allowances and Other Terms and Conditions of Service of Chairperson and Members) Rules, 2009” are meant to prescribe the framework for the independent and smooth functioning of the Cyber Appellate Tribunal. This is so because of the specific functions entrusted to this Appellate Tribunal. Under the IT Act, 2000 as amended by the IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, this Tribunal has the power to entertain appeals against orders passed by the adjudicating officer under Section 47.

Recommendation #12
Amend qualifications Information Technology (Qualification and Experience of Adjudicating Officers and Manner of Holding Enquiry) Rules, 2003, to require judicial training and experience.

Reasons for the Recommendation
It is submitted that an examination of these rules governing the Appellate Tribunal cannot be made independent of the powers and qualifications of Adjudicating Officers who are the original authority to decide on contravention of provisions in the IT Act dealing with damage to computer system and failure to furnish information. Even as per the Information Technology (Qualification and Experience of Adjudicating Officers and Manner of Holding Enquiry) Rules, 2003, persons who did not possess judicial experience and training, such as those holding the post of Director in the Central Government, were qualified to perform functions under Section 46 and decide whether there has been unauthorized access to a computer system. This involves appreciation of evidence and is not a merely administrative function that could be carried on by any person who has basic knowledge of information technology.

Viewed from this angle, the qualifications of the Cyber Appellate Tribunal members should have been made much tighter as per the new draft rules. The above rules when read with Section 50 of the IT Act, as amended in 2008, do not say anything about the qualification of the technical members apart from the fact that such person shall not be appointed as a Member, unless he is, or has been, in the service of the Central Government or a State Government, and has held the post of Additional Secretary or Joint Secretary or any equivalent post. Though special knowledge of, and professional experience in, information technology, telecommunication, industry, management or consumer affairs, has been prescribed in the Act as a requirement for any technical member.

Draft Rules under Section 54

These Rules do not suffer any defect and provide for a fair and reasonable enquiry in so far as allegations made against the Chairperson or the members of the Cyber Appellate Tribunal are concerned.

Penal Provisions

Section 66A

Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device,
    (a) any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or
    (b) any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device,
    (c) any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient about the origin of such messages,
shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and with fine.
Sec. 32 of the 2008 Act inserts Sec. 66A which provides for penal measures for mala fide use of electronic resources to send information detrimental to the receiver. For the section to be attracted the ‘information’ needs to be grossly offensive, menacing, etc. and the sender needs to have known it to be false.

While the intention of the section – to prevent activities such as spam-sending – might be sound and even desirable, there is still a strong argument to be made that words is submitted that the use of words such as ‘annoyance’ and ‘inconvenience’ (in s.66A(c)) are highly problematic. Further, something can be grossly offensive without touching upon any of the conditions laid down in Article 19(2). Without satisfying the conditions of Article 19(2), this provision would be ultra vires the Constitution.

Recommendation #13
The section should be amended and words which lead to ambiguity must be excluded.

Reasons for the Recommendation
A clearer phrasing as to what exactly could convey ‘ill will’ or cause annoyance in the electronic forms needs to be clarified. It is possible in some electronic forms for the receiver to know the content of the information. In such circumstances, if such a possibility is ignored and annoyance does occur, is the sender still liable? Keeping in mind the complexity of use of electronic modes of transmitting information, it can be said that several such conditions arise which the section has vaguely covered. Therefore, a stricter and more clinical approach is necessary.

Recommendation #14
A proviso should be inserted to this section providing for specific exceptions to the offence contained in this section for reasons such as fair comment, truth, criticism of actions of public officials etc.

Reasons for the Recommendation
The major problem with Section 66A lies in clause (c) as per which any electronic mail or electronic mail message sent with the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience is covered within the ambit of offensive messages. This does not pay heed to the fact that even a valid and true criticism of the actions of an individual, when brought to his notice, can amount to annoyance. Indeed, it may be brought to his attention with the sole purpose of causing annoyance to him. When interpreting the Information Technology Act, it is to be kept in mind that the offences created under this Act should not go beyond those prescribed in the Indian Penal Code except where there is a wholly new activity or conduct, such as hacking for instance, which is sought to be criminalized.

Offensive messages have been criminalized in the Indian Penal Code subject to the conditions specified in Chapter XXII being present. It is not an offence to verbally insult or annoy someone without anything more being done such as a threat to commit an offence, etc. When this is the case with verbal communications, there is no reason to make an exception for those made through the electronic medium and bring any electronic mail or message sent with the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience within the purview of an offensive message.

Section 66F

The definition of cyber-terrorism under this provision is too wide and can cover several activities which are not actually of a “terrorist” character.
Section 66F(1)(B) is particularly harsh and goes much beyond acts of “terrorism” to include various other activities within its purview. As per this provision,
“[w]hoever knowingly or intentionally penetrates or accesses a computer resource without authorisation or exceeding authorised access, and by means of such conduct obtains access to information, data or computer database that is restricted for reasons for the security of the State or foreign relations, or any restricted information, data or computer database, with reasons to believe that such information, data or computer database so obtained may be used to cause or is likely to cause injury to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence, or to the advantage of any foreign nation, group of individuals or otherwise, commits the offence of cyber terrorism.”

This provision suffers from several defects and hence ought to be repealed.

Recommendation #15
Section 66F(1)(B) has to be repealed or suitably amended to water down the excessively harsh operation of this provision. The restrictive nature of the information that is unauthorisedly accessed must be confined to those that are restricted on grounds of security of the State or foreign relations. The use to which such information may be put should again be confined to injury to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order. A mere advantage to a foreign nation cannot render the act of unauthorized access one of cyber-terrorism as long as such advantage is not injurious or harmful in any manner to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order. A mens rea requirement should also be introduced whereby mere knowledge that the information which is unauthorisedly accessed can be put to such uses as given in this provision should not suffice for the unauthorised access to amount to cyber-terrorism. The unauthorised access should be with the intention to put such information to this use. The amended provision would read as follows:

“[w]hoever knowingly or intentionally penetrates or accesses a computer resource without authorisation or exceeding authorised access, and by means of such conduct obtains access to information, data or computer database that is restricted for reasons for the security of the State or foreign relations, with the intention that such information, data or computer database so obtained may be used to cause injury to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order, commits the offence of cyber terrorism.”

Reasons for the Recommendation
The ambit of this provision goes much beyond information, data or computer database which is restricted only on grounds of security of the State or foreign relations and extends to “any restricted information, data or computer database”. This expression covers any government file which is marked as confidential or saved in a computer used exclusively by the government. It also covers any file saved in a computer exclusively used by a private corporation or enterprise. Even the use to which such information can be put need not be confined to those that cause or are likely to cause injury to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, or friendly relations with foreign States. Information or data which is defamatory, amounting to contempt of court, or against decency / morality, are all covered within the scope of this provision. This goes way beyond the idea of a terrorist activity and poses serious questions. While there is no one globally accepted definition of cyberterrorism, it is tough to conceive of slander as a terrorist activity.

To give an illustration, if a journalist managed to unauthorisedly break into a restricted database, even one owned by a private corporation, and stumbled upon information that is defamatory in character, he would have committed an act of “cyber-terrorism.” Various kinds of information pertaining to corruption in the judiciary may be precluded from being unauthorisedly accessed on the ground that such information may be put to use for committing contempt of court. Any person who gains such access would again qualify as a cyber-terrorist. The factual situations are numerous where this provision can be put to gross misuse with the ulterior motive of muzzling dissent or freezing access to information that may be restricted in nature but nonetheless have a bearing on probity in public life etc. It is therefore imperative that this provision may be toned down as recommended above.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-draft-rules

Can data ever know who we really are?

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:02:53Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Zara Rahman, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: Can data ever know who we really are?

Zara Rahman: The Engine Room, Website, and Twitter

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
– Audre Lorde

The proliferation of digital data and the technologies that allow us to gather that data can be used in another way too — to allow us to define for ourselves who we are, and what we are.

Amidst a growing political climate of fear, mistrust and competition for resources, activists and advocates working in areas that are stigmatised within their societies often need data to ‘prove’ that what they are working on matters. One way of doing this is by gathering data through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourced data isn’t ‘representative’, as statisticians say, but gathering data through unofficial means can be a valuable asset for advocates. For example, data collating the experiences of women who have reported incidents of sexual violence to the police in India, can then be used to advocate for better police responses, and to inform women of their rights. Deservedly or not, quantifiable data takes precedence over personal histories and lived experience in getting the much-desired currency of attention.

And used right, quantifiable data — whether it’s crowdsourced or not — can also be a powerful tool for advocates. Now, we can use quantifiable data to prove beyond a question of a doubt that disabled people, queer people, people from lower castes, face intersecting discrimination, prejudice, and systemic injustices in their lives. It’s an unnecessary repetition in a way, because anybody from those communities could have told reams upon reams of stories about discrimination — all without any need for counting.

Regardless, to play within this increasingly digitised system, we need to repeat what we’ve been saying in a new, digitally-legible way. And to do that, we need to collect data from people who have often only ever been de-humanised as data subjects.

Artist and educator Mimi Onuoha writes about the challenges that arise while collecting such data, from acknowledging the humans behind that collection to understanding that missing data points might tell just as much of a story as the data that has been collected. She outlines how digital data means that we have to (intentionally or not) make certain choices about what we value. And the collection of this data means making human choices solid, and often (though not always) making these choices illegible to others.

We speak of black boxes when it comes to the mystery choices that algorithms make, but the same could be said of the many human decisions that are made in categorising data too, whether that be choosing to limit the gender drop-down field to just ‘male/female’ as with Fitbits, or a variety of apps incorrectly assuming that all people who menstruate also want to know about their ‘fertile window’. In large systems with many humans and machines at work, we have no way of interrogating why a category was merged or not, of understanding why certain anomalies were ignored rather than incorporated, or of questioning why certain assumptions were made.

The only thing we can do is to acknowledge these limitations, and try to use those very systems to our advantage, building our own alternatives or workarounds, collecting our own data, and using the data that is out there to tell the stories that matter to us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are

Book 1: To Be, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-05-15T12:08:32Z

In this first book of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Collection, we concentrate on what it means to be a Digital Native. Within popular scholarship and discourse, it is presumed that digital natives are born digital. Ranging from Mark Prensky’s original conception of the identity which marked all people born after 1980 as Digital Natives to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s more nuanced understanding of specific young people in certain parts of the world as ‘Born Digital’, there remains a presumption that the young peoples’ relationship with technology is automatic and natural. In particular, the idea of being ‘born digital’ signifies that there are people who, at a visceral, unlearned level, respond to digital technologies. This idea of being born digital hides the complex mechanics of infrastructure, access, affordability, learning, education, language, gender, etc. that play a significant role in determining who gets to become a digital native and how s/he achieves it. In this book, we explore what it means to be a digital native in emerging information societies. The different contributions in this book posit what it means to be a digital native in different parts of the world. However, none of the contribution accepts the name ‘Digital Native’ as a given. Instead, the different authors demonstrate how there can be no one singular definition of a Digital Native. In fact, they show how, contextualised, historical, socially embedded, politically nuanced understanding of people’s interaction with technology provide a better insight into how one becomes a digital native.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System

ambika — 2019-12-06T04:57:55Z

In this case study undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network, Ambika Tandon evaluates the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level in India. The study also assesses the potential of MCTS to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data.

Case study: Download (PDF)

Introduction

The reproductive health information ecosystem in India comprises of a range of different databases across state and national levels. These collect data through a combination of manual and digital tools. Two national-level databases have been launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare - the Health Management Information System (HMIS) in 2008, and the MCTS in 2009. 4 The MCTS focuses on collecting data on maternal and child health. It was instituted due to reported gaps in the HMIS, which records monthly data across health programmes including reproductive health. There are several other state-level initiatives on reproductive health data that have either been subsumed into, or run in parallel with, the MCTS.

With this case study, we aim to evaluate the MCTS as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level. It will also assess its potential to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data. The methodology for the case study involved a desk-based review of existing literature on the use of health information systems globally, as well as analysis of government reports, journal articles, media coverage, policy documents, and other material on the MCTS.

The first section of this report details the theoretical framing of the case study, drawing on the feminist critique of reproductive data systems. The second section maps the current landscape of reproductive health data produced by the state in India, with a focus on data flows, and barriers to data collection and analysis at the local and national level. The case of abortion data is used to further the argument of flawed data collection systems at the national level. Section three briefly discusses the state’s imagination of reproductive health policy and the role of data systems through a discussion on the National Health Policy, 2017 and the National Health Stack, 2018. Finally, we make some policy recommendations and identify directions for future research, taking into account the ongoing shift towards big data globally to democratise reproductive healthcare.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1] Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2] Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3] More information about the programme can be found here.

[4] Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism

Bahujan Digital Publishing Infrastructures

Yatharth — 2025-01-20T10:48:39Z

In this study, we look at alternative Bahujan digital publishing as sites where Bahujans can claim media representation and how a vision of an anti-caste internet is emerging through these publishing practices.

Formal knowledge production, media, and technology in India are dominated and hegemonised by elite oppressor castes (the Savarnas). The exclusion of the caste-oppressed majority (the Bahujans) from mass media systematically erases their narratives, histories, and opportunities present to them.

We study how, despite systemic challenges, Bahujan publication spaces have emerged across digital media as sites of intersectional discourse on caste, using new media such as blogs, visual art, memes, YouTube channels, infographics, podcasts, etc. Further, we look at how this has exposed casteism buried under the ‘casteless’ facade of digital technologies, which are rife with issues of caste-based hate speech, poor moderation, algorithmic bias, and inadequate platform governance. For this, we draw on qualitative interviews with ten Bahujan publishing projects across social media.

Through a caste-critical lens, we look at motivations, infrastructural needs, editorial processes, audience engagement, other challenges, and the future vision for these publishing projects. We discuss questions of identity, community, hate speech, platform censorship, mental health, and self-care that emerge in online anti-caste publishing. Finally, we try to articulate an emerging vision of an anti-caste internet.

We explore the following questions through our research:

Why do Bahujans start publishing?
What are the infrastructures of Bahujan publishing?
Who engages with anti-caste content?
What resistance do Bahujan publishers face?
How do Bahujan publishers view mainstream progressive movements?
How do Bahujan publishers think about the future of the internet?

The key takeaways from our research are:

Publishing is a socio-technical response Digital Bahujan publishers have largely started in response to shifting political landscapes within India, where caste oppression, while increasingly invisibilised, has only strengthened. Bahujan publishing uses digital tools to challenge caste oppression, fostering anti-caste discourse and community building despite limited resources and systemic barriers.

Publishing is a community effort Bahujan publishing exists primarily within online anti-caste communities. Anti-caste communities help each other navigate resource constraints to raise funds, build safe spaces to provide critical mental health support, provide safety from hate speech, and build resistance and resilience together.

Caste mediates publishing infrastructure Caste hierarchies restrict resources and opportunities for Bahujan publishers, who often precariously self-fund their work. Meanwhile, media circles and the funding ecosystem are dominated by savarnas, who gatekeep their resources and knowledge from Bahujan publishers.

Online Casteism is enabled by Platforms Social media platforms have failed to address rampant caste-based hate speech effectively, leaving Bahujan publishers to manage the hate speech on their own. This takes a severe toll on the publisher’s mental and emotional health, especially hurting Bahujan publishers from smaller towns, women, and queer folks.

The future of Anticaste publishing is uncertain The reach of Bahujan publishers varies wildly and unexplainably, which makes it difficult for them to rely on social media for audiences and monetisation. Bahujan publishers face a triple whammy: algorithms that suppress anti-caste content, social media platforms moving away from political content, and contentious legislation that censors independent political content.

The future of Anticaste publishing is on independent platforms Bahujan publishers desire platform sovereignty—to own and control their own platforms and to be able to control what they put out and how it reaches their audiences—and a vision of the internet that works towards the annihilation of castes, both online and offline.

Read the full report here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/bahujan-digital-publishing-infrastructures

Asia in the Edges: A Narrative Account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School in Bangalore

nishant — 2015-04-14T12:47:38Z

The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School is a Biennial event that invites Masters and PhD students from around Asia to participate in conversations around developing and building an Inter-Asia Cultural Studies thought process. Hosted by the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society along with the Consortium of universities and research centres that constitute it, the Summer School is committed to bringing together a wide discourse that spans geography, disciplines, political affiliations and cultural practices for and from researchers who are interested in developing Inter-Asia as a mode of developing local, contextual and relevant knowledge practices.

This is the narrative account of the experiments and ideas that shaped the second Summer School, “The Asian Edge” which was hosted in Bangalore, India, in 2012. The peer reviewed article was published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal, Volume 15, Issue 2, on July 3, 2014. Click to download the file. (PDF, 95 Kb)

At the heart of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) project has been a pedagogic impulse that seeks to train young students and scholars in critical ways of thinking about questions of the contemporary. The ambition of developing an “Asian way of thinking” is not merely a response to the hegemony of North-Western theory in thought and research, especially in Social Sciences and Humanities. It is also a way by which new knowledge is developed and shared between different locations in Asia, to get a more embedded sense of the social, the political and the cultural in the region. Apart from building a widespread network of researchers, activists, academics and artists who have generated the most comprehensive and critical insights into developing ontological and teleological relationships with Asia, there have always been attempts made to integrate students into the network’s activities. From student pre-conferences that invited students to build intellectual dialogues, to subsidies and fellowships offered to allow students to travel from their different institutions across Asia, various initiatives have inspired and facilitated the first encounter with Asia for a number of young researchers who might have lived in Asian countries but not been trained to understand the context of what it means to be in Asia. Over time, through different structures, such as the institutionalisation of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal and the growth of the eponymous conference, the IACS has already expanded the scope of its activities, involving new interlocutors and locations in which to grow the environment of critical academic and research discourse.

Building upon the expertise and networks of scholarship developed for over a decade, the IACS Society initiated the biennial Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, in order to engage younger scholars and students with some of the key questions that have been discussed and contested in the cultural studies discourse in Asia. The IACS Summer School that began in 2010 in Seoul, is a travelling school that moves to different countries, drawing upon local energies, resources and debates to acquaint students with the critical discourse as well as the experience of difference that marks Asia as a continent. The summer school in 2012 was hosted jointly by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Indian Institute of Sciences.[1]

For a snapshot of the Summer School, see Table 1 below:

Table 1. The 2012 Inter-Asia cultural studies summer school: a snapshot

The Asian Edge

Core course: Methodologies for Cultural Studies in Asia (2–11 August, 2012)
Optional courses
The Digital Subject / Technology, Culture and the Body (13–16 August, 2012)
Language of Instruction: EnglishHomepage: http://culturalstudies.asia/?page_id=86
Organisers: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore
Host: Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore
Co-organisers: Consortium of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium Institutions; Institute of East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Korea
Course Coordinators: Nitya Vasudevan & Nishant Shah
Number of Students: 35 students from 12 Asian countries
Number of Faculty: 17 from 5 Asian countries[2]

Plotting Edges: The Rationale

The second summer school, hosted in August 2012, with the support of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and the Institute of East Asian Studies, was entitled “The Asian Edge.” We decided to stay with the metaphor of the Edge because it allowed us to experiment, both conceptually and in process, with new modes of engagement, interaction, knowledge production and pedagogy. The idea of an Asian Edge was interesting because it signalled a de-bordering of Asia. The Edge is also an inroad into that which might have remained invisible or inscrutable to those outside of it. The imagination of an Asian Edge brings in both the imaginations of geography as well as the notion of extensions, where Asia, especially in this hyper-real and geo-territorial age does not remain contained within the national boundaries. Within the Inter-Asia discourse, there has been a rich theorisation around what constitutes Asia and what are the ways in which we can reconstruct our Asianness that do not fall in the easy “Asian Studies” mode of being defined by the West as the ontological reference point. Chen Kuan-Hsing’s (2010) argument in Asia as Method, where he argues that Asia is a construct that emerged out of the Cold War and needs to be deconstructed and unpacked in order to understand the different instances and manifestations of India, have captured these dialogues quite comprehensively. Similarly, Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (2009) landmark work Indian Cinema in the time of Celluloid marks how questions of nationalism, modernity, governance and technology have been peculiarly and particularly tied to cultural objects and industries such as cinema, not only in negotiations with the post-colonial encounters of India with its erstwhile colonial masters but also with the different locations and imaginations of India. Chua Beng-Huat (2000) in Consumption in Asia similarly points at the ways in which Asia works at different levels of materiality and symbolism, creating communities, connections and commerce in unprecedented ways, not only within Orientalist imagination but in Asia’s own imagination of itself. The Asian Edge was also a way of introducing new thematic interventions in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies discourse. While the IACS project has invited and initiated some of the most diverse and rich conversations around cultural production—ranging from creative industries to cultural politics; from cultural objects to flows of consumption and distribution—we haven’t yet managed to shift the debates into the realm of the digital. The emergence of digital technologies has transformed a lot of our vocabulary and conceptual framework, but we haven’t been able to translate all our concerns into the fast-paced changes that the digital ICTs are ushering into Asia.

With this summer school, we wanted to introduce the digital and the technological as a central trope of understanding our existing and emerging research within inter-Asia cultural studies. And the edge, borrowing from the Network theories that have their grounds in Computing, Actor-Network modelling and ICT4D discourse, gives us another way of thinking about Asia. As the computing theorist Duncan Watts (1999) points out in his model of our universe as a “small world”, the edge, within networks is not merely the containing limit. It is not the boundary or the end but actually the space of interaction, communication and exchange. An edge is the route that traffic takes as it moves from one node to another. Edges are hence tenuous, they emerge and, with repetition, become stronger, but they also die and extend, morph and mutate, thus constantly changing the contours of the network. The ambition was to refuse the separation of technology from the Cultural Studies discourse, introducing what Tejaswini Niranjana in her work on Indian Language education and pedagogy calls “Integration” (Niranjana et al. 2010) rather than “interdisciplinarity”. It was also to provide a different historical trajectory to technology studies, what science and technology historians Kavita Philip, Lily Irani, and P. Dourish (2010) call “Postcolonial Computing.”

The Asian Edge then became a space where we could consolidate the knowledge and key insights from the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies discourse, but could also open it up to new research, new modes of engagement, and new questions that need the historicity and also the points of departure. These ambitions had a direct impact on both the structure of the Summer School as well as the processes that were subsequently designed
to implement it.

The core course: methodologies for cultural studies in Asia

The Inter-Asia Summer School in Bangalore thus had some distinct ambitions, which were reflected in its structure. While it wanted to reflect the rich heritage of scholarship that has been produced through the decade-long interventions, and give the participating students a chance to engage with these intellectual stalwarts of Asia, it also wanted to reflect some of the more cuttingedge and future-looking work that is also a part of the movement’s younger scholars. Hence, instead of going with the traditional model where the pedagogues teach their own text, explaining the nuances and intricacies of their work, we decided to stage a dialogue between the existing scholarship and emerging work. The curriculum for the summer school was designed by Dr Tejaswini Niranjana, Dr Wang Xiaoming and Nitya Vasudevan, to form the first Inter- Asia Cultural studies reader, reflecting the various trends and debates around different themes that have occurred in the movement. The reader, which served as a basic textbook for the summer school, and has plans to be bilingual (English and Mandarin Chinese), introduced historical thought, critical interventions and conceptual frameworks drawn from different locations within Asia. The reader not only incorporated the scholars whose work has shaped the Inter-Asia cultural studies movement but also the formative modern thought that has been central to the social, cultural and political theorisation in Asia.

However, instead of inviting the scholars whose work has been central to the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies thought, the instructors for the courses were younger critical scholars who are building upon, responding to and entering into a dialogue with the work prescribed in the curriculum. The pedagogy, hence, instead of becoming a “lecture” that synthesises earlier work, became a threeway dialogue, where the students and the instructors were responding to common texts, not only in trying to understand them but also in the context of their own work and interests. Moreover, each session was co-taught, by instructors from different disciplines, locations and geographies, to show how the same body of work can be approached through different entry points and pushed into different directions. The classroom hours, thus became a “workshop” space where the students and the faculty were engaging in a dialogue that sought to make the historical debates relevant to the discussions in the contemporary world. They also showed how the older questions persist across time and space, and that they need to be engaged with in order to make sense of the world around us.

Additionally, the Summer School classroom was designed as a space for collaborative pedagogy. The morning discussions around texts from the readers were followed by students presenting their work as a response to the texts prescribed for the day. Taking up a pecha-kucha format, it invited students to introduce themselves, their work, their context and their interventions and to open everything up for response and dialogue. The ambition was to build a community of intellectual support and interest, so that the students not only forge an affective bond but also a sense of collaboration and commonality in the work that they are already pushing in their existing research initiatives. The faculty for the day, along with some of the senior scholars also attended these presentations and helped tie in some of the earlier questions that might have emerged in the class, to the new material that was being introduced in the space.

While this dialogue around new research was fruitful, we also were aware that there is a huge value in getting the students to interact with some of the more formative scholars whose work was prescribed in the curriculum. Hence, alongside the classrooms, we also hosted three salons that brought some of the significant scholars from the Inter-Asia movement into a dialogue with each other, as well as into a conversation with local intellectuals and activists. The first salon, organised at the artist collaborator 1 Shanthi Road, saw Chen Kuan-Hsing and Tejaswini Niranjana, discussing the impulse of the Inter-Asia movement. Charting the history, the different trajectories and the ways in which it has grown, both through friendships and networks, and intellectual interventions and collaborations, the conversation gave an entrypoint to younger scholars in understanding the politics and the motivation of this thought journey. The second salon, organised at the Alternative Law Forum, had Ding Naifei (Taiwan) and Firdaus Azim (Bangladesh) in conversation with legal sexuality and human rights activists Siddharth Narrain and Arvind Narrain (India) to unpack the politics of rights, sexuality, modernity and identity in different parts of Asia. The third salon, hosted at the Centre for Internet & Society, saw Ashish Rajadhyaksha (India) in conversation with Stephen Chan (Hong Kong) looking at questions of infrastructure, sustainability and the new role that research has to play in non-university and non-academic spaces and networks. The salons were designed to be informal settings for conversations and socialising, giving the summer school students access to the senior faculty outside of the classroom setting.

The summer school also wanted to ensure that the students were introduced to the materiality and the texture of the local, to understand the different layers of modernity and habitation that the IT City of Bangalore has to offer. Hence a local tour, charting the growth of Bangalore from a sleepy education centre to the burgeoning IT City that it has become, guided by curator and artist Suresh Jairam, was included as a part of the teaching. The four-hour walking tour laid bare the different contestations and layers of an IT city in India, showing the liminal markets, local cultures of production, and the ways in which they need to be factored into our images and imaginations of modernity and the IT City. Along with these, there were student parties arranged in different local clubs and institutions of Bangalore, to offer informal spaces of socialising for the students but also to give them a glimpse of what public spaces and cultures of being social might look like in a city such as Bangalore.

The summer school found a new richness because two of the days were twinned with a workshop on Culture Industries, supported by the Japan Foundation, which became a pedagogic space for the summer school participants. The students had a new focus introduced to their work and a chance to meet other scholars and activists in the field from Asia, who presented their work as part of the Summer School. The creative industries workshop also afforded a chance for students to form new connections and collaborations with projects and research initiatives that were being discussed in that forum.

These different components were thus designed and put together as a part of the core course for the Inter-Asia Summer School in Bangalore. Each component had a specific vision and was designed to offer different spaces of learning, pedagogy and interaction for everybody included. The core course was an overview of the diversity and exchange that are parts of the Inter-Asia movement. The course ended with a “booksprint” model where the students, inspired by the conversations at the summer school, were given a day to submit written work that would capture their own learning and growth in the process. The submissions could take the form of an academic essay, a sketch towards a research essay, a blog entry summarising key events from a particular conversation, or a narrative summary of the key points in their own research and how it relates to the conversations at the Summer School. While the core course was compulsory for all the participants, the Summer School also offered two optional elective courses, which the students could opt for after the core course was concluded. The optional courses were designed to introduce students to work and debates that had not yet emerged centrally in the Inter-Asia debates, but were part of their current conversations.

New nodes: Optional courses: the digital subject/technology, culture and the body

The optional courses, which lasted for four days, were a way of introducing the students to some new core debates that are emerging in the Cultural Studies discourse. The courses were designed to specifically concentrate on how the older questions and frameworks are being reworked with the emergence of digital technologies, thus helping students to consolidate their own work and also engage with research initiatives across different parts of Asia.

The first optional course, entitled “The Digital Subject,” was coordinated by Nishant Shah and had lectures by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Lawrence Liang. It proposed to account for the drastic changes in the relationships between the State, the Citizen and the Markets with the rise of digital technologies in the twenty-first century. The course proposed that as globalisation consolidates itself in Asia, we see changes in the patterns of governance, of state operation, of citizen engagement and civic action. We are in the midst of major revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, powered by digital social change, some headed by cyber-utopians specialising in Web 2.0 and Social media. Phrases such as “Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” have become very common.

Instead of concentrating only on the newness of technology-mediated change, there is a need to engage with the changing landscape of political subjectivity and engagement through a reintegration of science and technology studies with cultural studies and social sciences. The course thus posited certain questions that need to be addressed, within the domain of cultural studies, around the digital: what does a digital subject look like? What are the futures of existing socio-cultural rights based movements? How do digital technologies produce new interfaces for interaction and mobilisation? How do we develop integrated science-technologysociety approaches to understand our technology-mediated contemporary and futures?

Through a series of seminars, workshops, film screening, lectures, and fieldtrips, the course challenged the students not only to look at new objects of the digital but also to ask new questions of the old, inspired by the new methods and frameworks that the digital technologies are opening up for us.

The second optional course entitled “Technology, Culture and the Body” was coordinated by Nita Vasudevan and had Audrey Yue, Ding Naifei, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wing-Kwong Wong, and Hsing-Wen Chang as instructors. The course began with a hypothesis that, at this moment in history, we seem to be embedded in what Heidegger calls “the frenziedness of technology.” Hence, now more than ever, it is important that we try to understand how the gendered body relates to technology, and what this means for the domain of the cultural. For instance, what are the freedoms that technology is said to offer this body? What are these freedoms posed in opposition to? How do we understand technological practice contextually, both historically and in the contemporary? Is it possible to have a notion of the body that is outside technology, and a notion of technology that is outside cultural practice?

The course called for a move away from the idea of technology as a tool used by the human body, or the idea of technology as mere prosthesis or extension, to map the different ways of understanding the relationship
between culture, technology and the body, specifically in the Asian context. It will involve examining practices, cultural formations and understandings that have emerged within various locations in Asia. The course engaged the students in closereadings of key events and texts, hosted workshops to present and critique their own work, and think of collaborative pathways towards future distributed research and pedagogic initiatives that can emerge within the Inter-Asia space.

Both courses had additional assignments that included close-reading of texts, practical field work, critical reflection and collaborative projects completed during the span of the course.

Tying things up: key learnings

The Second Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School was an ambitious structure, and while there were logistical hiccups in the implementation, there were some key learning aspects that need to be highlighted.

Working with tensions. Asia is not a homogeneous unified entity. There are several geo-political tensions that mark the relationships between different countries in Asia. While the academic protocol and individual interest in learning more can help negotiate these tensions, these tensions do play out in different linguistic, cultural and emotional unintelligibility, which becomes part of the pedagogic moment in the Inter-Asia classroom. Orienting the instructors to these tensions, and trying to build a collaborative environment where the students appreciate these tensions and learn to communicate with each other and engage with the different contexts is extremely valuable. In the summer school, we had students helping each other with translation, providing new contexts and critiques for each other’s work, and learning how to engage with the palpable difference of somebody from a different country. These tensions can sometimes slow the content and discussions in the classrooms, but taking it up as a collective challenge (rather than just thinking of it as a logistical problem where students not fluent in English need to be given tools of translation) made for a productive and rich learning environment.
Ownership of community structures. When young scholars from different parts of the world are thrown together for such an intense period of time, it is inevitable that there will be bonds of friendship and belonging that grow. We had debated about whether we should invest in doing online community building by creating platforms, discussion boards and other structures that accompany digital outreach and coordination. However, apart from the initial centralization for applications and programming, we eventually decided to make the participants owners of these activities.’ to give a better sense of the ‘digital structures of community building’. And it was fascinating to see how they formed social networks, blogs, Tumblrs and other spaces of conversation among themselves, making these spaces more vibrant and diverse, thus leading to conversations beyond the summer school.
Infrastructure of participation. The Summer School was an extremely subsidised event thanks to the generous support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium, the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Indian Institute of Sciences, who helped in significantly reducing the costs of registration. The availability of travel fellowships, subsidies, scholarships, and an infrastructure of access cannot be emphasised enough in our experience. Owing to the subsidised costs, the living conditions and the logistics were not optimal. And while the students were extremely cooperative and accommodating with the glitches, we realised that better living conditions and amenities, especially for young students who are travelling to a different country for the first time, are as important as the classroom and the intellectual thought and design. Finding more resources to ease the conditions of travel and living will help build richer conversations inside and outside the classrooms. Sustained efforts to find more funding for a space for the IACS summer school need to be continued.
Selection processes. It was wanted to promote the Inter-Asia movement and hence a first preference was given to students who applied for the summer school through an open call for application. The students were asked to have references from people who have been a part of the movement, and also to send in a brief essay describing their expectations from the summer school. We were scouting for students—given that the numbers we could accept were limited—who were involved in not only learning but also in contributing to the social and political thought of the Inter-Asia movement. We also encouraged students who might not have been a part of a formal education system but are considering further education. Instead of building a homogeneous student base, there was an attempt made to find different kinds of students, from different locations, at different places in their own research work, and with different disciplines and modes of engagement. Scholarships and travel aid were offered to students who we thought deserved to be a part of the summer school but did not have access to university resources for participation. The diversity helped bring a more comprehensive compendium of skills and methods to the table.
Integration and relevance. Younger students often find it difficult to deal with historically formative texts from other contexts because they do not see how this responds to their context or is relevant to their work in contemporary times. Efforts at integrating the different cultures, showing the different trajectories of thought and research within Asia, and at locating the older texts in the context of modern-day research were hugely rewarding and more attempts need to be made to continue this process of making the historical archive of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Movement relevant and critical in new research.
Planning the futures. The participants had all indicated that post the Summer School, they would be excited to see what future avenues for participation there could be. With this summer school, we hadn’t looked at modes of sustained engagement with the participants. While they did take the initiative to communicate with each other, the momentum that was generated because of these discussions could not be captured in its entirety because we did not have any formal structures and processes to continue the engagement. Especially if the IACS summer schools are some sort of an orientation into the IACS movement, then there should be more systemic thought given to how those interested in engaging with the questions can do so, through their own academic and institutional locations, but also through different kinds of support structures that continue the conversations and exchange that begin at the Summer School.
Synergy with the local. For us, as well as for the students, the synergy with the local movements, activists, artists and research was fruitful and productive. One of the values of a travelling summer school is that every summer school can take up a particular theme that is locally relevant and weave it into the summer school. For Bangalore, it made logical sense for us to bring questions of Digital Technologies and Identity/Bodies into the course. Even within the core course, there was an effort to integrate these as key questions that open up new terrains of thought and research within Inter-Asia cultural studies. The optional courses, which were introduced for the first time, were exciting and generated a lot of interest and engagement from the participants. Attempts at creating these kinds of synergies need to be supported along with new and experimental modes of pedagogy and learning.

The Second Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School was a great opportunity to harness the potentials of the incredibly rich and diverse network that the IACS movement has built up over more than a decade. For us, it also became a playground where, inspired by the hacker culture and DIY movements that dot the landscape of Bangalore, we experimented with different forms of learning and knowledge production. Involving the students as stakeholders in the process, engaging with them as peers, making them responsible for collaborative learning, and creating spaces of participation and socialisation helped us circumvent many of the problems of language and cultural diversity that might have otherwise crippled the entire process. Pushing these modes of interaction and integration, while also creating an environment of trust, reciprocity and goodwill, is probably even more important than the curriculum and teaching, because these interactions create new nodes and connections, with each student and his/her interaction creating new edges that will hopefully shape and contribute to the contours of critical thought and intervention in Asia.

References

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Chua, Beng-Huat, ed. 2000. Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and Identities. London: Routledge.
Philip, Kavita, Lily Irani, and P. Dourish. 2010. “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey.” Science Technology Human Values 37 (1): 3–29.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2009. Indian Cinema in the time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. New Delhi: Combined Academic Publications.
Niranjana, Tejaswini, et al. 2010. Strengthening Community Engagement of Higher Education Institutions. Bangalore: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society.
Watts, Duncan. 1999. “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon.” AJS 105 (2): 493–527.

Author's Biography

Nishant Shah is the Director of Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, an International Tandem Partner at the Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University, and a Knowledge Partner with Hivos, in The Hague. He is the editor of the four-volume anthology Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and writes regularly for the Indian newspaper The Indian Express and for the Digital Media and Learning Hub at dmlcentral.net. His current areas of interest are Digital Humanities, Digital Activism and Digital Subjectivity.

[1]. A mammoth project such as the Inter-Asia Summer School requires resources, support and generosity from family, friends, and colleagues that can never be measured or cited in a note. However, there are a few people who need to be mentioned for their incredible spirits and the resources that they extended to us. Dr Raghavendra Gaddakar at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences and his entire staff were patient and hospitable hosts, housing the entire summer school for over a fortnight. The faculty, students and staff at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Bangalore helped in designing courses, finding venues and organising events that added to the richness of the summer school. Raghu Tankayala and Radhika P, both at CSCS were our rocks through this process, taking up a lion’s share of logistical arrangements. The help of the entire staff at the Centre for Internet and Society, who were there every step, helping with every last detail, and the Executive Director Sunil Abraham who lent us infrastructure and financial support to organise various events and salons, is unparalleled and I know I would have found it impossible to work without the knowledge that they would always be there to watch my back. All the instructors who agreed to join the teaching crew made this summer school what it became (a full list can be found at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/iacs-summer-school-2012). Both Nitya Vausdevan and I owe a huge amount of gratitude to the IACS society and the Consortium, as well as the stalwarts of the IACS movement who put faith in our vision, and pushed us, supported us, inspired us and helped us to carry out the different things we had planned. The local partners who make our life worth living—friends and colleagues at 1 Shanthi Road and The Alternative Law Forum—have been our rocks and we cannot thank them enough for their support and encouragement. A special thanks to Daniel Goh, who apart from being a faculty member, also helped us put together the website to manage the workflow for the entire project.

[2]. A full list of instructors and the prescribed curriculum can be found at http://cis-india.org/internet-overnance/iacs-summer-school-2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/routledge-inter-asia-cultural-studies-volume-15-issue-2-nishant-shah-asia-in-the-edges

Arguments Against the PUPFIP Bill

pranesh — 2011-09-12T11:03:09Z

The Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill (PUPFIP Bill) is a new legislation being considered by Parliament, which was introduced in the 2008 winter session of the Rajya Sabha. It is modelled on the American Bayh-Dole Act (University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act) of 1980. On this page, we explore some of the reasons that the bill is unnecessary, and how it will be harmful if passed.

Summary

How is the legislation unnecessary?

The Indian government does not have vast reserves of underutilized patents, as the U.S. did in 1980.
Technology transfer is very important, but pushing IPRs aggressively is not the best way of ensuring technology transfer.

How is the legislation harmful?

Excessive patenting lead to gridlocks and retards innovation.
The legislation makes mandatory that which is optional now, and is anyway being followed in many institutions.
Copyright, trademark, etc., seem to be covered under the definition of “public funded IP”.
It will result in a form of double taxation for research, and will increase the consumer cost of all products based on publicly-funded research.
It could have unintended consequences of varied kinds, including discouraging fundamental research as well as discouraging industrial research.
Non-disclosure requirements in the Bill restricts the dissemination of research within the academic community, and curtails freedom of speech.
Exclusive licensing enables restriction on the dissemination of academic research in the marketplace, and increase in cost of products based on public-funded research.

Arguments

How is the legislation unnecessary?

1) The Indian government does not have vast reserves of underutilized patents, as the U.S. did in 1980.

The idea behind the Bayh-Dole Act was that the research funded by the government (and owned, in the US, by the government) was being underutilized. In 1980, over 28,000 unlicensed patents lay with the U.S. government.[1] The Act shifted the title of such works from the government to the University or small business that conducted the research, thus allowing them to take out patents on the research outputs. In India, under present laws, the researcher(s) own the rights over their research whether they be government-funded or not. Usually, due to employment contracts, the research institutes already have the right to patent their inventions. Thus, currently, there is no need for an enabling legislation in this regard, as there was in the U.S.

In fact, currently, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has over 5173 patents (counting both those in force and those under dispute), while only 222 patents are licensed (with 68 of them being under dispute). Thus, even with the IP being in the institute's hands, there is a "problem" situation similar to that which necessitated Bayh-Dole in the U.S. Thus, quite contrary to the aims of the Act, further patenting will only lead to a situation of even more underutilized patents.

2) Technology transfer is very important, but pushing IPRs aggressively is not the best way of ensuring technology transfer.

At a recent seminar held at NUJS Kolkata on the PUPFIP Bill, it was revealed that while IIT-Kharagpur’s TTO-equivalent (called the Sponsored Research & Industrial Consultancy division - SRIC) currently handles over Rs.300 crores through 850 projects, only around Rs. 5-15 crores (exact figures weren't available) are currently made through its patent portfolio.[2] Thus patents don't seem, on the face of things, to be the best way of ensuring technology transfer. Indeed, the oft-cited 28,0000 unlicensed patents held by the U.S. government were composed primarily of patents for which industry had refused to take exclusive licences.[3]

Many contend that one of the most important functions of a patent is to get inventors to disclose their inventions rather than keep them as secrets. This reason for awarding a patent is invalidated if stronger protection is granted to trade secrets (no term limit, for instance) than for patents. Secondly, this reason for granting patents is not valid in case of government-funded research in academia and research institutes. The culture of publication and the economy of reputation are sufficient to ensure disclosure. Even without these intrinsic factors, there grant requirements can necessitate publication. If mere publication is believed to be insufficient, then the government would do well to ask for technology dissemination plans before grants are made. At any rate, monopoly rights in the form of patents are thoroughly unnecessary.

How is the legislation harmful?

1) Excessive patenting lead to gridlocks and retard innovation.

It sees protection of IPR as the sole means of encouraging innovation and driving research to the doorstep of consumers. The trend around the world is that of exploring alternative forms of spurring innovation. Even in India, CSIR has gone for an innovative "Open Source Drug Discovery" project, which has proven very successful so far. Furthermore, recent literature shows that excessive patenting is harming research and innovation by creating gridlocks.[4] If platform technologies and basic research (such as SNP) gets mired in patents, then the transaction costs increase (not only in terms of money, but more importantly in administrative terms). This ends up in research clearances getting blocked, and thus retards innovation. It must be remembered that intellectual property is not only an output, but also an input. The more aggressively the outputs are guarded and prevented from being shared, the more the inputs will be affected. The study of patent thickets and gridlocks has reached such a stage that the U.S. law has been changed to reflect this. Firstly, the Bayh-Dole Act was amended in 2000 to state that the objectives of the Bayh-Dole Act were to be carried out "without unduly encumbering future research and discovery". Now, the courts (in the Bilski case) have increased the standard of obviousness in patent law (which means that less patents will be granted). Furthermore, the U.S.P.T.O. and the U.S. Senate are currently considering means of overhauling the U.S. patent system, which many fear is close to breaking down due to over-patenting. All these are signs that the footsteps we are seeking to follow are themselves turning back.

2) The legislation makes mandatory that which is optional now, and is anyway being followed in many institutions.

While the CSIR labs pursue patents aggressively, they also run the OSSD project. The latter might not be permissible if the Act is passed as it stands. Furthermore, this would increase the number of underutilized patents, which is a problem faced currently by CSIR, which has had an aggressive patent policy since the 1990s. Unlicensed patents constitute around 93% of CSIR's total patent portfolio. (In contrast, MIT averages around 50% licensing of patents.) If aggressive patenting is made mandatory, it adds substantially to administrative costs of all institutes which receive any grants from the government. These institutes might not be large enough to merit a dedicated team of professionals to handle

3) Copyright, trademark, etc., seem to be covered under the definition of "public funded IP".

This leads to a ridiculous need to attempt to commercialise all government-funded research literature (and the government funds science research, social sciences, arts, etc.). Furthermore, while the definition of "public funded IP" includes copyrights, trademarks, etc., yet the substantive provisions seem to only include those forms of IP which have to be registered compulsorily (copyright and trademark don't -- copyright comes into existence when an original work is expressed in a medium, and trademark can come into existence by use). Importantly, seeking to commercialise all copyrighted works of research would hamper the movement for open access to scholarly literature. The inititative towards open access to scholarly literature is something that National Knowledge Commission has recommended, and is a move that would result in increased dissemination of public-funded research, which seems to be an aim of the PUPFIP Bill as well.

4) It will result in a form of double taxation for research, and will increase the consumer cost of all products based on publicly-funded research.

This bill would increase the consumer cost of all products based on publicly-funded research, because of the additional burden of patent royalties.

Public funds research -> Institute patents research -> Pharma MNC gets exclusive license over research -> Drug reaches market.

Assuming an exclusive licence: Cost of the drug = cost of manufacturing, storage, etc. + mark-up (monopolistic) cost + cost of licence.

Thus, in effect, the public has to pay twice for the research: it pays once to enable the scientist to conduct the research, and once again in the form of royalties to have that research brought to the marketplace.

5) It could have unintended consequences of varied kinds, including discouraging fundamental research as well as discouraging industrial research.

The former could happen since institutions and individual scientists have a financial incentive to shift their focus away from fundamental research; the latter, conversely, because the filings and bureaucracy involved could drive scientists away from reporting or even engaging in industrial research [pdf]. Faculty and researcher involvement in the business of licensing is a sub-optimal usage of their talents, and there are scientists who would rather stay away from business (as is shown by the intake of former industry-researchers into government-funded labs such as those of CSIR).

6) Non-disclosure requirements in the Bill restricts the dissemination of research within the academic community, and curtails freedom of speech.

This will bring about a shift in science and research which is always done upon others' work. This is why in the U.S., the National Institute of Health (N.I.H.) has sought to ensure (without any legal authority) that it only finances that research that on single nucleotide polymorphism (S.N.P.) which is not patented, and is shared freely amongst scholars. Since this requirement of the N.I.H.'s does not have any legal backing (since it is contradictory to the Bayh-Dole Act), institutions are free to get the grant from N.I.H. and then go ahead and patent their inventions.

7) Exclusive licensing enables restriction on the dissemination of academic research in the marketplace, and increase in cost of products based on public-funded research.

The bill allows for both assignment of licences as well as exclusive licences. Both of these enable monopolistic pricing to be undertaken by the licensee/assignee. There are not even any mechanisms in the Act to ensure, for instance, that a public call is made to ascertain that no parties are willing to consider a non-exclusive licence. Patents are generally said to grant a monopoly right because of the opportunity to recover costs of research and development. When the research is being done by public-funded money, there is no justification for monopoly rights on that research, since there are no excessive costs to recover.

Footnotes:

[1] See So et al. and Thursby and Thursby, quoted in the National Knowledge Commission's letter to the Prime Minister.

[2] See Prof. Vivekanandans' presentation "Patenting and Technology Transfer-the IIT Khargpur Experience"

[3] See Anthony So et al., Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries, 6 PLoS Biol e262 (2008)

[4] See Michael A. Heller & Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research, 280 Science 698 (1998)

Additional Resources

On the PUPFIP Bill

February 5, 2004: NIPER holds parallel session of Indian Science Congress (Express Pharma)
October 27, 2006: Susan Finston, India to Propose New Technology Transfer Legislation (Bayh-Dole 25)
January 16, 2007: National Knowledge Commision's Letter to Indian Prime Minister (National Knowledge Commission)
April 15, 2007: Archita Bhatta, Proposed IPR law raises concern (Down to Earth)
May 31, 2007: Science & Technology needs to be core of the economic development says Kapil Sibal (PIB Press Release)
November 13, 2007: Government Accords Approval to National Biotechnology Development Strategy (PIB Press Release)
February 1, 2008: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Indian Government Hopes Bill Will Stimulate Innovation (Science)
February 19, 2008: Shamnad Basheer, Exporting Bayh Dole to India: Whither Transparency? (Part 1) (Part 2) (SpicyIP)
March 17, 2008: Kalpana Pathak, Varsities may soon own patent rights (Business Standard)
March 17, 2008: P.T. Jyothi Datta, Public-funded research may pay dividends for scientists (Business Line)
March 17, 2008: Joff Wild, India considers Bayh-Dole style legislation (IAM Magazine)
April 30, 2008: M.K. Unnikrishnan and Pradeepti Nayak, Lessons from Bayh Dole Act and its relevance to India (PharmaBiz)
July 2008: Sean M. O'Connor, Historical Context of U.S. Bayh-Dole Act: Implications for Indian Government Funded Research Patent Policy (STEM Newsletter)
July 7, 2008: Shamnad Basheer, Mysterious Indian "Bayh Dole" Bill: SpicyIP Procures a Copy (SpicyIP)
July 09, 2008: Latha Jishnu, Does India need a Bayh-Dole Act? (Business Standard)
September 2008: V.C. Vivekanandan, Transplanting Bayh-Dole Act- Issues at Stake Authors (13 Journal of Intell. Prop. 480)
September 18, 2008: Shamnad Basheer, Indian Patent Bill: Let's not be too hasty (SciDev.net)
October 28, 2008: Anthony So et al., Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries, 6 PLoS Biol e262 (2008)
October 31, 2008: Cabinet gives approval for Protection and Utilization of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill, 2008 (PIB Press Release)
November 2008: Annette Lin et al., The Bayh-Dole Act and Promoting the Transfer of Technology of Publicly Funded-Research (UAEM White Paper on the Proposed Indian Bayh-Dole Analogue)
November 1, 2008: Editorial: Not in Public Interest (Mint)
November 12, 2008: Ben Butkus, As India Mulls Bill Modeled on Bayh-Dole, Critics Claim It May Stifle Innovation (Biotech Transfer Weekly)
December 16, 2008: Pranesh Prakash, Indian "Bayh Dole" Bill before Parliament (Commons Law)
January 23, 2009: Editorial: Time to Rethink Intellectual Property Laws (SciDev.net)
March 12, 2009: Feroz Ali Khader, Does Patenting Research Change the Culture of Science? (The Hindu)
April 24, 2009: Sunil Abraham & Pranesh Prakash, Does India Need Its Own Bayh-Dole? (Indian Express)
September 21, 2009: C.H. Unnikrishnan, Proposed Patent Bill Is Flawed, Say Experts (Mint)
September 23, 2009: Editorial: An Idea That's A Patent Misfit (Mint)
October 2009: Bhaven N. Sampat, The Bayh-Dole Model in Developing Countries: Reflections on the Indian Bill on Publicly Funded Intellectual Property (UNCTAD - ICTSD Policy Brief No. 5)
January 2010: Amit Shovon Ray & Sabyasachi Saha, Patenting Public-Funded Research for Technology Transfer: A Conceptual-Empirical Synthesis of US Evidence and Lessons for India (ICRIER Working Paper No. 244)
January 2010: Mrinalini Kochupillai, The Protection and Utilization of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill, 2008: A Critique in the Light of India's Innovation Environment, 15 J. Intell. Prop. Rights 19 (2010)
January 16, 2010: Amit Shovon Ray & Sabyasachi Saha, Intellectual Bottlenecks (Financial Express)
January 21, 2010: Latha Jishnu, Perils of the US Model (Business Standard)
January 22, 2010: Rema Nagarajan, Scientists Fume Over New Patent Bill (Times of India)
January 26, 2010: Shamnad Basheer, The Problem with Patents (Mint)
February 5, 2010: Shalini Butani, Public Research May Become More Private (Business Line)
February 8, 2010: Anika Gupta, Scientists Want Changes in Innovation Bill (Mint)
February 9, 2010: C.H. Unnikrishnan, Parliament Panel Wants Govt Review on Innovation Bill (Mint)
February 15, 2010: Leena Menghaney, A Bad Example from the U.S. (Down to Earth)
February 19, 2010: Pranesh Prakash, A Patent Conundrum (Indian Express)
SpicyIP coverage by tag 'Bayh Dole'
Presentations from NUJS, Kolkata conference on the PUPFIP Bill

On Bayh-Dole

Newspapers and Magazines

Academic Journals

Amy Kapczynski et al., Addressing Global Health Inequities: An Open Licensing Approach for University Innovation, 20 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1031 (2005)
Anthony So et al., Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries, 6 PLoS Biol. e262 (2008)
Arti K. Rai & Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Bayh-Dole Reform and the Progress of Biomedicine, 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 289 (2003)
David C. Mowery & Arvids A. Aiedonis, Numbers, Quality, and Entry: How Has the Bayh-Dole Act Affected U.S. University Patenting and Licensing?, 1 Innovation Pol'y Econ. 187 (2000)
David C. Mowery, et al., Learning to Patent: Institutional Experience, Learning, and the Characteristics of U.S. University Patents After the Bayh-Dole Act, 1981-1992, 48 Mgmt. Sci. 73 (2002)
Donald Kennedy, Editorial: Enclosing the Research Commons, 294 Science 2249 (2001)
F.M. Scherer, The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States, 7 Colorado J. Telecomm. High Tech. L. 167 (2009)
Henry Steck, Corporatization of the University: Seeking Conceptual Clarity, 585 Annals of Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 66 (2003)
Jason Owen-Smith, Trends and Transitions in the Institutional Environment for Public and Private Science, 49 Higher Educ. 91 (2005)
Jerry G. Thursby & Marie C. Thursby, University Licensing and the Bayh-Dole Act, 301 Science 1052 (2003)
Jerry G. Thursby & Marie C. Thursby, Who is Selling the Ivory Tower? Sources of Growth in University Licensing, 48 Mgmt. Sci. 90 (2002)
Josh Lerner, Review of 'Ivory Tower', 43 J. Econ. Litt. 510 (2005)
Joshua B. Powers, R&D Funding Source and University Technology Transfer: What is Stimulating Universities to Be More Entrepreneurial?, 45 Research in Higher Educ. 1 (2004)
Lita Nelsen, The Rise of Intellectual Property Protection in the American University, 279 Science 1460 (1998)
Marcia Angell & Arnold S. Relman, Patents, Profits & American Medicine: Conflicts of Interest in the Testing & Marketing of New Drugs, 131 Daedalus 102 (2002)
Maria Jelenik, Review: Two Books on Technology Transfer, 50 Admin. Sci. Q. 131 (2005) (Review of 'Ivory Tower')
Michael A. Heller & Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research, 280 Science 698 (1998)
Rebecca Henderson, et al., Universities as a Source of Commercia Technology: A Detailed Analsis of University Patenting, 1965-1988, 80 Rev. Econ. Statistics 119 (1998)
Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Public Research and Private Development: Patents and Technology Transfer in Government-Sponsorded Research, 82 Virginia L. Rev. 1663 (1996)
Rebecca S. Eisenberg & Richard R. Nelson, Public vs. Proprietary Science: A Fruitful Tension?, 131 Daedalus 89 (2002)
Richard Jensen & Marie Thursby, Proofs and Prototypes for Sale: The Licensing of University Inventions, 91 Am. Econ. Rev. 240 (2001)
Roberto Mazzoleni & Richard R. Nelson, Economic Theories about the Benefits and Costs of Patents, 32 J. Econ. Issues 1031 (1998)
Thomas A. Massaro, Innovation, Technology Transfer, and Patent Policy: The University Contribution, 82 Virginia L. Rev. 1729 (1996)
Walter W. Powell & Jason Owen-Smith, Universities and the Market for Intellectual Property in the Life Sciences, 17 J. Pol'y Analysis Mgmt. 253 (1998)
William M. Sage, Funding Fairness: Public Investment, Proprietary Rights and Access to Health Care Technology, 82 Virginia L. Rev. 1737 (1996)
Zach W. Hall & Christopher Scott, University-Industry Partnership, 291 Science 553 (2001)

Resources

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/why-no-pupfip

Arguments Against Software Patents in India

pranesh — 2012-03-13T10:43:12Z

CIS believes that software patents are harmful for the software industry and for consumers. In this post, Pranesh Prakash looks at the philosophical, legal and practical reasons for holding such a position in India. This is a slightly modified version of a presentation made by Pranesh Prakash at the iTechLaw conference in Bangalore on February 5, 2010, as part of a panel discussing software patents in India, the United States, and the European Union.

This blog post is based on a presentation made at the iTechLaw conference held on February 5, 2010. The audience consisted of lawyers from various corporations and corporate law firms. As is their wont, most lawyers when dealing with software patents get straight to an analysis of law governing the patenting of computer programmes in India and elsewhere, and seeing whether any loopholes exist and can be exploited to patent software. It was refreshing to see at least some lawyers actually going into questions of the need for patents to cover computer programs. In my presentation, I made a multi-pronged case against software patents: (1) philosophical justification against software patents based on the nature of software; (2) legal case against software patents; (3) practical reasons against software patents.

Preamble

Through these arguments, it is sought to be shown that patentability of software is not some arcane, technical question of law, but is a real issue that affect the continued production of new software and the everyday life of the coder/hacker/software programmer/engineer as well as consumers of software (which is, I may remind you, everywhere from your pacemaker to your phone). A preamble to the arguments would note that the main question to ask is: why should we allow for patenting of software? Answering this question will lead us to ask: who benefits from patenting of software. The conclusion that I come to is that patenting of software helps three categories of people: (1) those large software corporations that already have a large number of software patents; (2) those corporations that do not create software, but only trade in patents / sue on the basis of patents ("patent trolls"); (3) patent lawyers. How they don't help small and medium enterprises nor society at large (since they deter, rather than further invention) will be borne out by the rest of these arguments, especially the section on practical reasons against software patents.

What are Patents?

Patents are a twenty-year monopoly granted by the State on any invention. An invention has to have at least four characteristics: (0) patentable subject matter; (1) novelty (it has to be new); (2) inventive step / non-obviousness (even if new, it should not be obvious); (3) application to industry. A monopoly over that invention, thus means that if person X has invented something, then I may not use the core parts of that invention ("the essential claims") in my own invention. This prohibition applies even if I have come upon my invention without having known about X's invention. (Thus, independent creation is not a defence to patent infringement. This distinguishes it, for instance, from copyright law in which two people who created the same work independently of each other can both assert copyright.) Patents cover non-abstract ideas/functionality while copyright covers specific expressions of ideas. To clarify: imagine I make a drawing of a particular machine and describe the procedure of making it. Under patent law, no one else can make that particular machine, while under copyright law, no one can copy that drawing.

Philosophical Justification Against Software Patents

Even without going into the case against patents per se (lack of independent creation as a defence; lack of 'harm' as a criterion leading to internalization of all positive externalities; lack of effective disclosure and publication; etc.), which has been done much more ably by others like Bessen & Meurer (especially in their book Patent Failure) and Boldrin & Levine (in their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, the full text of which is available online).

But there is one essentially philosophical argument against software as subject matter of a patent. Software/computer programs ("instructions for a computer"), as any software engineer would tell you, are merely algorithms ("an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions") that are meant to be understood by a computer or a human who knows how to read that code.

Algorithms are not patentable subject matter, as they are mere expressions of abstract ideas, and not inventions in themselves. Computer programs, similarly, are abstract ideas. They only stop being abstract ideas when embodied in a machine or a process in which it is the machine/process that is the essential claim and not the software. That machine or process being patented would not grant protection to the software itself, but to the whole machine or process. Thus the abstract part of that machine/process (i.e., the computer program) could be used in any other machine/process, as it it is not the subject matter of the patent. Importantly, just because software is required to operate some machine would then not mean that the machine itself is not patentable, just that the software cannot be patented in guise of patenting a machine.

Legal Case Against Software Patents

In India, section 3(k) of the Patent Act reads:

(3) The following are not inventions within the meaning of this Act: (k) a mathematical or business method or computer programme (sic) per se or algorithms.

As one can see, computer programs are place in the same category as "mathematical methods", "algorithms", and "business methods", hence giving legal validity to the idea propounded in the previous section that computer programs are a kind of algorithms (just as algorithms are a kind of mathematical method).

Be that as it may, the best legal minds in India have had to work hard at understanding what exactly "computer programme per se" means. They have cited U.S. case law, U.K. case law, E.U. precedents, and sought to arrive at an understanding of how per se should be understood. While understanding what per se means might be a difficult job, it is much easier to see what it does not mean. For that, we can look at the 2004 Patent Ordinance that Parliament rejected in 2005. In that ordinance, sections 3(k) and (ka) read as follows:

(3) The following are not inventions within the meaning of this Act: (k) a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; (ka) a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms.

Thus, it is clear that the interpretation that "computer programme per se" excludes "a computer programme that has technical application to industry" and "a computer programme in combination with hardware" is wrong. By rejecting the 2004 Ordinance wording, Parliament has clearly shown that "technical application to industry" and "combination with hardware" do not make a computer programme patentable subject matter.

Indeed, what exactly is "technical application to industry"? "Technical" has various definitions, and a perusal through those definitions would show that barely any computer program can be said not to relate to a technique, not involve "specialized knowledge of applied arts and sciences" (it is code, after all; not everyone can write good algorithms), or not relate to "a practical subject that is organized according to scientific principles" or is "technological". Similarly, all software is, by definition, meant to be used in combination with hardware. Thus, it being used in combination with hardware must not, as argued above, give rise to patentability of otherwise unpatentable subject matter category.

In 2008, the Patent Office published a new 'Draft Manual Of Patent Practice And Procedure' in which it sought to allow patenting of certain method claims for software inventions (while earlier the Patent Office objected to method claims, allowing only device claims with hardware components). This Draft Manual was withdrawn from circulation, with Shri N.N. Prasad (then Joint Secretary of DIPP, the department administering the Patent Office) noting that the parts of the Manual on sections 3(d) and 3(k) had generated a lot of controversy, and were ultra vires the scope of the Manual (which could not override the Patent Act). He promised that those parts would be dropped and the Manual would be re-written. A revised draft of the Manual has not yet been released. Thus the interpretation provided in the Draft Manual (which was based heavily on the interpretation of the U.K. courts) cannot not be relied upon as a basis for arguments in favour of the patentability of software in India.

In October 2008, CIS helped organize a National Public Meeting on Software Patents in which Indian academics, industry, scientists, and FOSS enthusiasts all came to the conclusion that software patents are harmful for both the industry as well as consumers.

Practical Reasons Against Software Patents

This is going to be an attempt at distilling and simplifying some of the main practical arguments against patenting of software.

There are traditionally four incentives that the patent system caters to: (1) incentive to invent; (2) incentive to disclose; (3) incentive to commercialize; and (4) incentive to invent substitutes. Apart from the last, patenting of software does not really aid any of them.

Patent Landmines / Submarine Patents / Patent Gridlocks / No Exception for Independent Creation

Given that computer programs are algorithms, having monopolies over such abstract ideas is detrimental to innovation. Just the metaphors say a lot about software patents: landmines (they cannot be seen/predicted); submarines (they surface out of the blue); gridlocks (because there are so many software patents around the same area of computing, they prevent further innovation in that area, since no program can be written without violating one patent or the other).

Imagine the madness that would have ensued had patents been granted when computer programming was in its infancy. Imagine different methods of sorting (quick sort, bubble sort) that are part of Computer Science 101 had been patented. While those particular instances aren't, similar algorithms, such as data compression algorithms (including the infamous LZW compression method), have been granted patents. Most importantly, even if one codes certain functionality into software independently of the patent holder, that is still violative of the patent. Computer programs being granted patents makes it extremely difficult to create other computer programs that are based on the same abstract ideas. Thus incentives # (1) and (3) are not fulfilled, and indeed, they are harmed. There is no incentive to invent, as one would always be violating one patent or the other. Given that, there is no incentive to commercialize what one has invented, because of fear of patent infringement suits.

An apt illustration of this is the current difficulty of choosing a royalty-free video format for HTML 5, as it shows, in practical terms, how difficult it is to create a video format without violating one patent or the other. While the PNG image format was created to side-step the patent over the LZW compression method used in the GIF image format, bringing Ogg Theora or Dirac (both patent-free video format) to surpass the levels of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or VC-1 will be very difficult without infringing dozens if not hundreds of software patents. Chris DiBona of Google, while talking about improving Ogg Theora as part of its inclusion in HTML 5 specifications said, "Here’s the challenge: Can Theora move forward without infringing on the other video compression patents?" Just the number of companies and organization that hold patents over H.264 is astounding, and includes: Columbia University, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea (ETRI), France Télécom, Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC). As is the amount of royalties to be paid ("[t]he maximum royalty for these rights payable by an Enterprise (company and greater than 50% owned subsidiaries) is $3.5 million per year in 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year in 2007-08 and $5 million per year in 2009-10"; with royalty per unit of a decoder-encoder costing upto USD 0.20.)

Indeed, even the most diligent companies cannot guard themselves against software patents. FFII estimates that a very simple online shopping website would violate twenty different patents at the very least. Microsoft recently lost a case against i4i when i4i surfaced with a patent covering custom XML as implemented in MS Office 2003 and MS Office 2007. As a result Microsoft had to ship patches to its millions of customers, to disable the functionality and bypass that patent. The manufacturers of BlackBerry, the Canadian company Research in Motion, had to shell out USD 617 million as settlement to NTP over wireless push e-mail, as it was otherwise faced with the possibility of the court shutting down the BlackBerry service in the U.S. This happened despite there being a well-known method of doing so pre-dating the NTP patents. NTP has also filed cases against AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Palm Inc. Microsoft was also hit by Visto Corporation over those same NTP patents, which had been licensed to Visto (a startup).
- Don't These Cases Show How Software Patents Help Small Companies?
  
  The astute reader might be tempted to ask: are not all of these examples of small companies getting their dues from larger companies? Doesn't all of this show that software patents actually help small and medium enterprises (SMEs)? The answer to that is: no. To see why, we need to note the common thread binding i4i, NTP, and Visto. None of them were, at the time of their lawsuits, actually creating new software, and NTP was an out-and-out "non-practising entity"/"patent holding company" AKA, patent troll. i4i was in the process of closing shop, and Visto had just started up. None of these were actually practising the patent. None of these were producing any other software. Thus, none of these companies had anything to lose by going after big companies. In other words, the likes of Microsoft, RIM, Verizon, AT&T, etc., could not file counter-suits of patent infringement, which is normally what happens when SMEs try to assert patent rights against larger corporations. For every patent that the large corporation violates of the smaller corporation, the smaler corporation would be violating at least ten of the larger corporation's. Software patents are more helpful for software companies as a tool for cross-licensing rather than as a way of earning royalties. Even this does not work as a strategy against patent trolls.
Thus, the assertion that was made at the beginning is borne out: software patents help only patent trolls, large corporations that already have large software patent portfolios, and the lawyers who draft these patents and later argue them out in court.
Term of Patents

Twenty years of monopoly rights is outright ludicrous in an industry where the rate of turnover of technology is much faster -- anywhere between two years and five months.
Software Industry Progressed Greatly Without Patents

In India, software patents have never been asserted in courts (even though many have been illegally granted), yet the software industry in India is growing in leaps and bounds. Similarly, most of the big (American) giants of the software industry today grew to their stature by using copyright to "protect" their software, and not patents.
Copyright Exists for Software

As noted above, the code/expression of any software is internationally protected by copyright law. There is no reason to protect the ideas/functionality of that software as well.
Insufficient Disclosure

When ordinary computer programmers cannot understand what a particular software patent covers (which is the overwhelming case), then the patent is of no use. One of the main incentives of the patent system is to encourage gifted inventors to share their genius with the world. It is not about gifted inventors paying equally gifted lawyers to obfuscate their inventions into gobbledygook so that other gifted inventors can at best hazard a guess as to precisely what is and is not covered by that patent. Thus, this incentive (#2) is not fulfilled by the current system of patents either -- not unless there is a major overhaul of the system. This ties in with the impossibility of ensuring that one is not violating a software patent. If a reasonably smart software developer (who are often working as individuals, and as part of SMEs) cannot quickly ascertain whether one is violating patents, then there is a huge disincentive against developing software in that area at all.
Software Patents Work Against Free/Libre/Open Source Software

Software patents hinder the development of software and FOSS licences, as the licensee is not allowed to restrict the rights of the sub-licensees over and above the restrictions that the licensee has to observe. Thus, all patent clearances obtained by the licensee must be passed on to the sub-licensees. Thus, patented software, though most countries around the world do not recognize them, are generally not included in the default builds of many FOSS operating systems. This inhabits the general adoption of FOSS, since many of the software patents, even though not enforceable in India, are paid heed to by the software that Indians download, and the MP3 and DivX formats are not enabled by default in standard installations of a Linux OS such as Ubuntu.

Conclusion

Currently, the U.S. patent system is being reviewed at the administrative level, the legislative level, as well as the judicial level. At the judicial level, the question of business method patents (and, by extension, software patents) is before the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the form of Bilski v. Kappos. Judge Mayer of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, which heard In re Bilksi) noted that "the patent system has run amok". The Free Software Foundation submitted a most extensive amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, filled with brilliant analysis of software patents and arguments against the patentability of software that is well worth a read.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/arguments-against-software-patents

Archives and Access

praskrishna — 2015-04-17T11:06:20Z

The monograph by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving. By examining the Tamil Nadu and Goa state archives, along with the larger public and state archives in the country, the monograph looks at the materiality of archiving, the ambitions and aspirations of an archive, and why it is necessary to preserve archives, not as historical artefacts but as living interactive spaces of memory and remembrance. The findings have direct implications on various government and market impulses to digitise archives and show a clear link between opening up archives and other knowledge sources for breathing life into local and alternative histories.

Download the Monograph

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/archives-and-access/archives-and-access

Anushree Gupta - Ladies ‘Log’: Women’s Safety and Risk Transfer in Ridehailing

Anushree Gupta — 2020-05-19T06:29:12Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Anushree Gupta is the third among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on August, 1, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (YouTube) and Transcript (text)

Mumbai, India’s financial capital, is also often considered one of the safest cities for women in India, especially in contrast with New Delhi which is infamously dubbed as the “rape capital” within the country. Sensationalised incidents of harassment, molestation and rape serve as anecdotal references and warnings to other women who dare to venture out alone even during the daytime. The Delhi government recently proposed a policy for free transport for women in public buses and metro trains with the objective of increasing women’s affordability and access and to ensure safety in public transportation. [1] Despite such measures to increase women’s visibility and claims to public utilities and spaces, women who use public transport have historically suffered groping and stalking on buses and trains, which uphold self-policing and surveillance narratives. The issue of women’s safety in India remains a priority as well as a good rhetorical claim and goal to aspire to, for public and private initiatives. Ironically, the notion of women’s safety is also advanced to increase moral policing and censure women’s access to public spaces, which also perpetuates exclusion of other marginalised citizens (Phadke 2007). Further, and crucially, whose safety is being imagined, prioritized and designed for (which class of women are central to the imagination of the safety discourse) is often a point of contention.

In this context, ridehailing services offered by Uber and Ola have come to be frequently cited as safer and more reliable options for women to traverse the cityspace, compared to overcrowded buses and trains. Their mobile applications promise accountability and traceability, enforcing safety standards by way of qualified and well-groomed drivers, SOS buttons and location-sharing features. However, it has increasingly become common knowledge that these alternatives are prone to similar, if not worse, categories of crimes against women. While reports of violence against women in cabs have mostly been outside of Mumbai, due to “platform-effects,” such incidents have widespread ramifications for drivers across the country. Cab drivers who operate via cab aggregator platforms have come under heavy scrutiny not only by the corporate and legal infrastructures of aggregator companies but also in the public eye. On the other hand, platform companies independently, and in partnership with city and state administrations, continue to launch “social impact” initiatives aimed at women’s safety as well as employment (through taxi-driving training). [2] Incidents of violence against women present jarring narratives of risk not only for female passengers but also for the platform-workers, both of whom are responsible for abiding by the constructed notions of safety for women in urban spaces.

In this post, I explore women’s presence as workers as well as passengers/customers in the ridehailing platform economy, in the context of women’s safety, situating the analysis with a focus on Mumbai. The related discourses around risk for female commuters give rise to various interventions and women-centric services through female-only cab enterprises and training more women drivers to mitigate this risk. Through these, I will think through the figure of the woman in the ridehailing economy in Mumbai and by extension in India.

Platforms in Gendered Cityscapes

Mumbai’s public transport is comprised of the local train network, BEST buses and auto rickshaws, with the metro being the newest addition to the mix. Unlike in most of India, kaali-peelis (black-yellow cabs) have been a permanent feature of Mumbai’s landscape since the 1950s and, taking a cab is not necessarily a luxury. Against this backdrop, platform companies have sought to make the claims of democratizing public transport and providing safer travel options to women in the city.

Cab drivers on ridehailing platforms in Mumbai are usually domestic male migrants or Muslim drivers from within and outside the city, who are more often than not overworked and stressed due to the falling incomes and rising debts. It is important to recognise the ‘veiled masculinities’ (Chopra 2006) which labor to service the emergent platform economy and the hierarchies of caste and class which are sustained through their labor. The incongruence between the masculinity of a working class man and the demands of the service economy (Nixon 2009) exacerbates emotional pressures in customer-facing services, which can offer an explanation for angry outbursts and conflicts between drivers and customers.

Uber’s ad on a billboard in Mumbai promises earnings of more than Rs. 1 lakh per month. Using a woman’s image illustrates the extent of their potential for transforming lives and livelihoods. Source: Drivers’ Union Telegram Group.

While Uber and Ola claim that a large number of women drivers work on their platforms, actual experiences of passengers and the male drivers I spoke to, suggested otherwise. Ironically, mass driver-training programs are seen as a quick way to make low-skilled and migrant male workers employable in Indian cities while, despite public-private partnerships to train women, it has been impossible to retain women drivers due to stereotypical perceptions of gender and persistent social stigma. [3] This made the ridehailing passenger woman (upper middle class, affording professional) a stakeholder to design for, while female drivers (but all female workers) appeared as liability for platforms.

These narratives speak directly to the construction of insecurity and risk for women (Berrington and Jones 2002) on public transport systems as they highlight vulnerabilities due to public exposure of women’s bodies. Pandering to a moral panic standpoint and creating personalised or ‘inside’ safe spaces for women to manage risk (Green and Singleton 2006), these platforms can then be imagined as a boundary-setting exercise. Access to public spaces is encouraged but it is delimited by confining the woman’s body to a singular vehicle in the custody of the cab driver. Autonomy and access afforded by the platform manages to transform women—particularly upper class and upper caste women who can afford these services—into potential customers. Their agency is bounded though by tasking the driver to ferry her across the otherwise hostile cityscape filled with ‘unfriendly bodies’ (Phadke 2013). The production of the city’s gendered space goes hand in hand with the confinement/erasure of female bodies in the public space as they embody patriarchal norms even in a city as ‘progressive’ as Mumbai. As demonstrated by studies mapping the movement of women in the city (Ranade 2007), the spatio-temporal factors lend themselves to creating gendered bodies in order to keep patriarchal norms intact. These norms, as I argue in this post, are detrimental not just to women but also other marginalised sections of the urban population, in this case platform workers.

Terms of Safety

Male drivers’ social identities as lower class, lower caste individuals do not inspire confidence in the standards of safety boasted by these companies in the eyes of their predominantly upper caste and upper class customer base. Risk to female passengers is further exaggerated due to the closed space in which the service is provided, highlighting the proximity to a potential aggressor by way of these platforms. In specific situations wherein a female passenger is inebriated or is travelling alone at night, drivers report being extra cautious and helpful towards her. Many respondents proudly mention going out of their way to make sure women get home safely, for instance, prolonging waiting time or escorting them to the entrance of their residential buildings or involving the security guard at the gate.

However, there have also been cases wherein the driver has been under scrutiny either by an overly careful passenger or by the public. One driver reported being surrounded by a crowd at a traffic signal, only to realise that he was being suspected of foul play with the female passenger who had fallen asleep on the backseat of the car. In contrast to their western counterparts, the class differences between drivers and passengers in India exacerbate doubts, fears and insecurities in India which tend to take a caste-purity angle as well. The woman’s body undergoes an exchange of custody in these instances wherein she is deemed incapable of taking care of herself and requires external assistance. Imagining a deterrence effect of ridesharing services (Park et. al 2017) reinforces the logic of guardianship and protectionism for the woman. The risk of carrying her in the vehicle in these situations is borne by the cab driver, operating under a framework of overbearing protectiveness which holds him culpable for any misgivings, assumed or otherwise.

Cautionary listicles advise women to not take a cab alone at night, carrying pepper sprays/umbrellas as tools for self-defence, refrain from conversations with drivers or talk continuously on the phone, among other things. The onus of the woman’s safety is either on the individual herself or the driver who is ferrying her. Moreover, the driver is a likely assailant whom the woman should guard against as well. Source: HelloTravel.

Notions of safety and risk are embodied in everyday interactions in urban spaces and mediated by disparate infrastructures of knowledge across distinctions of caste, class and gender. These distinctions define constraints which govern social interactions between actors of these categories. Interactions between lower caste or Muslim men and upper caste/class women are circumscribed by what Tuan (1979) describes as ‘landscapes of fear’. Be it the apprehensions about sharing a ride with a passenger of the opposite sex (Sarriera et. al 2017) or reports of gang-rapes by cab drivers, the boundaries of social conduct are laid out clearly by constructing narratives of risk and safety. The protection of the female body and her sexual safety is not her responsibility alone but that of the society as a whole. The so called preventive measures for rape and violence against women produce the dichotomies of frailty and strength (Campbell 2005) in so far as they project the woman as always at risk with the shadow of a potential assault always looming large.

When asked about interactions with women as customers or fellow drivers, drivers performed exaggerated respectability for women. The catch in these narratives however was that drivers justified and extended respect only to ‘good’ customers, where a ‘good’ woman was a certain kind of a moral actor.

Given the prevailing discontent with redressal mechanisms for workers on the platforms, it was not surprising to witness a group of drivers at the Uber Seva Kendra (help centre) in Mumbai, debating whether they should be accepting requests from any female customers at all. Drivers also had to attend mandatory training sessions for ‘good conduct’ with customers wherein they underwent behavioral correction and gender sensitisation lessons. [4] The gendering of the platform economy is baked into these instructions and trainings that reproduce male drivers as figures of safety and constant positive affect.

Gender, Safety, and Enterprise

In my fieldwork, I also came across a slew of ventures run by fleet owners and others that sought to service women passengers and employ women drivers exclusively. Claiming to fill in the gaps of inadequate vetting mechanisms in existing platforms, these alternate ventures purportedly smoothened out some anxieties by eliminating the risk of interacting with a man from different socio-economic strata. The premium charged by these companies was telling of the value of safety and affordability of these services for a large section of their intended audience, namely women with higher disposable incomes residing in metropolitan cities.

On the flipside, these enterprises encouraged women to break stereotypical perceptions about women drivers, also giving a nod to increasing and diversifying opportunities of employment for women. However, these ideas remained attractive only in principle and fizzled out sooner or later as most of these ventures did not succeed. A severe capital crunch due to unsustainable business models, limited funding options and lack of substantial supportive ecosystems for training and upkeep are possible reasons for failure. [5] Even so, the idea of a women-centric service continues to remain valuable because of the promise of safety which is produced through considerations of class, caste, gender and religion (Phadke 2005). Any alternative to avoid interaction with men from a lower class or caste background or from another religion (especially Hindu/Muslim in Mumbai) is welcome in a society which is deeply stratified and entrenched in caste-class systems of religion and economy alike.

Conclusion

The pervasiveness of the discourses of safety and risk in the ride hailing space became apparent to me during field research. Respondents indicated a heightened awareness of my gender, referring to me as “madam” and taking measures to ensure my safety. They advised me to use a separate phone to interact with drivers and moderated my interactions with drivers on the Telegram group (run by one of the Unions in Mumbai). Union representatives were also diligent in moderating the group to filter out abusive language as a token of respect for women. My apprehensions in interacting with drivers, most of whom were older men from a lower class/caste community, were also indicative of my social conditioning as an upper class and upper caste woman. Self-policing and boundary setting in both physical and virtual interactions, while necessary to some extent, were often rendered useless as the shifting of risks became apparent to me in my interactions with the drivers.

In this piece, I have tried to show how gendered norms govern the construction of safety and risk which in turn regulate social interactions. Limiting exposure in a personal cab as opposed to a public bus/train also heightens considerations of intimacy and proximity to a potential aggressor (often from a marginalised sociocultural background). Women-centric cab services mitigate this by promoting the image of the female driver who breaks social norms. However, these services dwindle till they completely disappear due to a capital crunch or insufficient infrastructural support. Patriarchal contexts reaffirm the woman as a risky object by highlighting narratives of vulnerabilities and insecurities in the ridehailing space. Besides the woman, the cab drivers are held accountable for bearing this risk and ensuring her sexual and physical safety. These patriarchal hierarchies of protectionism are sustained by platform workers’ affective labour which lubricate the wheels of the platform economy.

Endnotes

[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/free-rides-for-women-only-the-starting-point-say-activists/article28111938.ece

[2] https://www.olacabs.com/media/in/press/ola-foundation-launches-drive-to-enable-sustainable-livelihoods-for-500000-women-by-2025

[3] https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/girl-power

[4] https://yourstory.com/2018/11/uber-gender-awareness-sensitisation-driver

[5] https://www.livemint.com/Companies/bo4534H8mOWo0oG6VQ0xbM/As-demand-for-womenonly-cab-services-grow-challenges-loom.html

References

Berrington, E. and Jones, H., 2002. Reality vs. myth: Constructions of women’s insecurity. Feminist Media Studies, 2(3), pp.307-323.

Campbell, A., 2005. Keeping the ‘lady’ safe: The regulation of femininity through crime prevention literature. Critical Criminology, 13(2), pp.119-140.

Chopra, R., 2006. Invisible men: Masculinity, sexuality, and male domestic Labor. Men and Masculinities, 9(2), pp.152-167.

Green, E. and Singleton, C., 2006. Risky bodies at leisure: Young women negotiating space and place. Sociology, 40(5), pp.853-871.

Nixon, D., 2009. I Can’t Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy. Gender, Work & Organization, 16(3), pp.300-322.

Park, J., Kim, J., Pang, M.S. and Lee, B., 2017. Offender or guardian? An empirical analysis of ride-sharing and sexual assault. An Empirical Analysis of Ride-Sharing and Sexual Assault (April 10, 2017). KAIST College of Business Working Paper Series, (2017-006), pp.18-010.

Phadke, S., 2005. ‘You Can Be Lonely in a Crowd’ The Production of Safety in Mumbai. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 12(1), pp.41-62.

Phadke, S., 2007. Dangerous liaisons: Women and men: Risk and reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1510-1518.

Phadke, S., 2013. Unfriendly bodies, hostile cities: Reflections on loitering and gendered public space. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.50-59.

Ranade, S., 2007. The way she moves: Mapping the everyday production of gender-space. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1519-1526.

Raval, N. and Dourish, P., 2016, February. Standing out from the crowd: Emotional labor, body labor, and temporal labor in ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 97-107). ACM.

Sarriera, J.M., Álvarez, G.E., Blynn, K., Alesbury, A., Scully, T. and Zhao, J., 2017. To share or not to share: Investigating the social aspects of dynamic ridesharing. Transportation Research Record, 2605(1), pp.109-117.

Tuan, Y.F., 2013. Landscapes of fear. U of Minnesota Press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing

pranesh — 2011-09-21T06:01:54Z

CIS analyses the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, from a public interest perspective to sift the good from the bad, and importantly to point out what crucial amendments should be considered but have not been so far.

The full submission that CIS and 21 other civil society organizations made to the Rajya Sabha Standing Committee on HRD (which is studying the Bill) is available here. Given below is the summary of our submissions:

Existing Copyright Act

The Indian Copyright Act, 1957 has been designed from the perspective of a developing country. It has always attempted a balance between various kinds of interests. It has always sought to ensure that rights of authors of creative works is carefully promoted alongside the public interest served by wide availability and usability of that material. For instance, our Copyright Act has provisions for:

compulsory and statutory licensing: recognizing its importance in making works available, especially making them available at an affordable rate.
cover versions: recognizing that more players lead to a more vibrant music industry.
widely-worded right of fair dealing for private use: recognizing that individual use and large-scale commercial misuse are different.

These provisions of our Act have been lauded, and India has been rated as the most balanced copyright system in a global survey conducted of over 34 countries by Consumers International.

The Indian Parliament has always sought to be responsive to changing technologies by paying heed to both the democratisation of access as well as the securing of the interests of copyright holders. This approach needs to be lauded, and importantly, needs to be maintained.

Proposed Amendments

Some positive amendments

Fair Dealings, Parallel Importation, Non-commercial Rental: All works (including sound recordings and cinematograph films) are now covered the fair dealings clause (except computer programmes), and a few other exceptions; parallel importation is now clearly allowed; and non-commercial rental has become a limitation in some cases.
Persons with disabilities: There is finally an attempt at addressing the concerns of persons with disabilities. But the provisions are completely useless the way they are currently worded.
Public Libraries: They can now make electronic copies of works they own, and some other beneficial changes relating to public libraries.
Education: Some exceptions related to education have been broadened (scope of works, & scope of use).
Statutory and compulsory licensing: Some new statutory licensing provisions (including for radio broadcasting) and some streamlining of existing compulsory licensing provisions.
Copyright societies: These are now responsible to authors and not owners of works.
Open licences: Free and Open Source Software and Open Content licensing is now simpler.
Partial exemption of online intermediaries: Transient and incidental storage of copyrighted works has been excepted, mostly for the benefit of online intermediaries.
Performer’s rights: The general, and confusing, exclusive right that performers had to communicate their performance to the public has been removed, and instead only the exclusive right to communicate sound/video recordings remains.
Enforcement: Provisions on border measures have been made better, and less prone to abuse and prevention of legitimate trade.

Some negative amendments

WCT and WPPT compliance: India has not signed either of these two treaties, which impose TRIPS-plus copyright protection, but without any corresponding increase in fair dealing / fair use rights.
Increase in duration of copyright: This will significantly reduce the public domain, which India has been arguing for internationally.
Technological Protection Measures: TPMs, which have been shown to be anti-consumer in all countries in which they have been introduced, are sought to be brought into Indian law.
Version recordings: The amendments make cover version much more difficult to produce.
Moral rights: Changes have been made to author’s moral rights (and performer’s moral rights have been introduced) but these have been made without requisite safeguards.

Missed opportunities

Government-funded works: Taxpayers are still not free to use works that were paid for by them. This goes against the direction that India has elected to march towards with the Right to Information Act.
Copyright terms: The duration of all copyrights are above the minimum required by our international obligations, thus decreasing the public domain which is crucial for all scientific and cultural progress.
Criminal provisions: Our law still criminalises individual, non-commercial copyright infringement.
Libraries and archives: The exceptions for ‘public libraries’ are still too narrow in what they perceive as ‘public libraries’.
Educational exceptions: The exceptions for education still do not fully embrace distance and digital education.
Communication to the public: No clear definition is given of what constitute a ‘public’, and no distinction is drawn between commercial and non-commercial ‘public’ communication.
Internet intermediaries: More protections are required to be granted to Internet intermediaries to ensure that non-market based peer-production projects such as Wikipedia, and other forms of social media and grassroots innovation are not stifled.
Fair dealing and fair use: We would benefit greatly if, apart from the specific exceptions provided for in the Act, more general guidelines were also provided as to what do not constitute infringement. This would not take away from the existing exceptions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/copyright-bill-analysis

Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Activism in Asia Reader

The Book

Excerpt from the Foreword

Data Lives of Humanities Text

This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (2020) edited by Sandeep Mertia, with a Foreword by Ravi Sundaram as part of the Series on Theory on Demand by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Read the open access book here.

Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

Sadaf Khan: Media Matters for Democracy and Twitter

Comments on the Draft Rules under the Information Technology Act

Comments on the Draft Rules under the Information Technology Act as Amended by the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008

Interception, Monitoring and Decryption

Section 69

Draft Rules under Section 69

Blocking of Access to Information

Section 69A

Draft Rules under Section 69A

Monitoring and Collection of Traffic Data

Draft Rules under Section 69B

Manner of Functioning of CERT-In

Draft Rules under Section 70B(5)

Draft Rules under Section 52

Draft Rules under Section 54

Penal Provisions

Section 66A

Section 66F

Can data ever know who we really are?

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: Can data ever know who we really are?

Zara Rahman: The Engine Room, Website, and Twitter

Book 1: To Be, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System

Case study: Download (PDF)

Introduction

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

Introduction

Context

Snapshots

Propositions

About the Authors

References

End Notes

Bahujan Digital Publishing Infrastructures

Asia in the Edges: A Narrative Account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School in Bangalore

Plotting Edges: The Rationale

The core course: methodologies for cultural studies in Asia

New nodes: Optional courses: the digital subject/technology, culture and the body

Tying things up: key learnings

References

Author's Biography

Arguments Against the PUPFIP Bill

Summary

How is the legislation unnecessary?

How is the legislation harmful?

Additional resources

Arguments

How is the legislation unnecessary?

1) The Indian government does not have vast reserves of underutilized patents, as the U.S. did in 1980.

2) Technology transfer is very important, but pushing IPRs aggressively is not the best way of ensuring technology transfer.

How is the legislation harmful?

1) Excessive patenting lead to gridlocks and retard innovation.

2) The legislation makes mandatory that which is optional now, and is anyway being followed in many institutions.

3) Copyright, trademark, etc., seem to be covered under the definition of "public funded IP".

4) It will result in a form of double taxation for research, and will increase the consumer cost of all products based on publicly-funded research.

5) It could have unintended consequences of varied kinds, including discouraging fundamental research as well as discouraging industrial research.

6) Non-disclosure requirements in the Bill restricts the dissemination of research within the academic community, and curtails freedom of speech.

7) Exclusive licensing enables restriction on the dissemination of academic research in the marketplace, and increase in cost of products based on public-funded research.

Additional Resources

On the PUPFIP Bill

On Bayh-Dole

Arguments Against Software Patents in India

Preamble

What are Patents?

Philosophical Justification Against Software Patents

Legal Case Against Software Patents

Practical Reasons Against Software Patents

Patent Landmines / Submarine Patents / Patent Gridlocks / No Exception for Independent Creation

Don't These Cases Show How Software Patents Help Small Companies?

Term of Patents

Software Industry Progressed Greatly Without Patents