Centre for Internet and Society

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa

praskrishna — 2014-01-05T02:52:03Z

From 9 to 13 December 2013, delegates from national and international governmental governmental entities, the private sector, civil society, and academia gathered for five days of interconnected events in Cape Town.

Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the sessions on Bridging into the Global Congress: Global Issues, Local Answers?, User Rights Track: What Medicines Can Teach Tech: Exploring Patent Pooling and Compulsory Licensing in the Indian Mobile Device Market, User Rights Track: Reclaiming the World Trade Organisation: A Modest Proposal for a WTO Agreement on the Supply of Global Public Goods, and was a keynote speaker on The Freedom Continuum. Nehaa Chaudhari also participated in this event. Click to read more about the event published on the website of open A.I.R. here. The full programme can be seen here.

Participants will engage with diverse perspectives and future scenarios for intellectual property (IP), innovation and development during the combined 3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest and Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa.

The event is now fully subscribed, with only registrations invited by Congress & Conference organisers being accpted. For further details, please visit this website's Cape Town 2013 page.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) Faculty of Law's IP Unit is serving as host of the Congress & Conference. Implementating partners include the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at The American University in Cairo, the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS) at the University of Lagos, the Centre for IP and IT Law (CIPIT) at Srathmore University in Nairobi, the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
at American University in Washington, DC.

Congress and Conference funding is being provided by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Open Society Foundations.

Date: Monday, 9 December, 2013 to Friday, 13 December, 2013
Place: Cape Town
Type of Event: Conference

Sunil Abraham provided a hilarious talk on The Freedom Continuum. An example: “Freedom is like the Kama Sutra – there are many positions one can take.” Mr. Abraham also brilliantly suggested a method for plausible deniability in the world of biometric identification and oppressive government oversight. By posting all of my biometric information (fingerprints, eye scans, etc.) on the internet, I can plausibly deny any crimes or contracts or tracking by the government because, well, it’s all online so it couldn’t have been me, right? So we should (paradoxically) fight incursion into data privacy simply by releasing all biometric data about ourselves.

Also quite amusing was the comparison of the IP debate to Tom and Jerry, that iconic Cat (Kat?) and Mouse duo who are perpetually chasing one another. Tom the Cat represents Big Business, corporate interests, the USTR, etc. Tom is chasing (but can never quite catch) Jerry the Mouse, who represents civil society, human rights activists, the open source movement, etc. An audience member pointedly observed that Jerry typically runs around for a bit and then disappears into a hole in the wall, where he stays for some time before emerging to torture Tom again. The obvious point is that activists (i.e., the audience at the Global Congress) will never make substantial progress until they stop disappearing for long periods of time and start acting more like a cat (or even, perhaps, like a dog).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/3rd-global-congress-ip-and-public-interest-open-air-conference-innovation-and-ip-africa

3rd Expert Committee Meeting on reference of secretary, MHRD on representation of Internet and Mobile Association of India

praskrishna — 2016-02-05T14:04:24Z

The 3rd Expert Committee meeting was held on January 11, 2016 in Committee Room No.654, 'A' Wing, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in New Delhi. Nehaa Chaudhari and Anubha Sinha attended the meeting.

Download the notice.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/3rd-expert-committee-meeting-on-reference-of-secretary-mhrd-on-representation-of-internet-and-mobile-association-of-india

3 Copyright Tips for Students and Educators

subha — 2016-10-07T00:42:06Z

Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when it comes to online use of creative works, accidentally crossing the line between fair use and a copyright violation is easy. How do you know what is copyrighted? Recently Frederico Morando (Creative Commons, Italy) and I presented a training session on understanding copyright policies at Wikimania 2016, which was originally proposed by Wikipedian User:Jim Carter. We covered topics such as fundamentals of copyright, exclusive rights, Berne convention, copyleft, Creative Commons licenses, Public Domain, fair use, and copyfraud.

The blog post was published by Opensource.com on August 16, 2016. This got mentioned in Wikipedia's newsletter "The Signpost". This was mirrored by Wiki Edu on October 5, 2016. The post republished can be read here.

In this article, I'll look at three copyright tips to keep in mind when you're thinking about using content—even for academic purposes— you find online.

1. Most of what you find on the Internet is copyrighted.

Except content that clearly indicates the work is released under a free license, or that the copyright has lapsed and the work is in the Public Domain, you can assume content is not freely/liberally licensed. A few popular free and open licenses include GNU General Public License (GPL), BSD licenses, Apache License, Mozilla Public License, and SIL Open Font License. If a work mentions the license, usually the license is explained or links to terms for using the work. Spending a little time to find out what license the work is under beats spending time and money on a copyright infringement case later.

2. Fair use can be your friend, but not always.

Fair use means you might be permitted to make limited use of a copyrighted work without prior permission from the copyright holder. The fair use policy varies from country to country. As explained in the Stanford University Libraries site, commentary/quotes and criticism, and parody are cases that often fall under fair use.

Wikipedia article images related to recent music albums, movies, and even people who are deceased are used under fair use policy. Click on a recent movie poster appearing in a Wikipedia article and check the copyright section for an example explanation of why the use on Wikipedia qualifies as fair use.

^{Example Wikipedia explanation for fair use of an image.}

Fair use also gives some freedom to scholars to use copyrighted work for academic research. To be in a safe side if you are not sure your use falls under "fair use," reach out to the copyright holder and get formal permission before using their work.

3. search.creativecommons.org helps streamline Creative Commons content searches.

Where do you go to search for images, illustrations, and other content with Creative Commons licensing? Most images turned up using a search engine are copyrighted and not licensed liberally, for example. A better way to search is using search.creativecommons.org.

You can choose Creative Commons-licensed content from several sites, such as Flickr, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and Europeana. You can also specify whether you want to use the content for commercial purposes, or to modify, adapt, and build upon work.

^{Image credit likeaduck. CC BY 2.0}

Note that you still will need to check which Creative Commons license the content uses. As explained in an article by Richard Fontana:

The Creative Commons suite includes licenses that implement various policies. Some, like CC BY and CC BY-SA, are normatively consistent with corresponding permissive and copyleft families of free software licenses. Others, however, particularly its “NC” (no commercial use) and “ND” (no derivative works) licenses, are in conflict with basic principles of free software and free culture. I am not alone in lamenting the application of the Creative Commons umbrella brand to cover licenses with such disparate qualities. One consequence has been a general confusing dilution of the meaning of “openness” in the context of cultural works. A more specific problem is the evidence of confusion on the part of content authors interested in applying Creative Commons licenses to their works, and resulting confusion by those interested in making use of such works. Too often a work is labeled as being licensed under “a Creative Commons license”, without specifying accurately, or specifying at all, which free or nonfree policy the author sought to apply.

If you still cannot find content—images, for example—with free licenses, but you find copyrighted content that fits your academic need, you can reach out to the content creator or copyright holder for permission. Often copyright holders allow usage of their work for non-commercial purposes, such as academic research and publication.

Do you have other sources you recommend for finding Creative Commons or Public Domain content? Let us know about your favorite resources in the comments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/3-copyright-tips-for-students-and-educators

2nd National Language Conference, Bhubaneswar

subha — 2015-04-10T15:23:02Z

Institute of Odia Studies and Research organised 2nd National Language Conference beginning on Monday, March 30, 2015 and ending on April 2, 2015 at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar. This conference was organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Culture. I presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

I spoke briefly about the issues with Odia being used massively on the Internet and gaining popular with Odia speaking netizens. Odia Wikimedia community and CIS-A2K's efforts has resulted growth in online Odia content. I also shared the potential projects that people could get involved and how collective effort will yield more diversification of the language and its use by today's generation.

The talk is available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 license.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/second-national-language-conference-bhubaneswar

2nd Law Economics Policy Conference 2017

Admin — 2017-12-05T14:08:47Z

The 2nd Law Economics Policy Conference is being organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi and Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York from December 4 to 6, 2017 at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi.

Steering Committee

Upma Chawdhry, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration
Rajeev Kapoor, Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals
K. P. Krishnan, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship
Sunanda Nair Bidkar, Institute for New Economic Thinking
Ila Patnaik, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
Rathin Roy, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
Ajay Shah, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
B. N. Srikrishna, Former Judge, Supreme Court of India
Somasekhar Sundaresan, Advocate
Shardul S. Shroff, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas

4 December 2017

Juniper Hall (Entry from Gate No. 1 on Lodhi Road)

19:30 - 22:30	Inauguration and Dinner
	Inaugural Address Amitabh Kant, NITI Aayog

5 December 2017

Juniper Hall (Entry from Gate No. 1 on Lodhi Road)

09:00 - 09:30	Registration and Breakfast
09:30 - 09:45	Opening remarks
09:45 - 11:05	Panel 1: Public Health
	Chairperson: C. K. Mishra, Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change
	Regulating the health profession Shefali Malhotra, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	Air pollution Shubho Roy, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	Health system design thinking Nachiket Mor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
	Panelists
	B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, Government of Chhattisgarh Yamini Aiyar, Centre for Policy Research Sanjay Arte, True North Managers
11:05 - 11:25	Tea/Coffee
11:25 - 12:45	Panel II: Bankruptcy
	Chairperson: Injeti Srinivas, Ministry of Corporate Affairs
	The issues Bhargavi Zaveri, Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research
	Panelists
	Shashank Saksena, Ministry of Finance Suharsh Sinha, AZB & Partners Sumant Prashant, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
12:45 - 13:45	Lunch
13:45 - 14:45	Rule of law and regulation Justice (Retd.) B.N. Srikrishna, Supreme Court of India
14:45 - 16:05	Panel III: Importance of land market for ease of doing business
	Chairperson: Vijay Madan, Ex-Secretary, Department of Land Resources
	Stylised facts on Maharashtra RERA data Sahil Gandhi, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
	Creating an efficient market in land Anirudh Burman, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	Panelists
	Venkatesh Panchapagesan, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore Barun Mitra, Liberty Institute S. Chockalingam, Government of Maharashtra
16:05 - 16:25	Tea/Coffee
16:25 - 17:45	Panel IV: Technology Policy
	Chairperson: Rajeev Kapoor, Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals
	Current debates in technology policy Smriti Parsheera, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	Panelists
	Arunabh Choudhary, Juris Corp Parag Kar, Vice President, Qualcomm Sunil Bajpai, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Sunil Abraham, The Centre for Internet and Society S. Ganesh Kumar, Reserve Bank of India

6 December 2017

Juniper Hall (Entry from Gate No. 1 on Lodhi Road)

09:30 - 10:00	Registration and Breakfast
10:00 - 11:30	Panel V: Courts and Tribunals
	Chairperson: Shardul S. Shroff, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas
	The issues Prasanth Regy, Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India
	Judicial delay: Informalism as panacea? Anuj Bhuwania, South Asian University
	Panelists
	Anand Prasad, Advocate Somasekhar Sundaresan, Advocate Ritin Rai, Advocate Sanjay Kumar Medhi, Additional Advocate General, Assam
11:30 - 11:50	Tea/Coffee
11:50 - 13:20	Panel VI: Macroeconomic and financial institution building
	Chairperson: Vijay Kelkar, NIPFP
	A progress report Ila Patnaik, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	Panelists
	U. K. Sinha, Ex-Chairman, Securities and Exchange Board of India Harsh Vardhan, Bain & Company Amit Raje, Goldman Sachs
13:20 - 14:20	Lunch
14:20 - 15:50	Panel VII: Criminal Justice
	Chairperson: Prakash Singh, Police Foundation and Institute
	The issues Renuka Sane, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	Panelists
	P.C. Haldar, Police Foundation and Institute B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, Government of Chhattisgarh
15:50 - 16:10	Tea/Coffee
16:10 - 17:40	Panel VIII: High performance regulators
	The issues Ajay Shah, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
	A regulator for private skills providers K.P. Krishnan, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship
	Panelists
	Praveen Garg, Ministry of Finance Somasekhar Sundaresan, Advocate Suyash Rai, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
17:40 - 17:50	Summing up Sunanda Nair Bidkar, Institute for New Economic Thinking Ila Patnaik, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/2nd-law-economics-policy-conference-2017

2nd International Conference on Managing Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy (MIPS 2014)

praskrishna — 2014-03-12T13:23:33Z

Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay through the support of the Ministry of Human Resources Development IPR Chair Project, Government of India, is hosting the 2nd International Conference on Management of Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy MIPS 2014 at IIT Bombay, India.

The core focus of this conference is to provide a suitable and conducive platform to discuss, debate and present contemporary research in the area of Intellectual Property Rights and its management.

Click to download the event brochure (PDF, 124 Kb)

Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist at the session on "An Unexamined Premise: The Relevance of a Twenty-year Patent Term for Various Sectors". She gave a talk on the re-examining the 20 year patent term for software. The full details of the event can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/mips-2014-second-international-coference-on-management-of-ip-rights-and-strategy

(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards

gupta — 2016-10-20T01:44:41Z

World Wide Consortium (W3C) as a standard setting organization for the World Wide Web plays a very important role in shaping the web. We focus on the ongoing controversy related to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and found that there was a serious lack of participation from people from non-western countries. We also found serious lack of gender diversity in the EME debate.

W3C is the organization which sets the standard for HTML 5. Recently it got surrounded by controversy due to the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) draft specification (David Dorwin et al. 2016). EME aims to prevent piracy of digital video by making it hard to download the unencrypted video stream. But it also raises lots of issues regarding implementation in Free and Open Source Software, Interoperability, Privacy, Security, Accessibility and fair use. (Cory Doctorow 2016)

In this study we looked at aspects of the debate which both of the sides ignored, the third world! We found that out of 48 people who participated in the debate around EME on W3C's public-html mailing list, none of them were from the continents of Asia, Africa or South America. These regions make up almost 80 % of the world's population and more than 60 percent of world's internet users (Stats 2016). When a group of people doesn't get represented a in the standard making process it is expected that their concerns don't get represented either. The representation of people is specially important in the EME debate because laws around Digital Rights Management around the world are different. For example Indian laws does not disallow manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools whereas the law in USA does (Prakash 2016b). The cultural norms around the world are quite different and also the conditions under which people use the internet are different. India has the lowest average internet speed across the world (Akamai 2016). A large of fraction of Indian population (37% in 2010) accesses internet through Cyber Cafés (TRAI 2016). These factors makes the ability to download digital content much more important for an Indian internet user than a North American or European internet user.

Methodology

We used BigBang[1] python package to download the achieves of the public-html mailing list at W3C.[2] Our dump contains all the messages between 31st August 2010 to 15th May 2016. Then we filtered out all the emails with EME, encrypted media or DRM in the subject line. There were 472 such emails. We then de-duplicated the list of senders as some senders used multiple emails in the course of discussion. There were 48 unique senders afters de duplication. Then we looked up their social media profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Github), personal website or page at employers site to determine the region they belong to and their gender. All the source code used for the analysis is available on our github repository.[3]

Result

Regional Diversity

Region	Participant (%)	Email (%)
Africa	0 (0)	0 (0)
Asia	0 (0)	0 (0)
Australia and New Zealand	5 (10.4)	16 (3.4)
Europe	13 (27.1)	146 (30.9)
North America	30 (62.5)	310 (65.7)
South America	0 (0)	0 (0)
Total	48 (100)	472 (100)

As mentioned in the Introduction above there was absolutely no participation from the whole continents of Africa, Asia, or South America with most of the emails being sent by North Americans.

Gender Diversity

Gender	Participant(%)	Email(%)
Male	47 (97.9)	466 (98.7)
Female	1 (2.1)	6 (1.3)
Total	48 (100)	472 (100)

There was only one women participating in the discussing contributing 1.3 % of the emails sent. The numbers reflects widely discussed lack of gender diversity in Tech and Open communities.

The debate inside W3C around EME also seriously lacked in gender diversity, which is typical of open communities.

Stakeholder Community

Stakeholder Community	Participants per work category	Emails sent per stakeholder category
FOSS browser developer	5	56
Digital Content Provider	9	186
DRM Platform Provider	15	100
Accessibility	4	47
Security Researcher	0	0
Privacy	2	2
Other W3C Employee	3	10
None of the Above	10	71
Total	48	472

We observe that there was no participation from the Security Researcher community and negligible participation from privacy community. Voice of Digital Content Provider was overrepresented with almost 40% of emails sent by them.

Methodological remarks:

Participants are categorized on the basis stakes of their employer and not specifically on the work they do. For example someone who works on privacy in Google will be placed in "DRM platform provider" instead of "Privacy".
W3C and Universities are considered to neutral and their employees are categorized by the work they do.
Google's position is very interesting, it is a DRM provider as a browser manufacturer but also a content provider in Youtube and fair number of Google Employers are against EME due to other concerns. Therefore Christian Kaiser has been paced as Content provider because he works on Youtube, and everyone else has been placed as DRM provider.

Discussion and Future Work

The lack of diversity in W3C is not unique. (Graham, Straumann, and Hogan 2015) showed a significant western bias in Wikipedia, gender bias in Wikipedia has also a well known and is being actively worked upon. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has also been criticized for under representing interests of non North American and West European world (Prakash 2016a).

We hope that W3C and other organizations will increase the diversity in their standard making process so that global voices actually shape the global internet.

Acknowledgement

This work was done during my internship at The Center for Internet & Society, India. I thank Sunil Abraham for useful and timely feedback and Pranesh Prakash, Amber Sinha and Udbhav Tiwari for informed discussions.

References

Akamai. 2016. “Akamai State of the Internet Q1 2016.” Accessed August 20. https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/akamai-state-of-the-internet-report-q1-2016.pdf.
Cory Doctorow. 2016. “Interoperability and the W3C: Defending the Future from the Present.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present.
David Dorwin, Jerry Smith, Mark Watson, and Adrian Bateman. 2016. “Encrypted Media Extensions, W3C Editor’s Draft.” Accessed May 13. https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/
Feminism, Geek. 2016. “Geek Feminism Wiki FLOSS.” Geek Feminism Wiki. Accessed October 5. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS.
Graham, Mark, Ralph K. Straumann, and Bernie Hogan. 2015. “Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105 (6): 1158–78. doi:10.1080/00045608.2015.1072791.
Prakash, Pranesh. 2016a. “CIS Statement at ICANN 49’s Public Forum.” The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed August 20. http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/icann49-public-forum-statement.
Prakash, Pranesh. 2016b. “Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010.” The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed August 20. http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment.
Stats, Internet Live. 2016. “Number of Internet Users (2016) - Internet Live Stats.” Accessed August 20. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/.
TRAI.. “Recommendations on National Broadband Plan.” Accessed August 20. http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/Recommendation/Documents/Rcommendation81210.pdf.

^{^[1]} https://github.com/datactive/bigbang

^{^[2]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/

^{^[3]} https://github.com/hargup/eme_diversity_analysis

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/lack-of-representation-of-non-western-world-in-creation-of-web-standards

'We Need to Proactively Ensure that People Can't File Patents Representative of the Creativity of a FOSS Community'

rohini — 2015-09-27T11:51:50Z

Rohini Lakshané attended “Open Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Our Digital Culture” in Bangalore on August 13, 2015. Major takeaways from the event are documented in this post.

Speakers: Prof. Eben Moglen, Keith Bergelt, and Mishi Choudhary; Panel discussion moderator: Venkatesh Hariharan. See the event page here. The organizers republished Rohini's report on their website.

Prof. Eben Moglen on FOSS and entrepreneurship

The culture of business in the 21^st century needs open source software or free software because there is one Internet governed by one set of rules, protocols and APIs that make it possible for us to interact with each another. The Internet made everybody interdependent on everybody else. Startup culture needs free and open source software (FOSS) because startups are an insurgency, a guerrilla activity in business. The incumbents in a capitalistic world dislikes competition and detests that existing resources, such as FOSS, enable insurgents to circumvent some of the steep curve that they had to climb in order to become incumbents.
Hardware is developing in ways that make the idea of proprietary development of software obsolete. There is no large producer of proprietary software that isn't also dependent on FOSS. Microsoft Cloud is based on deployments that do not use Windows but are based on FOSS. The era of Android as a semi-closed, semi-proprietary form of FOSS is over. Big and small companies around the world are exploiting the open source nature of Android.
Free software is a renewable resource not a commodity. Management is needed to avoid over-consumption or destruction of the FOSS ecosystem. Software is to the 21^st century economic life what coal, steel, and rare earth metals were at the end of the previous century.
FOSS turned out to be about developing human brains. It turned out to be about using human intelligence in software better. Earlier universities, engineering colleges and research institutions were the greatest manufacturers and users of FOSS. Now businesses of all sizes are.
When Richard Stallman and Prof. Eben Moglen set out to make GPL free, they initiated a large public discussion process, the primary goal of which was to ensure that individual developers have as much right to talk and to be heard as loudly as the largest firms in the world. At the end of the negotiation process, 35 or 36 of the largest patent holders in the IT industry accepted the basic agreement to be a part of the commons. --- Incumbents like people to pay for a seat at the table. Paying to have an opinion is a pretty serious part of the landscape of the patent system.

Prof. Eben Moglen on Digital India

Every e-governance project that the Indian government buys should use FOSS. The very nature of the way the citizens and governments interact can come to be mediated by software that people can read, understand, modify, and improve. An enormous ecosystem will come up -- a kind of public–private partnership (PPP) in the improvement of governance and government services, which is far more useful than most other forms of PPP conceptualised in the developed world in the 20^th century.
Everybody has a stake in the success of this policy. Several corporations are working against this policy as they once stated that they do not need FOSS.
The biggest market for both making and consuming software in the world is in India, because the science done here will dominate global software making, which in turn will define how the Internet works, which in turn will define society. One can't develop the largest society on earth by reinventing the wheel. The government is going to understand that only the sharing of knowledge and the sharing of forms of inventing would enable the largest society in the world to develop itself freely and take its place in the forefront of digital humanity.
If every state government's data centre across India is going to be turned into a cloud, one state might have VMWare, another might have AWS, and so on, it would be disastrous. To prevent this, all e-governance activities of every state government and federal agency in India could be conducted in one, big, homogeneous Indian cloud. This would enable utility computing across the country for all citizens, which would also make room for citizen computing to happen. When one moves towards architectures of omnipresent utility computing with large amounts of memory flatly available to everybody, one is going to be describing a national computing environment for a billion people. We can't even begin to model it until we start accomplishing it.
Prof. Eben Moglen's ambition is that there comes a time not very long from now when basic data science is taught in Indian secondary schools. The software is free and all the big data sets are public. A nation of a 100 million data scientists rules the world.

Keith Bergelt on the Open Invention Network

Over the past 10 years, Open Invention Network (OIN) has emerged as the largest patent non-aggression community in the history of technology. It has around 1,700 participants and is adding almost 2 participants every day. In the last quarter, OIN had approximately 200 licensees.
There is now a cultural transformation where companies are recognising that where OIN members collaborate, they shouldn't use patents to stop or slow down progress. Where members compete, they choose to invent while utilising defensive patents publications. What we are doing is a patent collaboration and a technical collaboration that exists in major projects around the world.
OIN has been making a major effort since January 2015 to spend more time in India and China to be able to ensure that the technological might and expertise represented in the two countries can be a part of the global community, and that global projects can start here. “We can expect to leverage the expertise of the community to be able to drive innovation from here [India and China]. It's not about IBM investing a billion dollars a year since 1999 and having some birthright to driving the open source initiatives around the world or about Google or Red Hat or anyone else. You have the ability to impact major changes and we want to be able to support you in the name of freedom of action as participants.”

Panel Discussion

Patent Wars and Innovation

In the past 5 to 7 years, patent wars in the handset segment of the information technology (IT) market have wasted tens of billions of dollars on litigation, and on raising the price of patent armaments. This patent litigation was purely an economic loss to the IT industry and it contributed nothing. If the patent system strangles invention, non-profit groups, non-commercial bodies, free software makers, and start-ups cannot invent freely.
Defensive patent publications, such as those made by IBM, lead to the gross underestimation of the inventive power and output of the company. People are struggling to find something to evaluate the productive output of an entity – startup, micro-industry or macro-industry. Patents are being used inappropriately and it's part of the corruption of the patent system. Any venture capitalist (VC) who believes that either the innovative capacities or the potential success factors of a start-up are tied to its patents should know that there are only a minuscule number of cases where patents are the differentiator. The differentiators required in order to sustain business are how smart the people are, how quickly they innovate, and how quickly they are able to adapt to complex situations. We see a trend in the US of not equating patents with innovation. The core-developer and hacker communities are largely anti-patent.
However, the flip side is that if the FOSS communities do not patent defensively, i.e., acquire and publish patents for their inventions in order to prevent others from getting patents in one jurisdiction or another, patent trolls will eventually encroach on the communities' inventive output. The only people making money out of this whole process are lawyers. It is slowing down the uptake of technology by creating fears and doubts in the system.
FOSS communities didn't qualify everything produced in the 23 years of (Linus') Linux, which would have let the service serve as stable prior art, preventing other people from filing patents. We can debate what is patentable subject matter in general or whether software should be patentable, but in the meantime if we can be proactive and file everything that we have in defensive publications and make it accessible to the patent and trademark offices here and around the world, we will have far fewer patents. We need to be activists in making sure that people can't file patents that are representative of the creativity of a community.
The Chinese government has instituted a programme designed to produce defensive publications in order to capture all the inventiveness across their industries, to be able to ensure that the quality of what ultimately gets patented is at least as high.
The US has a massive repository called ip.com, which is with every patent examiner of the USPTO.
India does not grant software patents as per section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, but that doesn't mean that no software patents are being granted. One of the empirical studies conducted by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) in India shows that 98.3% of the [telecom and computing technology] patents granted till 2013 went to multinational corporations. Almost none of the assignees are Indian.
In the context of the ongoing patent infringement law suits filed in the Delhi High Court by Ericsson [link]: The Delhi High Court has had a reputation of being very pro-intellectual property from the beginning.
Also, there is pressure from trade organisations. In August 2015, Ericsson along with ASSOCHAM invited the Director General of the Competition Commission of India to present a paper about why patents are good. It is essential to determine how the rules of conflict of interest apply here. This is exactly what the pharmaceutical industry would do. The only bodies who would object are Doctors Without Borders (MSF) or some local organisations who realise that high priced patented drugs is not what India needs and that we do not need to have the same IP policy as the US or Japan. We only need a different policy.
The Special 301 Report of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is a big sham, and it suggests that India doesn't have strict enforcement of IP law. India does, unlike China.
Accenture has been granted a software patent in India. The patent is about an expert present in a remote location transferring knowledge to somebody who is listening in another location. Universities offering MOOCs, BPOs, and many other services would fall under such a patent. SFLC spent four years trying to fight this patent. The first defence of Accenture's battery of lawyers was that they won't use the patent.
Patents of very low quality are being bought at very high prices. The tax system or the subsidy system for innovation regards all patents as equal. This is a pricing failure and that should be corrected by other forms of intervention. The pendulum has already begun to swing the other way. Alice Corp was the third consecutive and unanimous ruling by the US Supreme Court that abstract ideas are not patentable. Patent applications pertaining to business methods and algorithms are increasingly being rejected by the USPTO after the ruling.

Prof. Eben Moglen on Facebook:

Facebook is a badly designed technology because there is one Man in the Middle who keeps all the logs. The privacy problem with Facebook is not just about what people post. It's about surveillance and data mining of web reading behaviour. It is a social danger that ought not to exist. I have said since 2010 is that we can't forbid it; let's replace it. It means bringing the web back as a writeable medium for people in an easy way. What I see as next-generation architecture could just as well be described as Tim Burners Lee's previous generation architecture.

You have to be able to trust the Internet. If you can't, you are going to be living in the shadow of govt surveillance, corporate surveillance, the fear of identity theft, and so on. We need to be able to explain to people what kind of software they can trust and what kind they can't. Distributed social networking will happen; it's not that difficult a problem.

An example of federated networking is Freedombox, a cheap hardware doing router jobs using free software in ways that encourage privacy. The pilot project for Freedombox has been deployed in little villages in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These routers don't deliver logs to a thug in a hoodie in Menlo Park.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/we-need-to-proactively-ensure-that-people-cant-file-representatives-of-the-creativity-of-a-foss-community

'Trolled' from US Congress, Wikipedia bans edits

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T10:22:53Z

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has issued a ten-day ban against an anonymous editor of its website located on the premises of the U.S. Congress, after the latter engaged in “disruptive editing,” on a wide range of subjects, from moon-landing conspiracy theories linked to Cuba to naming former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an alien wizard.

The article by Narayan Lakshman was published in the Hindu on July 25, 2014. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

Many of the seemingly humorous edits were tracked by a Twitter ‘bot’ with the handle @CongressEdits, which is driven by a code to automatically monitor Wikipedia for changes to the site made by accounts with a Congressional IP addresses.

Per the Wikipedia ban, only persons editing the site anonymously are barred from making changes, while Congressional staffers who have created named accounts to log into Wikipedia could continue making edits.

Yet some reports noted that the changes “have become almost troll-like,” alluding for example to an edit on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which changed the text to say that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was acting “on behalf of the regime of Fidel Castro.”

Another entry revised the biography of Mr. Rumsfeld to describe him as an “alien lizard who eats Mexican babies,” and yet another change suggested that moon-landing conspiracy theories were “promoted by the Cuban government.”

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, said to The Hindu via Twitter that Wikipedia’s ban affected up to 9000 people, while only a few pranksters seem to be indulging in vandalism.

“Ironically, it is the public nature of @CongressEdits has led to this increase in attention-seeking vandalism,” he said, adding that such bans, if there are more to come, could “effectively kill projects like @CongressEdits.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-narayan-lakshman-july-25-2014-trolled-from-us-congress-wikipedia-bans-edits

'I'm going to ruin you, dear'

praskrishna — 2014-09-09T09:55:47Z

Revenge porn is sweeping across the developed world. And now it's being seen in India. The culprit, says Prasun Chaudhuri, is often a former friend, partner, relative or colleague.

This article by Prasun Chaudhuri with additional reporting by Varuna Verma in Bangalore was published in the Telegraph on August 3, 2014. Rohini Lakshane gave her inputs.

How would you feel if you casually opened a mail and found the link to a pornographic site — and it turned out to contain pictures of yourself naked? That's what Kalpana did. She clicked on a link sent to her and, to her horror, found that the face of the girl who "was available for sex" was hers. Her stomach lurched when she saw that the pictures showed her own bedroom. The site also contained her personal and contact details.

Kalpana was shattered. The subject line of the mail had said "I'm going to ruin you, dear". It had seemed like a prank. Only, it wasn't. It was a very real and malevolent attempt to destroy her reputation.

The 24-year-old Mumbai-based bank executive had become a victim of revenge porn — a new form of cybercrime in which ex-lovers or boyfriends upload intimate photos and videos of their former partners for the world to see. Mostly, the sexually explicit pictures are of women posted by jilted or spurned men.

Kalpana's photos, it was later found, were posted by her recently divorced husband, Pranay. They were taken when the two lived together.

Revenge porn is a trend sweeping across the developed world — from the US and Japan to countries in Europe. And now it's being seen in India, fuelled by the growing access to the Internet and camera-wielding mobile phones — all that is needed for taking and posting offensive pictures.

"Now that you have gadgets you tend to capture every moment of your life in pictures or videos," Calcutta-based psychiatrist J.R. Ram points out. "Not only that, you want to share these images through networking apps in your mobile phone or the Internet — without ever thinking of the consequences."

National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) figures — released on July 1, 2014 — show a 63.7 per cent rise in cyber offences from 2012 to 2013. During this period, the category "transmission of obscene content in electronic form" reflects a quantum jump —104.2 per cent — with 1,203 cases registered and 737 people arrested. "The data show cyber offences against women have increased sharply," NCRB director-general R.R. Verma says. "But we do not have any specific data on revenge crimes."

More and more such cases, however, are now coming to light. Kalpana lodged a complaint with the Navgarh police station in Mumbai. Ashish was arrested under a number of sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act.

Sneha, a 22-year-old college student from Udupi in Karnataka, also went to the police with the complaint that her ex-boyfriend had put up her photographs and videos on the Internet. M.B. Boralingaiah, superintendent of police, Manipal district, says the boy was arrested and sent to judicial custody.

"There has been an exponential rise in the number of cases of cyber revenge being reported to the police," Boralingaiah says. "This could also be because of increasing awareness of cyber laws, which prompts more people to approach the police." The Karnataka police are now setting up cyber crime police stations at regional levels across the state. Currently, only one police station, in Bangalore, deals with such crimes.

The profile of the criminal in revenge porn, Boralingaiah adds, is different from that of the average criminal plotting a scam using the Internet. In all the cases that have been reported, the accused is a former friend, partner, relative or colleague with no criminal history. They are also educated, intelligent and technologically savvy.

And that is why, despite suspicions, it is not always easy to catch the offender. The police say they have to first track down the origin of the pornographic site where the pictures are posted. "When we receive a complaint we try to locate the IP address (the unique identifier for the computer)," says Siddhartha Chakraborty, in charge of Cyber Police Station, Lalbazar, Calcutta. "But these crooks are clever enough to use some fake IP address of a distant country."

Once the police zero in on the IP address, it asks the web hosts to remove the offensive images, which they normally do. "But the procedure can take weeks or even months," Chakraborty adds.

Debarati Halder, a lawyer and cyber victim counsellor based at Tirunelvelli, Tamil Nadu, says she comes across 10-15 cases of revenge porn every month across the country, mostly involving college students. Often, the victims themselves take pictures while taking a shower or in their inner wear and share them with their boyfriends.

Many young women, Halder says, see such acts as symbols of independence or defiance.

"Taking 'sexy' images of themselves offers them a false sense of liberty, bypassing the repression imposed upon them in the real world," she says. "They feel relatively uninhibited in cyberspace and tend to experiment with their looks and sexuality, but are unable to determine where to draw the line."

The young are not greatly concerned with privacy and security on the Internet, Canada-based Internet safety expert Terry Cutler stresses. "They don't understand that once you send out an inappropriate photo or video, you no longer control it."

There are, according to some estimates, at least 3,000 voyeuristic websites where such pictures can be posted. The visuals are often copied and replicated across multiple porn sites, making it virtually impossible for the authorities to wipe off the digital prints. "Often these clips are available on mirror sites, web archives and caches. Video footage can also go viral on social networks and porn buffs even share these images offline," Chakraborty warns.

But people seldom think that the intimate pictures that they shoot with their lovers may one day become public. "When you're in love you trust your partner. You don't expect him to use these pictures to humiliate you when things fall apart," says Antara, a 32-year-old IT analyst in a government agency who has been a victim of revenge porn. She says that her husband, to seek a quick divorce, uploaded intimate pictures on porn sites to show that she was a woman of "bad character".

Also worrying is that a large number of women are victims of non-consensual and amateur pornography. Abir Atarthy, a Calcutta-based cyber-security expert, recently solved a case in which a college student found her pictures, shot in her bedroom, circulating on a social networking site.

"She was shocked because she not taken those pictures, nor had anybody else," Atarthy says. A thorough check revealed that a boy whose advances she had spurned had installed a hidden spy program in her laptop. "The program — capable of switching on the webcam even if the machine was offline — had been taking her snaps from her private life and sending the visuals to the youth whenever she connected to the Internet," he says.

Rohini Lakshané, a researcher at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, describes such non-consensual acts as sexually violent crimes. "I don't like to use the term 'revenge porn', for it's an act of violence against women," she says. "Sometimes women are even raped and coerced into sex, filmed, threatened and blackmailed over the release of the footage online," Lakshané says.

The intention is to humiliate the woman and make her life miserable is the equivalent of throwing acid on her face, holds Dr Subhrangshu Aditya, a student counsellor at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. "These men can't accept rejection and it's their way to settle scores."

The victim, the experts say, doesn't just feel betrayed but often falls into depression — not just because of the ex-partner's action but because she sees herself as a partner in the crime, for the pictures uploaded may have been shot with her consent. "Their guardians also blame her for this and avoid reporting the matter to the police apprehending a bigger scandal," Halder adds.

The lawyer urges victims of such crimes to always approach the police. "Indian women have a strong legal recourse against perpetrators of revenge porn," she says. The amended 354 [C] of the Criminal Law (Amended) Act 2013, also known as the "voyeurism section", criminalises capturing and sharing images of a woman in private space. Section 66(E) of the IT Act criminalises the publication and transmission of images of an individual's private parts without his or her consent.

"These are watertight laws, strong enough to book an offender," she says, adding that the law also protects a victim's identity.

Across the world, laws are now being framed to punish cyber porn offenders. In January, Israel voted to define posting of images without consent as sexual harassment, punishable by up to five years in jail. Many states in the US already have laws against revenge porn and Britain may bring in one soon.

But perhaps the best way to prevent such crimes is by safeguarding privacy — at home and in the virtual world (see box). Cyber security expert Cutler sums it up aptly: "Just think this before you click the send button: If I were to post the visual on the Internet, would I care if it landed on the front page of a newspaper or the 8pm news?"

Some names have been changed to protect identities

How to Safeguard Your Privacy?

Get acquainted with the privacy settings of the social networks, dating and matrimonial websites you use
Do not upload any single close-shot picture on the Internet; this can be morphed and misused
Never film yourself during sexually intimate acts; even if you delete the pictures and videos these can be recovered from your device
Watch out for weird webcam activity; malicious software can easily infect your computer or phone and control the webcam
Remove your memory card from your mobile or format the hard disc of your computer before giving the device to service centres
Don't give your device to others and always lock your applications (especially picture galleries) in your mobile
Install and update antivirus and antimalware in your device

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-telegraph-august-3-2014-i-am-going-to-ruin-you-dear

'Help Konkani Wikipedia come out of incubation'

praskrishna — 2013-09-17T10:10:38Z

The functioning of the free online encyclopedia, ‘Wikipedia,’ is like a true democracy. It is for the people and by the people, said The Centre for Internet and Society Programme Officer (Indian Languages) Pavanaja U B.

The article was published in the Deccan Herald on September 13, 2013. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was quoted.

He was speaking after inaugurating, "Wikipedia Editing Workshop," organised by Aloysius Institute of Management and Information Technology (AIMIT) in association with The Centre for Internet and Society in Mangalore on Friday.

Stressing on the need for more Wikipedia contributors and editors from India, he explained to students the simplicity of creating a account in Wikipedia and editing articles.

Wikipedia has 50 crore unique visitors and three crore are from India. There are 6,000 editors registered from India, of which, around 2000 people edit in Indian vernacular languages, and only 450 are very active, he said.

There are around 98,000 odd articles in Hindi, 14,600 odd articles in Kannada. However, Konkani Wikipedia is in incubation for the last seven years, as there are only 133 articles and very few registered editors. “To get it out of incubation, many should write Konkani articles for Wikipedia,” he said and added that out of 133 Konkani articles in Wikipedia, over 100 are in Devnagari script, 31 in Roman and just two in Kannada script and none in Malayalam.

Pavanaja added that being a contributor and editor of Wikipedia, will be a positive add on to ones resume. "Today's IT companies need logical thinkers and problem solvers. Writing for Wikipedia, enables one to think and research, hence benefiting one’s personally," he said.

He also regretted that some people try to vandalise Wikipedia, with disruptive editing and deleting articles. Though, this will be corrected by other Wikipedia users instantly, it wastes precious time. Everyone benefits from Wikipedia, hence the contributor should have a positive outlook with regard to helping people and sharing knowledge, he said

He further added, that maintaining a neutral point of view, giving significant coverage and writing on notable topics is important. One should give opposing views and no personal views should be reflected, he added.

St Aloysius College Rector Fr Denzil Lobo said that the present generation is lucky to have knowledge at their finger tips, and they should make the best use of it.

AIMIT Director Rev Fr Pradeep Sequeira, Wikpedia Volunteer Harriet Vidhyasagar among others were present.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-september-13-2013-help-konkani-wikipedia-come-out-of-incubation

'महाराष्ट्र ग्रंथोत्तेजक' होणार लोकाभिमुख, महाराष्ट्र टाईम्स

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T07:55:38Z

Coverage of Marathi Wikipedia in Maharashtra Times.

Scanned version of the media coverage below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/92e93993e93093e93794d91f94d930-91794d93090292594b92494d92494791c915-93994b92393e930-93294b91593e92d93f92e941916-92e93993e93093e93794d91f94d930-91f93e90892e94d938

#NAMA: The Future of Indic Languages

praskrishna — 2014-07-24T07:40:36Z

Medianama is hosting an open house session on "The Digital Future of Indic Languages" at the Oberoi in Bangalore on Thursday, July 24, 2014. The event will begin at 4.30pm and be followed by cocktails and dinner. Subhashish Panigrahi will participate in the event.

The following will be discussed in the event:

Growth of consumption of content in Indic languages in India.
Impact of mobile on Indic languages consumption.
Challenges of discovery of Indic language content: role of social and search.
Defining standards and the role of tools and translation.
Driving user generated Indic language content creation.
Video versus Text in Indic languages.
The role of government policy in supporting Indic language content.
The role of mobile devices and touch screens.
Beyond content: service delivery in Indic languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/nama-the-future-of-indic-languages

# NAMA Community Meet | Global Payments Ecosystem

Admin — 2019-08-19T14:29:41Z

Anubha Sinha attended the event organized by Medianama in Delhi on July 31, 2019.

Click to view the agenda.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/nama-community-meet-global-payments-ecosystem

"Marathi Bhasha Gaurav Din" celebrations in Maharashtra

manasa@cis-india.org — 2017-03-10T05:36:48Z

Marathi Language Day was recently commemorated across the state of Maharashtra to celebrate the Marathi language, its literature and culture.

Last week, the state of Maharashtra commemorated Marathi Bhasha Gaurav Din, a day to celebrate the Marathi language, its literature and culture. The celebrations mark the 105th birth anniversary of renowned Marathi poet and writer Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar who wrote under the pen name Kusumagraj. Most notably, the Maharashtra state government issued a circular, appealing to all educational institutions and government offices to edit one paragraph on Marathi Wikipedia on 27th February(Marathi Language Day). Asmita Pote, a Marathi Wikipedian, believes that this “small step of writing one paragraph on Marathi Wikipedia will give those learning about Wikipedia for the first time, an opportunity to explore further and contribute”.

There were Wikipedia awareness programs and cultural festivities organised across the state’s schools and colleges to mark the week long(27 February to 6 March) celebrations. The Gateway of India in Mumbai held a large-scale cultural program with performances from leading Marathi singers, dancers and poets portraying their cultural heritage through their art. The state government promoted the celebrations on television channels, radio stations and newspapers with interviews of eminent Marathi achievers from different walks of life. These interviews can be found here.

This year’s theme for Marathi Bhasha Gaurav Din was ‘role of computer and internet in language’. The Minister for Education and Marathi Bhasha(among other portfolios), Mr. Vinod Tawde, encouraged citizens to edit on Wikipedia and urged the citizens to use unicode on their social media platforms to facilitate discussions in Marathi. Says Rahul Deshmukh, Marathi Wikipedia administrator, “this is the outcome of efforts channelled over two years. The government understood the need to take Wikipedia to the aam aadmi(common man) in Maharashtra in order to strengthen the language. The primary goal was to expose people to Wikipedia and raise awareness about Marathi Wikipedia.” In thanking the government officials who worked tirelessly for this initiative, he also appeals to other Indic language communities in India to see this as a role model. He believes that this initiative should be taken to other states and state governments as well.

The recent celebrations in Maharashtra have seen significant due to active government involvement. Priya Hiregange, a Marathi Wikipedian, says, “the government raised awareness not just in schools and colleges across the state but also in their own offices, giving training to government officials to write about their department or their organisation’s work on the free encyclopaedia.” The government circular appealing to citizens to edit on Wikipedia saw a great increase in the number of articles and editors. This goes to show that government involvement could immensely benefit the free knowledge movement in regional languages by creating awareness and exposure to these resources. It also sets a positive precedent for other state governments in India to emulate and promote their regional languages. Wikipedia is available in 23 Indic languages. A supportive government could go a long way to ensure the development of the free knowledge movement in India.

If you would like to contact Mr. Rahul Deshmukh for guidance on such initiatives for your language, please drop him a line here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-bhasha-gaurav-din-celebrations-in-maharashtra