Centre for Internet and Society

ଆମ ହାତେ ଆମ କୋଡ୍ ଲେଖିବା

subha — 2016-09-17T16:04:12Z

I authored a column on writing our code in our own hands for the editorial of Odia-language daily the "Samaja". The piece is about the philosophy of software freedom and how free and open source software is making a significant difference in our lives. I have also shared a little bit about how anyone can celebrate the Software Freedom Day today by contributing to and sharing about to FOSS.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/samaja-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-let-us-write-our-code-in-our-own-hands

It's September, and That Means It's Time for Software Freedom Day

subha — 2016-09-17T15:42:46Z

Software Freedom Day (SFD), which celebrates the use of free and open software, is just around the corner on September 17. When the day first started in 2004, only 12 teams from different places joined, but it has since grown to include hundreds registered events around the world, depending on the year.

The article was published by Global Voices on September 17, 2016.

Supported by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy promoted by people like Richard Stallman who argue that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the liberty to users from proprietary software developers’ power and influence. SFD encourages everyone to gather in their own cities (here's a map of places where SFD is organized this year), educate people around them about free software, and promote the cause on social media (with the hashtag #SFD2016 this year). There's also hackathons (hacking free software to modify the code and create what one wants to have in it), running free software installation camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running free software.	What are FOSS, free software, open source, and FLOSS? Free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both free software and open source software. Adopted by noted software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, free software has many names — libre software, freedom-respecting software and software libre are some of them. As defined by the Free Software Foundation, one of the early advocates of software freedom, free software allows users not just to use the software with complete freedom, but to study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and noncommercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and noncommercial form, however, depends on the particular license the software is released under. “Open source” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by educational-advocacy organization Open Source Initiative. Open source software is generally created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

From South Asia, there are 13 celebratory events in India, eight in Nepal, one in Bangladesh and four in Sri Lanka.

South Asian countries have seen adoption of both free software and open source software by individuals, organizations and the government. The Free Software Movement of India was founded in Bengaluru, India, in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working to promote and grow the free software movement in India.

The Indian government has launched an open data portal at data.gov.in portal for sharing large datasets like the census data under free licenses. The government's new policy emphasizes on adopting open source software. Moreover government's Ministry of Communication and Information Technology asked vendors to include open source software applications while making requests for proposals.

Similarly, there are several free and open source communities and organizations operating from the subcontinent, like Mozilla India, Wikimedia India, the Centre for Internet and Society, Open Knowledge India, Mozilla Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Bangladesh Open Source Network, Open Knowledge Bangladesh, Mozilla Nepal, Wikimedians of Nepal, Open Knowledge Nepal, Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan, and the Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka.

Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh, argues in a research paper that the use of open source software can help the government save a enormous amount of money that are spent in purchasing proprietary software:

A Large amount of money of government can be saved if the government uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, Because government is providing computer to all educational institute from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason government is to expend a large amount of many for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the Government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize cost of the projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/global-voices-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-it-is-september-and-that-means-it-is-time-for-software-freedom-day

Methodology: Statements of Working (Form 27) of Indian Mobile Device Patents

rohini — 2017-09-10T15:19:51Z

In India, if a patent is not locally worked within three years of its issuance, any person may request a compulsory license, and if the patent is not adequately worked within two years of the grant of such a compulsory license, it may be revoked. In order to provide the public with information about patent working, India requires every patentee to file an annual statement on “Form 27” describing the working of each of its issued Indian patents. We conducted the first comprehensive and systematic study of all Forms 27 filed with respect to mobile devices. We tried to empirically establish the extent to which patentees and licensees comply with the statutory requirement to declare information about the working of their patents. Research assistance was provided by interns Anna Liz Thomas and Nayana Dasgupta.

The research paper on patent landscape, Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey, [PDF] was published in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law (2017).

The research paper on "Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance" has been published here (July 2017).

The dataset of all the Form 27 studied for this paper has been published here.

Research Questions

How many annual Form 27 submissions have been made to the Indian Patent Office for 4,419 granted patents identified in the landscape of mobile device patents in India?
How many patents have no corresponding Form 27 filed yet?
How many Form 27 submissions from those found are defective?
Is there an identifiable pattern in the defects and discrepancies?
Is there any discernible trend in filing of Form 27 over time and with respect to patent owners?

The objective of this paper is to quantitatively determine the extent to which patentees and licensees comply with the statutory requirement to declare information about the working of their patents according to Section 146(2) of the Patents Act, 1970 read with Rule 131 of the Patent Rules, 2003.

Section 146(2): Without prejudice to the provisions of sub-section (1), every patentee and every licensee (whether exclusive or otherwise) shall furnish in such manner and form and at such intervals (not being less than six months) as may be prescribed statements as to the extent to which the patented invention has been worked on a commercial scale in India.

Rule 131: Form and manner in which statements required under section 146(2) to be furnished

The statements shall be furnished by every patentee and every licensee under sub-section (2) of section 146 in Form 27 which shall be duly verified by the patentee or the licensee or his authorised agent.
The statements referred to in sub-rule (1) shall be furnished in respect of every calendar year within three months of the end of each year.
The Controller may publish the information received by him under sub-section (1) or sub-section (2) of section 146.

Object

The research object is Form 27 submissions made annually to the Indian Patent Office for the 4,419 granted patents.

4,052 of these patents were identified in the landscape (“the patent landscape”) developed by the Centre for Internet and Society as a part of ongoing research on patents pertaining to sub-USD-100 mobile devices sold in India. The dataset of the patent landscape can be accessed here. Another 367 patents pertaining to mobile technology identified during the landscaping exercise but excluded from it, were added to the initial set of 4,052 patents.

A blank copy of Form 27 is available here. The pro forma is defined as per Schedule II of Patent Rules, 2003.

Research Methods

[Corresponding research questions

How many annual Form 27 submissions have been made to the Indian Patent Office for 4,419 granted patents identified in the landscape of mobile device patents in India?
How many patents have no corresponding Form 27 filed yet?
How many Form 27 submissions from those found are defective?]

Outsourcing the searching of the submitted copies of Form 27 to a contractor

Owing to the repetitive nature of the process for collecting the forms, as well the large scale of the project, the task of searching was outsourced to a contractor. Price quotations were invited from five data entry operators and two firms of patent attorneys. On the basis of the quotation, deliverable time, scope and nature of the results delivered, and quality assurance, the contract was awarded to one firm. The firm offered the best price for a commensurate deliverable time and assured quality of results.

Form 27 retrieval online

Form 27 were searched from IPAIRS (Indian Patent Information Retrieval System) and InPASS (Indian Patent Advanced Search System) public databases of the Indian Patent Office.

InPASS has two features: Application Status and E-Register. We checked both features, in case forms not found through one could be located through the other. We indeed found that, sometimes, the forms not available on E-register could be found through the Application Status table, and vice versa.

Case 1: Accessing form 27 using Application Status tab on INPASS

A search portal is located at ipindiaservices.gov.in/publicsearch.

Enter the patent number in the “Patent Number” search field without the kind codes (IN) and click on “Search”. E.g., for patent number IN263932B, enter ‘263932’ in the “Patent Number” field.
Once the queried patent is displayed, select the “Application Status” tab to access the list of documents that were filed for the requested patent.

In the Application Status tab, scroll down to the bottom to view “Application Status table”. Click on the “View Documents” button to access the list of the documents filed for the queried patent. A pop-up window opens with the results.

In the window, a list of hyperlinks to various documents is displayed. Sometimes Form 27/ working statement is explicitly named so. At other times, it may have a different title. Once you click on the form 27 link, a PDF file opens in a new tab. There may be more than one Form 27 in the list of documents as Form 27 is an annual submission.

Case 2: No record of Form 27 found (Application status tab)

If the form is not present on InPASS, that is, if it has not been uploaded to the website, or if it has not been submitted to the Indian Patent Office (IPO), then it will not be displayed in the list of documents described in Case 1, step 5. Such instances have been logged as “No record found”.

Case 3: Accessing form 27 using E-Register tab on INPASS

At http://ipindiaservices.gov.in/publicsearch, a patent search portal is displayed. Enter the patent number by following the same steps as described in Case 1 until the queried patent is displayed. Select the “E-register” tab to access the e-register data corresponding to the queried patent.

In the “E-register” tab, scroll to the bottom to view the “Information u/s 146” table. The “Information u/s 146” table includes a list of Form 27 filed for the queried patent. As visible in the screenshot below, on clicking the “261762_2015” hyperlink, Form 27 for the queried patent opens. There could be multiple form 27s corresponding to different years.

Case 4: No record of Form 27 found (E-register)

If the form is not present in the E-register, that is, if it has not been uploaded to the website or if it has not been submitted to the IPO, then the E-Register tab displays “Eregister Not Available”.

Case 5: Searching on IPAIRS

Both InPASS and IPAIRS fetch forms from the same URL. However, we observed that one search engine sometimes displays the forms when the other doesn’t. The IPAIRS search engine was used when Form 27 was not found on InPASS.

IPAIRS patent search homepage: http://ipindiaonline.gov.in/patentsearch/search/index.aspx On the home page, in the Application Status tab, enter the full patent application number and CAPTCHA.
A window containing information pertaining to the patent application opens. At the bottom of the window, there is a “View Documents” button.

On clicking on “View Documents”, a new window with list of hyperlinked documents opens as described in Case 1, Step 5.

The URL for the new window displayed via “View Documents” on IPAIRS is the same as the URL displayed via “View Documents” in the “Application Status” tab on InPASS. For example, for patent number 263932, the URL for this window is the same on IPAIRS and InPASS: http://ipindiaonline.gov.in/patentsearch/GrantedSearch/viewdoc.aspx?id=Bx6eZ7YQLgsl3yH1LqKHjg==&loc=wDBSZCsAt7zoiVrqcFJsRw==

Form 27 retrieval via Right To Information (RTI) requests

CIS filed two requests under the RTI Act, 2005 with the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs, and Trade Marks in Mumbai.

CIS' RTI application to the Indian Patent Office in Mumbai, March 2016 [PDF]. The IPO's reply, April 2016 [PDF].

(View text: https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/rti-request-to-indian-patents-office-for-form-27-statement-of-working-of-patents-march-2016)

CIS' RTI application to the IPO in Mumbai, June 2015 [PDF]. The IPO's reply, June 2015 [PDF].

(View text: https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/rti-request-to-indian-patents-office-for-form-27-statement-of-working-of-patents-2015)

InPASS and IPAIRS yielded Form 27 for 1,999 patents out of 4,419. For Form 27 pertaining to 61 of the remaining patents, CIS made a request in March 2016 under the Right to Information Act (2005) to the office of the Indian Patent Office located in Mumbai.

How the 61 patents were chosen
37 of the 50 companies in the patent landscape owned granted patents. We took one patent from each of the 37 companies. [See Annexure 4 (PDF)of Methodology: Patent landscaping in the Indian mobile device market] The remaining were patents litigated in India, as well as patents transferred from one of the companies in the landscape to another.

IPO’s reply to the March 2016 RTI application
The IPO replied in April 2016 that it could provide CIS with forms for eleven of the requested patents. As for the rest of the forms, the IPO stated, “As thousand [sic] of Form-27 are filed in this office, it is very difficult to segregate Form-27 for the patent numbers enlisted in your RTI application as it needs diversion of huge official/ staff manpower and it will affect day to day [sic] work of this office.”

Repeating the Form 27 search online

A few days after CIS received the reply from the IPO, Form 27 pertaining to patents in the landscape started appearing on InPASS and IPAIRS E-register portal. CIS’ contractor repeated the search for forms for all 4,419 patents as some forms filed in 2016 and 2015 were found. Forms for additional 1,003 patents were found, taking the number of patents with at least one corresponding form to 3,002.

Of the 1,417 patents for which forms were not found, 481 are either expired or there is no log corresponding to them in the E-Register.

Schema for the results

Information from the Form 27 was logged into a spreadsheet with the following heads:
Serial Number -- Assignee -- Patent Number -- Status -- Application Date -- Grant Date -- Title -- Application Number -- Form 27 presence -- Multiple Forms -- Number of years -- Year -- If Worked -- Working/ Non-working Status -- Working/ Non-working Information -- Licensing Status -- Licensing Information -- Comments.

Detailed legend and process of logging the results

Assignee: Name of the company that owns the patent. Annexure 4 [PDF] lists 50 companies studied for the patent landscape. 37 of those companies owned patents in India. Thus, the assignee could be one of 37 companies among the 50 in Annexure 4. Where two assignees are mentioned, the patent was transferred from the second assignee to the first on account of sale of the patent, company merger, etc. For example, "Huawei|NEC" indicates that a patent that belonged to NEC was transferred to Huawei.

Form 27 presence: Whether or not Form 27 was found. Entries in this column are either “Yes” or “No”. If case Form 27 was not found, the subsequent columns are unpopulated.

Multiple Forms: If more than one Form 27 was found, the number of years for which it was found. In some cases, more than one form was found for the same patent for the same year. We have considered these instances as a single form for the same year and noted the defect in the “Comments” column.

Year: The year for which the form was filed. This information was found in #2 of the pro forma of Form 27. In the case of patents with Form 27 filed for more than one year, the entries for different years have been logged into consecutive rows.

If Worked: This information was found in 3(i) of the pro forma. Depending on whether the text of Form 27 states that the patent was “worked” or “not worked”, results have been logged as either “Yes” or “No”. In instances where it is not explicitly stated whether the patent has been worked or not, or where 3(i) is blank, the results are logged as “Not disclosed” with a description of the defect in the “Comments” column.

Working/ Non-working status: Corresponds to 3(i)a in the case of patents stated as “worked” and to 3(i)b in the case of those stated as “not worked”. The results have been marked as:

Description is generic (future use)
Description is generic (present use)
Description is specific
No description

Description is generic (future use): No specific information been provided as required by 3(i)a or 3(i)b. The description indicates that in the future the patentee might “work” or license the patent or do both. E.g: “May be worked in the future depending on the market demand and when technology is mature.”

“We are still assessing the commercial and technological aspects of working of this patent in India and negotiating marketing and distribution of patented product with related parties.”

“Technical developments [sic] are still continuing” or “Negotiations and technical developments [sic] are still continuing”.

Description is generic (present use): No specific information been provided as required by 3(i)a or 3(i)b. The description indicates that the patentee may be “working” the patent. E.g:, “DUE TO THE NATURE OF THE INVENTION, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE ACCURATELY WHETHER THE PATENTED INVENTION HAS BEEN WORKED IN INDIA OR NOT. Improvements in the invention are continuing to be made. The Patentee is actively looking for licensees and customers to commercialise the invention in the Indian environment.”

“... This patent is among a large number of patents in the patentee’s complex portfolio which may cover the products services and embedded technologies provided by the patentee or its licensee(s) in India. This patent might worked [sic] in India in some of the patentee(s) existing or future products, services and embedded technologies. Given the extremely Iarge number of patents that may apply to any given product or service of the patentee, it is very difficult to Identify and accurately update which of those patents would apply to the numerous products, services and embedded technologies.”

Description is specific: Specific information has been provided as required in 3(i)a or 3(i)b.

E.g, “Quantum of the patented product-303520 and value of the patented product in INR-2790524299”.

No description: 3(i)a and 3(i)b are blank.

Working/non-working information: Contains the full text of the descriptions mentioned in “Working/non-working status” column. These have been reproduced verbatim from Form 27 filings.

Licensing status: States whether or not the patent has been licensed as per 3(ii) of the pro forma for Form 27. Results are logged as “Yes” (licensed), “No” (no-licensed), “Cross-licensed” and “Not disclosed”.

“Not disclosed” indicates that the response to 3(ii) is either blank or there is an explicit statement that licensing information would not be disclosed on Form 27. E.g: “As all the licenses are confidential in nature, the details pertaining to the same are not being disclosed herein and may be provided to the Patent Office as and when the same is specifically directed by the Patent Office under sealed cover so that such details are not laid open in public domain.”

Licensing information: Contains the full text of the response reproduced verbatim from 3(ii). (Blank fields when there is no text in 3(ii))

For patents marked as licensed, this column contains the names and addresses of licensees and/ or sub-licensees.

For patents marked as not-licensed, this column is either blank or contains statements such as, “Information Not readily available; efforts will be made to collect and submit further information, if asked for.”, “None”, “No licensees”.

For patents marked as “cross-licensed”, the patentee states that it has a cross-licensing agreement with its licensees. E.g: “There is a cross license agreement between <company name> and at least one licensee, giving mutual rights to produce despite monopoly afforded by patents that are hold by any of the companies. There is no information available on whether the technology of said patent is included products sold by such licensee. As all the licenses are confidential in nature, the details pertaining to the same shall be provided under specific directions from the Patent Office.”

Comments: Contains information about defects and notable observations from the Form 27 submissions.

Validation of results

Validation of the results was done via deduplication first and then random sampling of 10% of the results.

Analysis of results

[Corresponding research questions:
4. Is there an identifiable pattern in the defects and discrepancies?
5. Is there any discernible trend in filing of Form 27 over time and with respect to patent owners?]

The results logged into the spreadsheet were analysed to find a pattern in the defects in the submissions. Visualisations will be created, if necessary.

Prior Art

Extraordinary writ petition in the matter of a public interest litigation, filed in the High Court of Delhi, Shamnad Basheer vs Union of India and others, C.M. No. 5590 of 2015 http://spicyip.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FORM-27-WP-1R-copy.pdf

The petitioner(s) “sought to investigate the commercial working of certain patented inventions in India, particularly in relation to three key areas”. One of these areas include telecommunications technology. Para 53 to 58 of the writ elucidate on the petitioners’ observations and findings on “High technology patents and trolls”, while para 59 and 60 refer to the linkage between patents and products. Annexure P-8 of this petition contains copies of Form 27 filed by Ericsson in India. Annexure P-11 contains a “summary of findings of Form 27 investigations conducted by the petitioner”. Annexure P-4 (II. Telecommunications Sector) contains a list of 58 patents pertaining to the telecommunications domain in India. 21 of these are coincide with the patent landscape mentioned in “Research Object”.
Basheer had published a report in 2011 based on the findings of his RTI investigation of Form 27 pertaining to pharmaceutical patents in India. The report titled “RTI Applications and “Working” of Foreign Drugs in India?” is available at: http://www.spicyip.com/docs/Workingpatents.doc The report sheds light on lack of filing, incomplete filing and violation of patent working norms by pharmaceutical companies. He states having encountered difficulties during the RTI process: The RTI process was a very arduous one, with the patent office refusing information or claiming missing files in some cases. We had to resort to the appellate procedure in almost all cases. And in one case concerning the drugs Tarceva and Sutent, both the CPIO (Delhi office) and the appellate authority refused to provide information. We had to then take the matter up directly with Controller General PH Kurian who immediately ordered that the information be provided. Upon his instructions, the information was provided within 24 hours. However, we received this information only on the 4^th of April 2011, more than 6 months since we began the RTI process! (Source: Drug Firms and Patent "Working": Extent of Compliance with Form 27 http://spicyip.com/2011/04/drug-firms-and-patent-working-extent-of.html

Limitations

If Form 27 is not found on InPASS or INPAIRS, it is not possible to determine if the form has not been submitted to the IPO or it has been submitted but the IPO has not uploaded it. There is no publicly available database or log where such information is available.
Technical issues with the IPAIRS website hampered the speed of searching for and downloading Form 27. At the time of trial run in May 2015, the website was not available for nearly a week. Technical issues also lead to conflicting search results on IPAIRS and INPASS at times. For example, the form may be available via one search engine but not via another, even though they are fetched the files from the same database. Runtime errors occur due to browser caching.

Edited, September 10, 2017: To add -- URLs of the research paper on Form 27 published in July 2017, and of the dataset containing raw data, which was published and licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-statements-of-working-form-27-of-indian-mobile-device-patents

Where is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Headed?

sinha — 2016-09-17T14:15:05Z

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the Asian answer to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is still being furiously scripted.

The blog post was originally published in Spicy IP on September 7, 2016. It can be read here.

The US-led TPP and China-led RCEP were always touted as rivals racing to set global trade standards before the conclusion of the other. Well, TPP gunned ahead and is currently in the ratification phase, where as RCEP is yet to be concluded and talks may very well enter 2017. The latest round of RCEP talks ended last month and paints a worrisome picture for the global south, given that it will bring 3.5 billion people and 12% of world trade into its fold.

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) do not enable zero-sum free trade. In fact, each country leaves with disproportionate gains and losses in their kitty, after the conclusion of the agreement. And the worst casualties are environment, public health, labour rights, SMEs and local markets. Since there is plenty of give and take occurring in a context of fluid foreign policy relations, it becomes imperative to locate the ‘barter’. Last month, Balaji wrote an excellent comparative analysis(I & II) of the RCEP IPR text, and this post complements that. I present a regional overview of negotiations and the impact on course of the agreement, as gathered from press coverage of the meetings and the leaks; and to provide a more wholesome picture of the barters, I discuss other relevant chapters at the end of this post. Further, as the negotiations are conducted in secrecy, different organisations and individuals have ‘leaked’ draft texts. KEI and bilaterals.org are two such organizations that regularly collate and release latest RCEP texts. I rely on RCEP’s IP Chapter(October 15, 2015 version) and Terms of Reference by the Working Group on Electronic Commerce(August 2015 version). Analysing the Telecommunications Services chapter is outside the scope of the post, and I link it here for the interest of our readers.

Impact on E-commerce

What is currently available are the terms for reference establishing the Working Group’s mandate on drafting a chapter on e-commerce. The document acknowledges the need for inclusion of a provision for special and differential treatment, and additional flexibilities to the least developed ASEAN countries. It draws a list of relevant elements for possible inclusion in the RCEP. I reproduce the list here (emphasis supplied is mine):

I. General Provisions

Cooperation
Electronic Supply of Services

II. Trade Faciliation

Paperless Trading
Electronic Signature and Digital Certification

III. Creating a Conducive Environment for Electronic Commerce

Online Consumer Protection
Online Personal Data Protection
Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
Domestic Regulatory Frameworks
Custom Duties
Non-Discriminatory Treatment of Digital Products

IV. Promoting Cross Border Electronic Commerce

Prohibition on Requirements Concerning the Location of Computing Facilities
Prohibition on Requirements Concerning Disclosure of Source Code
Cross- Border Transfer of Information by Electronic Means

While there is no clarity on customs duties, there is a mention of non-discriminatory treatment of digital products. While India has no law on non-discriminatory treatment of digital products, this may conflict with the Indian government’s policy on adoption of open source software for government use.

More alarmingly, the first prohibition restrains governments from mandating data localisation. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) also bar governments from making rules on data localisation, i.e. requiring physical situation of servers and storage in their countries’ territories. This is a worrisome provision because it may effectuate surreptitious surveillance. The prohibition on disclosure of source code is also troublesome and is aimed to stop examination and review of code in computing devices. This would effectively ban security researchers from finding security vulnerabilities in devices, and the if the provision is drafted like its counterpart in the TPP, there will also be prohibitions on checks by regulating authorities.

Re ‘Cross- Border Transfer of Information by Electronic Means’, the provision will be most likely drafted to favour big data and advertising companies’ operations enabling unrestricted transfer of personal data(like the TPP). If that is the case, then it will be in conflict with Rule 7 of the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and sensitive personal data or information) Rules 2011, which permits cross-border flow of personal information only in situations where the recipient of the information complies with Indian data protection standards as a bare minimum.

Impact on farmer's seeds

RCEP is bound to hit farmers the worst: not only are countries reducing tariffs for increased import of agricultural products, there also exists an obligation to join the International Union for Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV system), which would mandate members to introduce a new IPR: the breeders’ right over new plant varieties. Japan and Korea want RCEP members to join UPOV 1991, and Japan has proposed criminal penalties for the infringement of breeders’ rights.

While India has applied to become a member to the UPOV Convention, in 2001 it passed the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, and thereby built a sui generis system of protection (ambitiously trying to balance breeders’ rights and farmers’ rights). It will be naive to expect a similar attempt in balanced lawmaking by other countries. Furthermore, “…India’s current legislation is less stringent than UPOV 1991. It allows farmers to continue with their seed practices, except they cannot sell packaged seeds of protected varieties. The space for both small farmers and public breeders to freely work with seeds will be lost of RCEP goes the way of what Korea and Japan are proposing.” Using FTAs to reduce farmers’ freedom has been well documented, and you may read more on that here.

The text also desires all RCEP members to codify traditional knowledge and make it available to various patent offices. This push is widely regarded as problematic, as it is feared that documenting and digitization of existing knowledge may propel companies to use that information for commercial gains, to the detriment of the indigenous people and farming communities. On the other hand, it would be feasible to share such data in a confidential manner with patent offices, as India has done under the TKDL.

Massive reduction in tariffs

Tariffs emerged as an enormous sticking point in the August round, and there was pressure on India to eliminate tariffs completely. India proposed a differential tariff reduction plan, but countries kept pushing for a single-tier plan – particularly Japan. Finally, in what is seen as a big loss, India offered tariff cuts as high as 80% goods trade for all RCEP partners, except China. With China, India said that it was only comfortable with a 65% tariff cut initially, given the skewed trade deficit between China and India. It is worth noting that for India, RCEP will become the first FTA to forge trade partnerships with China, Australia,and New Zealand.

As a result of the heavy concession in tariffs, the Kerala Agriculture Minister has moved a cabinet note, and written a letter to the Centre expressing serious concerns on lowering of tariffs for agricultural products. He also requested to include Kerala in the RCEP pre-negotiation talks.

Staving off ISDS

Provisions on investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) are being pushed by Japan and South Korea. Countries are not convinced about agreeing to this, especially India. In fact, India is in the process of rolling back on bilateral investment treaties, and has already moved for BIT termination with 57 countries. We’ve already seen ISDS being (mis)used by private entities against governments – there have been enough challenges to countries’ IPR laws and policies as well.

Mobilised Movements against the RCEP

Individuals and organizations are advocating for scrapping the RCEP, given the impact that it is expected to have on people’s rights and freedoms. A ‘People’s Strategy Meeting’ last month conducted large-scale sessions to inform civil society organizations, NGOs, trade unions, farmers groups and other peoples’ movements in the Asia-pacific region. Many have also been persistently calling out for a meeting with negotiators of their respective countries and for a public hearing on the RCEP. The Asia Pacific Research Network has released a policy brief on the RCEP, and you may read that here.

The road ahead

Looking at the larger picture, it is evident now that neo-FTAs’ focus on trade has descended into attacks on sovereign states’ economic and social policies.

With respect to the RCEP IPR text, India is trying to eliminate TRIPS plus provisions from the text. And after heavy concessions on the tariff front, it will be bargaining for liberalisation in services in the next rounds. India’s aim is to clinch a deal allowing for free-er movement of its workers and professionals. Further, the negotiations are going to proceed quickly now. Members are becoming desperate to lock down the text, and therefore, this year we will see more rounds than the usual scheduled ones. The urgency is driven largely by Japan and Korea – both of which wish to ratify the TPP soon and would like the RCEP to work in tandem.

In another worrisome development, Phillipines, Thailand and Indonesia have met with US trade officials on what they need to do to join the TPP, once it is implemented. These countries are considering making serious changes to their labour, environmental, IP, and other standards. Yesterday, US Prez. Obama arrived in Vietnam for the Asean summit, trying hard to sell the TPP. Japan and Korea are already TPP members, and if ASEAN countries come under TPP’s fold as well, we may see an upping of standards at the RCEP.

India will have to deploy serious negotiating chops at the upcoming rounds if it is remotely hopeful of steering the RCEP standards away from the TPP.

Author’s note: Added the sentence “On the other hand, it would be feasible to share such data in a confidential manner with patent offices, as India has done under the TKDL.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/spicy-ip-september-7-2016-anubha-sinha-where-is-the-regional-comprehensive-economic-partnership-headed

Making Telugu Suitable for Internet

rahim — 2016-09-06T14:21:49Z

In brief, the article speaks of steps in making a language other than English suitable for Internet and computers, what input methods, fonts and content are available in Telugu as on date and what challenges are ahead in making language fully available on Internet and in computers.

Click to download the file here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ammanudi-september-6-2016-making-telugu-suitable-for-internet

Wikiwomen’s Meetup at St. Agnes College Explores Potentials and Plans of Women Editors in Mangalore, Karnataka

ting — 2016-09-01T14:39:53Z

Karnataka is known for its diverse linguistic cultures. Aside from Kannada, many are native speakers of Konkani, Tulu, and other languages. A small Wikiwomen's meetup was held on Saturday, August 27th at St. Agnes College, Mangalore, to invite female Wikipedians from the region. Many of them were new to the online encyclopedia but demonstrated strong interest in learning and contributing more Indic language content online.

A Wikiwomen’s meetup was held at St. Agnes College on August 27^th in the hope to strengthen the bonding and communication between female Wikipedians in Mangalore. Attendees of the meetup on Saturday included five Kannada Wikipedian, one Konkani Wikipedian, one from the recently gone live Tulu Wikipedia, and Ting-Yi Chang from the CIS A2K team. Two of the Kannada Wikipedians are staff and faculty members of the College’s library and Department of Kannada respectively. Both were brought into Wikipedia by edit-a-thons held on the college campus in the last few months

The meetup started off with a round of brief self-introduction and an inspiring introductory presentation by Dhanalakshimi K T, a St. Agnes commerce student who had successfully organized the last two women’s edit-a-thons on her campus.

“Wikipedia is a great tool for knowledge sharing. When we edit in our own languages, people from outside of the city who don’t speak English can learn things more easily online.... It is the respect and passion I have for my language."

The presentation also touched upon some feasible benefits that editors gains through participating in Wikipedia/media projects: improvement in writing and research skills, nurturing a critical thinking habit when reading texts and doing research, learnings from collaborative work experience, improvement in language and communication skills, etc. One of the participants later mentioned that with the hobby of editing Wikipedia, she began actively researching in her interested topics. Even in occasions when she had no time to actually update the content onto Wikipedia, the knowledge she gained throughout the research process has already enriched her and broadened her horizon of the subject.

The second half of the presentation consists of an introduction to the 5 pillars rules and some other advice of Wikipedia editing. Participants who were newcomers showed great interest and actively raised questions surrounding the use of different editing tools including the infobox templates, translation tools, useful markups, and personal sandboxes.

When being asked about the barriers they have faced so far in editing Wikipedia, most agreed that time issues do prevent them sometimes as their offline commitments (work, family, school) can take priority over it. However, most participants also concluded that “those who are truly interested will eventually find the time.” On the other hand, access to internet and facilities has not been reported as a barrier in their cases, but all agreed that it can be for many other women. Awareness was emphasized as a crucial factor when trying to bring in more women to Wikipedia. One of the student participants shared her experience,

“Some people may have never heard of Wikipedia before; some misunderstood its use and potential… when I talked about Kannada Wikipedia with my peers, first they thought it was some website for Kannada stories writing…. But when I explained to them what it is and how we can edit, they were all very excited and very much wanted to try."

In the latter discussion of the meetup, participants talked about the tentative event plans for the next few months. Two sessions were suggested to be held by November, 2016. One as a workshop for the newcomers and the other as an editing event for more experienced female Wikipedians. All participants, old and new, are really excited to strengthen the bonding between Wikiwomens in Mangalore. Some suggested there should be more casual meetups every few weeks to help them communicate more and plan upcoming community events, including an ongoing event that can be held in March, 2017 for the International Women’s Day and Wikiwomen’s History Month.

The meetup continued with more discussion on various language Wikipedias’ development. As an experienced Wikipedian and an actively outreaching community member, participant Harriet Vidyasagar explained the complexity in Konkani Wikipedia, which contains five scripts, and the importance of those scripts in Konkani language’s history and culture. All participants agreed that seeing their mother tongues’ scripts online and creating more content to make their culture and language visible are a great source of happiness and a motivation for them to continue editing. The session ended with exchange of contacts and group pictures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiwomen2019s-meetup-at-st-agnes-college-explores-potentials-and-plans-of-women-editors-in-mangalore-karnataka

A workshop to improve Telugu Wikipedia articles on Nobel laureates

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-09-12T15:01:15Z

Many articles about Nobel laureates are missing in the Telugu Wikipedia. Recently undergraduate students from four different disciplines of the Andhra Loyola College (ALC), Vijayawada gathered to create and improve articles related to Nobel laureates.

Spanned for three days—from August 16 through 18—54 students from the department of Telugu, Botany, Statistics and Physics edited articles related to Nobel laureates, improved the content quality and inserted images that were already there in Wikimedia Commons. There was a great balance of equal participation in the number of female and male students. During this sprint 124 existing articles on Telugu Wikipedia were improved and 118 of them saw images being added. Though it was challenging for me to manage so many participants, I was partly successful in mentoring some of the students who in turn helped their friends with basic editing.

Apart from educating the students about editing Wikipedia, I demonstrated about digitising “Kavitvatattva Vicharam”, a book authored by by Kattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy in 1913 and is considered as the first modern literary criticism in Telugu literature, on Telugu Wikisource. Some of the students tried to proof-read the book for the first time.

There is a plan laid out to work with a small subset of these participating students again for different kind of academic-centric projects like the QRpedia project. To keep the activity more regular, the students are are creating the missing Botany-related articles. We are hoping to work with remaining students at least once in every quarter. A few recommendations for bettering the students’ understanding of Wikipedia and the community that Telugu Wikipedian User:Chaduvari had shared earlier came quite useful during this event. Based on his inputs I did my best elaborating the [Wikipedia] project structure and community dynamics to the new editors. Another long time Wikimedian Rajasekhar followed up on the Wikisource activity remotely. B. Manikantha, a students from the Arts department shares, “Until now I always had a notion that Wikipedia might be some sort of entertainment website where we can listen to music and play games. But after attending this workshop I could understand how great it is as a learning platform. Also I learnt about one of our professors Dr. Gumma Sambashivarao who is a noted author, and how the articles about more such authors could be made available online in our language.” “It was fun translating articles in my favourite subject—war. I’m hoping to continue my contributions further”, he adds.

More details in the event page on Telugu Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/a-workshop-to-improve-telugu-wikipedia-articles-on-nobel-laureates

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

Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses

Pavan Santhosh S. & Subhashish Panigrahi — 2016-09-20T12:43:29Z

This campaign was started on June 19 and copyright migration process is complete for 17 books so far. Once the copyright migration is over the books—ranging from historical figures and popular personalities to regional history—are going to be digitised on Wikisource.

List of books and their authors

Author: Gadam Gopala Swamy
Book: Paschima Godavari Jillalo Mahatmuni Sancharam, a historical account on Gandhi's travels and the way he spread his ideology in and around this area.
Significance: This can be used in improving articles related to the history of villages of the West Godavari district. Swamy is going to publish his magnum opus on the national movement in West Godavari along with another biographical work about the notable people of the district.

"I dedicate these works to all the people of the West Godavari district. All my efforts will be useful even if one person [from West Godavari] reads these works, learns what their ancestors lived for and died for [in the national independence movement] and tries to be responsibly contribute to the society. I find this could only be possible through placing it in digital platform like Wikisource."
- Dr. Gadam Gopala Swamy, historian, former professor

Author: Kanuri Badarinadh (Historian, Novelist and Journalist)
Books: Biographies, short biographies like Tanuku Talukulu, Yarra Narayana Swamy Jeevitha Charitra, Local Histories like Panara Vishayamu, Maa doothikapuramu, collection of articles on historical, cultural, social and art like Kasyapa Vyasalu, Antharvani, Badareenadheeyam, Lochoopu, Annavi anukonnavi, Vyasa Badarikam, historical fiction like Kavi garu, Koutilyuni Nireekshanam.
Priority: These Books can be used as resources to create articles about notable personalities of West Godavari district, several important persons and events in Andhra pradesh politics and history. Can improve articles related to West Godavari district, especially about the history sections in the village articles.

“I don't want these works to be in bookshelf and get wasted by termites. My wish as an author and researcher is to make these works available to future historians who can make use of it, so that our people get to know the local history”
- Kanuri Badarinadh, historian, novelist and journalist. Badarinadh has donated some of his books.

Author: Katta Srinivasa Rao, historian, Wikipedian and poet
Book: Ganapeswaralayam, a historical account of temples of historical importance that were built in Kusumanchi of Khammam district in Telangana. These temples flourished under the Kakatiya dynasty’s reign.
Priority: Katta Sriniavasa Rao is one of the first line Telangana historians who are working to rebuild Telangana’s History. This work is result of his research. It contains valuable content about Ganapeswara Temple and gives a glimpse of the sculpture, history and society under Kakatiya dynasty in Khammam.

Author: Vemuri Venkateswara Rao
Book: Ramanujan Nundi atu itu, a book about mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his works in mathematics
Priority: Like many other Indian languages, Telugu also has a lower number of books related to science and mathematics especially in the contemporary context. This book is about Ramanujan Numbers, formulas and a few more works. It also has description about contemporary mathematics built upon Ramanujan's work. This can be used to improve mathematics related articles in Telugu Wikipedia.

Author: Yasaswi Sateesh Kumar
Books: Okkamata, contains brief poetic pen portraits that explains about contemporary Telugu poets, Tellakagitam is anthology of Telugu poet Yasaswi’s poetry.
Priority: Photos of many contemporary Telugu poets and brief descriptions about them are now under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. These can be used in Wikipedia articles about notable poets.

Author: Emma Rauschenbusch Clough
Translator: Vivina Murthy
Book: Cheppulu Kuduthu Kuduthu is a translation of Emma Rauschenbusch Clough’s English book “While sewing sandals”. The English book was released in 1899 and is in Public Domain. The Telugu book was translated by Vivina Murthy and was published in 2007 by Manasu Foundation. As the translator had rights on his translated work, he released it under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license to make it freely available to all on our request.
Priority: Historical record especially about Christianity in coastal Andhra Pradesh, dalits in 19th century.

Author: Gurajada Apparao
Book: Gurujadalu is a compilation of all the works Gurajada Apparao -- he is considered as one of the greatest literary figures of modern Telugu literature. The book was edited and published by the efforts of Manasu Foundation and its associates. Apparao’s works are under Public Domain already as per the Indian Copyright Law,. But the critical introduction and some of the translations included in the book were copyrighted by Manasu foundation which they released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. This move will help digitize them on Wikisource and make them freely available to Telugu people.
Priority: Even Though some of the works of Apparao got digitized on Wikisource, this can showcase his complete literary journey with bringing a vast set of reading for the Telugu readers.

All of these books were released or agreed to be released under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license in June and July 2016. Some of these books were digitized on Wikisource, and the proofreading is going on currently. Some of the the remaining books being scanned and some are uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The ones that have been uploaded on Commons are being indexed and digitized on Wikisource.

The news about all of these license migrated books was shared with the [Telugu Wikimedia] community, and also personally with some of the community members like Rajasekhar, Sri Ramamurthy, Gullapalli Nageswara Rao, Bhaskara Naidu, and a few others who supported in various stages of digitization like indexing, proofreading, etc.

"I wish this contribution will go forward in the same way and help making Telugu Wikisource number one in entire Indic Wikisources. I will support this work wherever you need and please ask my help whenever necessary. Definitely we can collaborate."
- User:Rajasekhar1961, Telugu Wikimedian

The list of the books can also be located on the Telugu Wikisource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/campaign-for-relicensing-copyrighted-books-under-creative-commons-licenses

Data Xgen launches paid Hindi email service

praskrishna — 2016-08-30T02:35:03Z

Jaipur based Enterprise email provider Data Xgen Technologies has launched a paid email service in Hindi Devnagari script. This is especially for .bharat domain names, but can also be used for other domains. As of now, the company offers email packages starting at Rs 99, Rs 499, Rs 999 and Rs 1,499, which look like monthly plans.

The blog post by Sneha Johari was published in Medianama on August 29, 2016.

Ajay Data, the company’s founder and CEO told MediaNama that it plans to launch an app for sending free email in Indic language, starting with Hindi. Data said that he was hopeful about Hindi email adoption given the vast majority of the population in India was rural and did not understand English. “People get left out of communication streams because they do not understand English. But they can still get onto the internet and communicate with all of us. Mobile companies are also selling phones in Indian languages, marketing as Hindi phones.. And this is the right time (for Indic email) since the segment is being created,” he added.

Earlier this month, the Indian government told email service providers to provide users with addresses in Indian languages, starting with Hindi. It also wanted ‘sufficient local language content and tools to access it’ in order to increase internet penetration and push higher rural adoption. This was needed because English speakers and readers in the country were low (10.35%), according to Rajiv Bansal, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT.

Wikipedia Indic efforts

About 3 weeks ago, Wikipedia launched in Tulu, the 23rd Indian language Wiki. In September 2013, the Goa University had entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia, which was launched 6 months later. In August 2014, former Bihar CM Nitish Kumar launched the ‘Bihar on Wikipedia’ campaign inviting people of the state to write about their villages, towns, culture, history, development over the years, etc. Note that in 2012, Wikipedia editors were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts online.

As of June 2016, Wikipedia had 16 million page views per month on the Hindi wiki, with overall 106,844 articles. This is not a significant increase. According to this August 2011 report, there were 0.1 million Hindi articles on the platform, and 9 million overall views.

Indian mobile handsets need to support Hindi: BIS

In June, the Bureau of Indian Standards reportedly said that mobile handsets in India would need to support typing in Hindi and English, and reading in all 22 official Indian languages. We’d pointed out at the time that this was essential for growth of access to the internet for handsets in order to access content in users’ local languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/data-xgen-launches-paid-hindi-email-service

Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language!

subha — 2016-08-30T02:14:13Z

The Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month.

The post was published in Global Voices on August 28, 2016.

The project waited as long as eight years in the Incubator before becoming the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia. Available at https://tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wiki space has a total of 1,285 articles contributed by 198 editors, about 5-10 of which are active with over five edits every month.

The announcement about the project going live was made by Katherine Maher, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation during the WikiConference India.

Wikimedia Incubator is a sister project of Wikipedia and before any new language Wikipedia is created, an Incubator project is created and grown by volunteer editors. Once the project gains momentum with more editors developing more content more often, the project goes live as a new Wikipedia project.

The Tulu language is spoken by about three to five million people in the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala, and there is a sizeable diaspora living in US and the Gulf countries.

Eight years back in 2008, Tulu Wikipedia was created in Incubator with just a handful of editors. But apart from a few sporadic edits every so often, there was little impetus to take the project forward.

A community in a real sense is one that engages in discussion, consensus and collaboration. This never existed for Tulu Wikipedia as individual editors were working in isolation from each other.

There was therefore a need for them to meet and form a strategic plan to grow the community and the Incubator by brining in more active contributors.

In 2014, the need to connect the Tulu Wikipedia editors and foster an interactive editorial group was discussed and a meetup was organized in Mangalore by the Centre for Internet and Society—Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent.

As an offshoot of that meeting, more community meetups started to happen. A few workshops were organized in Mangalore to provide hands-on training to participants and the city's St. Aloysius College opened its door to include Wikipedia editing as part of its syllabus.

A Wikipedia Education Program was promptly organized for the undergraduate students in this college where students started editing Wikipedia as a classroom assignment and the faculty was involved both in providing training and evaluating the articles.

Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada language department at St. Aloysius College, became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor himself and led outreach activities at the institution. His students have enriched the Tulu Wikipedia with articles across a broad range of topics.

However, what has been achieved so far is still only the tip of the iceberg. The community is still fairly small and has to grow beyond one supporting institution. The larger Tulu language community also has to take ownership and become stewards in growing Tulu Wikipedia.

Despite its long, rich linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling in terms of achieving wider usage in written form, especially in its native script. The lack of promotion is also quite evident as the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, an official body set up by the Karnataka government uses Kannada and English for its official portal.

The biggest challenge of all is the lack of Unicode support. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the Tigalari script that is used to write in Tulu is not encoded in Unicode. At the moment, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script as most of the speakers are based in the state of Karnataka, and speak Kannada as a second language.

The only possibility of using Tigaliri script is tied to standardizing the script on Unicode, releasing a freely licensed typeface so that it can be bundled as a web font to display the script in the case of any mobile or desktop user not having the font installed on their device.Finally the script for existing content must be converted from Kannada to Tigaliri.

There is a series of eight how-to video tutorials that have been created to help new and existing editors to learn more about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, style and the editing process.

“Many students have contributed by creating these tutorials,” says Dr. Badikana.

The current set of editors are doing their best to spread the word about the project while safeguarding the core values of Wikipedia.

In an interview to the media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman said, “Anyone can write or edit articles on Wikipedia Tulu, but it should not be plagiarised [..] Photos should be one's own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture.”

Dr. Badikana moreover shared in an interview with this author that he is hopeful of seeing more Tulu speakers contributing to Tulu Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online, combined with work in conventional classrooms, is the best approach to preserving the language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/global-voices-august-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-meet-the-newly-born-tulu-wikipedia-the-23-in-south-asian-language

Press coverage about Punjab edit-a-thon & Telugu Wikipedia success

praskrishna — 2016-08-26T16:16:43Z

Andhra Jyothi, one of the leading news papers in Telugu covered Punjab edit-a-thon & Telugu wikipedia success in national level with the angle of Pranaraj involvement in it.

Here is the news clipping.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/press-coverage-about-punjab-edit-a-thon-telugu-wikipedia-success

Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief

Subhashish Panigrahi and Ting-Yi Chang — 2016-08-26T15:21:58Z

Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.

The blog post was published in the Wikimedia blog on August 24, 2016.

Available at https://tcy.wikipedia.org, the project has a total of 1285 articles contributed by 198 editors.

Tulu is spoken by between three and five million people principally concentrated in the states of Karnataka and Kerala in south-west and south India (respectively), with more in the US and in Gulf countries. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director Katherine Maher announced that the project would go live in her keynote at WikiConference India 2016.

Tulu Wikipedia was started in the Wikimedia Incubator back in 2008 with a one or two editors, but neither the project nor the community remained active except sporadic edits. Without any meetups and outreach, it was difficult for those editors to work as a community to bring the project live from Incubator. The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent, started building a Tulu-language community in 2014. They and the community conducted Wikipedia editing training workshops at St. Aloysius College in Mangaluru, who opened their doors to introduce the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP). As part of the WEP, students started editing Wikipedia as part of their syllabus with the leadership and guidance of Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada-language department at St. Aloysius, who himself became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor. Similarly, many students from both the institutions also contributed articles of diverse subject areas.

However, the community is fairly small and needs a way to grow outside the institution. “A series of eight how-to video tutorials have been created to help editors to learn about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, manual of style and overall editing. Many students have contributed in creating these tutorials”, Badikana says, and the existing set of editors are doing their best to spread the word about the project. In an interview with the media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman, said, “anyone can write or edit articles on the Tulu Wikipedia but it should not be plagiarised. The photos should be one’s own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture.”

One of the biggest challenges in growing the project—apart the community’s limitations within institutional frameworks and having just a handful of editors outside—is the lack of codification of the project as per Unicode compliance. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the modern Tulu script (derived from the original Tigalari script) is not yet encoded in Unicode. As a result, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script, as the speakers are mostly based in the state of Karnataka and speak Kannada as a second language.

Despite a long linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling to be widely used, especially in its native script. Badikana says that he is really hopeful that he will see more Tulu speakers start contributing to the language’s Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online would be the best thing to do while working in a conventional classroom.

In brief

Ongoing India At Rio Olympics 2016 Edit-a-thon promises to plant one tree for every 20 new articles created

India this year has a great participation in the Rio Olympics; some of the participating athletes have brought medals and glory for the country and some lost in the tight competition. But for Wikipedia, every single athlete matters! An edit-a-thon is being organized by Wikimedia India in collaboration with not-for-profit “Sankalp Taru”, publication house Niyogi books. Several Indian-language Wikipedia communities are participating in creating Wikipedia articles related to the Rio Olympics and India’s participation in it. A unique goal is set for this edit-a-thon where a tree will be planted for every 20 new articles created and it could also be monitored online. The edit-a-thon started officially at 0:00 UTC on 29 July 2016 and will go on 23:59 UTC on 18 September 2016. Apart from several other rules for participation, the rule also discourages pure machine translation of the articles as historically there has been disastrous impact of Google Translate for many Indian language Wikipedias.

Wiki Loves Monuments returns to India after three years

Wiki Loves Monuments, the global photo competition that is organized by the Wikimedia communities in September with the focus of getting good quality photographs of monuments of historical interest, will be organized in India. “The aim of the contest is to ask the general public—readers and users of Wikipedia, photographers, hobbyists, etc.—to take pictures of cultural heritage monuments and upload them to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and its other sister projects.”, shared Abhinav Srivastava, Executive Committee member of Wikimedia India which is the official organizer of the event. More details about participating in this event could be found in the event page.

WikiConference India 2016, the largest Wikimedia community gathering of the year in South Asia comes to an end

Organized by the Wikimedia communities in India, the WikiConference India 2016 was the largest Wikimedia gathering in the subcontinent of this year. After a long break of five years, the event has about 250 participants including over 100 scholarship recipients from four countries representing Wikimedia projects in 20 Indic languages. As reported in the Signpost, nearly 25% of scholarship recipients were women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. There were 89 accepted submissions including workshops, presentations, The event also included an edit-a-thon to improve the content related to Punjab, Punjabi language and culture as a gesture of respect to the place where the event was organized. Over 2000 articles have been created by more than 150 editors in 12 different language Wikipedias.

A gender gap-focused panel, led by formed Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees member Bishakha Datta, was held on the second day of the conference to share the research and outreach experiences in different communities (featuring Kannada, Tamil, and Marathi communities). Researchers proposed new strategies and practices in tackling the systematic and social barriers for Indian women joining Wikimedia projects. Other presenters shared tips and event-organizing experience on various outreach activities—from edit-a-thons and photo-thons in the International Women’s Month to student-led events in college institutions—demonstrating respective communities’ efforts on the local, national, and global scales. The panel was followed by a Wikiwomen’s Lunch meetup attended by most female Wikipedians at the conference along with Bishakha, Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees member Nataliia Tymkivand WMF staff members.

Ashutosh Sarangi, the youngest Wikimedian from the oldest Indian-language Wikipedia community

At the closing ceremony WikiConference India 2016, Ashutosh Sarangi was awarded as the youngest Wikimedian at the conference by , two days after Katherine congratulated the Odia Wikipedia for celebrating its 14th birthday, where the project happens to be the oldest of all Indian-language Wikipedias. Ashutosh, a 6th grade student, is the son of Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active Odia Wikisourcer, and is active in Odia Wikisource with 226 edits for digitization of two books so far. “Living and studying in New Delhi where Hindi is predominantly the primary language, having a conversation in our native language Odia itself is so difficult. I am proud to be a mother who not only teaches Odia language to her kids but also helps them contribute to the open Internet. At some point of time, these valuable books Ashutosh has contributed in digitizing on Odia Wikisource will be of great read for others”, she shares. Long time Hindi-language Wikipedian Raju Suthar has mentioned in a news article in Hindi newspaper the Sanjivani saying, “Ashutosh has won everyone’s heart as the youngest Wikimedian in this conference. Asaf Bartov and Nataliia Tymkov have awarded him for his contribution”. Ashutosh started contributing to Odia Wikisource in February this year on the day of the second workshop in New Delhi.

MediaWiki hackathon at WikiConference India 2016 has seven important outputs

The MediaWiki hackathon that was running at the WikiConference India in the leadership of Santosh Shingare was productive to engage with several participants and bring as many as seven most important outcomes:

WikiSpeak, an easy-to-use Android (source code) and web app (source code) that read the the Wikipedia articles in native languages.
Edit Tamil Wiktionary, android app that helps create entries in Tamil-language Wiktionary from a spreadsheet created with a .tsv extension. The app checks for existing entries and creates only entries that are not existent. (source code)
Commons audio uploader, Android app that helps a user to log in using Mediawiki credentials, create audio recordings using their phone microphone, and upload them on Commons. (source code)
Wikipedia articles on Google map, web application that can show Wikipedia articles with geo-cordinates in Google Maps when the phone’s location is enabled for Google Maps. The application is responsive enough to adjust the portion of the Wikipedia article it displays on the screen, and works for all the Indian languages. (source code)
OCR (Native Application) : Convert scanned book copy to Indian language text with google doc (Tested for Hindi and Malayalam).
Communication platform[WebRTC] (Web Application) : Community used this to talk or conference (Audio/video web conferencing application)
Notification (Event based) : showing popup on event eg (If recent changes happen, It will show popup which article was updated)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-digest-tulu-wikipedia-goes-live-after-eight-years-in-incubator-news-in-brief

Preserving Languages and Cultures in India: The Birth of the Tulu Wikipedia

subha — 2016-09-07T15:35:43Z

After eight years of effort and outreach, the Tulu language Wikipedia has gone live. Wikimedia contributors play a key role in preserving languages and cultures, and tools like the Wikimedia Incubator help new projects like the Tulu Wikipedia get started.

The blog post was published by Opensource.com on August 26, 2016. This got mentioned in Wikipedia's newsletter "The Signpost".

Tulu is a language spoken by three to five million people in the states of Karnataka and Kerala in the southwest and south India respectively, and by some people in the US and in Gulf countries. Tulu Wikipedia is the 294th Wikipedia and the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia.

The Tulu Wikipedia grew in the Wikimedia Incubator for about eight years before going online. So far, 198 editors have contributed 1285 articles, and the active editors that have more than 5 edits in the project number between 5-10.

Tulu Wikipedia started back in 2008 with just one or two editors. But neither the project nor the community remained active except for sporadic edits. Without any meetups or outreach it was difficult for those editors to work as a community to bring the project live. The Centre for Internet and Society—Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow the Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent, started work on building a community for Tulu in 2014. It all started with an informal meetup, and then more community meetups started happening. The community also conducted Wikipedia editing training workshops, and two major educational institutions came forward to help grow the community and the project.

These institutions, St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College in Mangaluru in the state of Karnataka, introduced the Wikipedia Education Program where students started editing Wikipedia as part of their syllabus. Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada language department at St. Aloysius, became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor himself and led the outreach activities in the institution. Similarly, many students from both the institutions also contributed articles of diverse subject areas.

However, the community is still fairly small and has to grow outside of the institutions. "A series of eight how-to video tutorials have been created to help editors to learn about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, manual of style and overall editing. Many students have contributed in creating these tutorials", says Dr. Badikana. The current set of editors are doing their best in spreading the word about the project while safeguarding the core values of Wikipedia. In an interview to media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman said, "Anyone can write or edit articles on Wikipedia Tulu, but it should not be plagiarised. The photos should be one's own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture."

One of the biggest challenges, apart from the limitations in attracting new contributors, is the lack of Unicode support. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the Tigalari script that is used to write in Tulu is not encoded in Unicode. At the moment, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script as the speakers are mostly based in the state of Karnataka, and speak Kannada as a second language.

With its great and long linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling to be widely used, especially in its native script. The lack of promotion is also evident as the official body, the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, that is set up by the Karnataka government uses Kannada and English in the official portal. However, Dr. Badikana shared in an interview to the author that he is hopeful to see more Tulu speakers contributing to Tulu Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online would be the best thing to do along with working in a conventional classroom.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/preserving-languages-and-cultures-in-india-the-birth-of-the-tulu-wikipedia

International Conference on Innovation for Shared Prosperity

praskrishna — 2016-08-25T02:40:59Z

Rohini Lakshane attended a conference on IP Rights, Competition and Standard Setting in the IT industry on August 20 and 21, 2016. The conference was organized by O.P. Jindal Global University and Jindal Initiative on Research in IP & Competition.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/international-conference-on-innovation-for-shared-prosperity