Centre for Internet and Society

ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ನಿರ್ಬಂಧಗಳ ನಿರ್ವಹಣೆ

sunil — 2012-06-18T11:19:35Z

ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ತಂತ್ರಾಂಶ ಪ್ರತಿಷ್ಠಾನದ ಸ್ಥಾಪಕ ರಿಚರ್ಡ್ ಸ್ಟಾಲ್‌ಮನ್ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ (ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ರೈಟ್ಸ್ ಮ್ಯಾನೇಜ್‌ಮೆಂಟ್) ಎಂಬ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆಯನ್ನು `ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ರೆಸ್ಟ್ರಿಕ್ಷನ್ ಮ್ಯಾನೇಜ್ಮೆಂಟ್` ಎಂದು ಬಿಡಿಸಿಡುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಅವರ ದೃಷ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಇದು ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳ ನಿರ್ವಹಣೆಯಲ್ಲ. ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ನಿರ್ಬಂಧಗಳ ನಿರ್ವಹಣೆ. ಈ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ತಂತ್ರ ಬಳಕೆದಾರನ ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳನ್ನು ನಿಯಂತ್ರಿಸುತ್ತದೆ.

The article was published in Prajavani on June 9, 2012

ಕಾಪಿ ರೈಟ್ ಹೊಂದಿರುವವನಿಗೆ ಬಳಕೆದಾರನ ಹಾರ್ಡ್‌ವೇರ್, ಸಾಫ್ಟ್‌ವೇರ್ ಮತ್ತು ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ನೋಡುವ, ಆಲಿಸುವ ಮತ್ತು ಓದುವ ವಸ್ತು-ವಿಷಯದ ಮೇಲೆಯೂ ನಿಯಂತ್ರಣ ಹೇರುವ ಅನೈತಿಕ ಅಧಿಕಾರವನ್ನು ಕೊಟ್ಟು ಬಿಡುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂಬುದು ಸ್ಟಾಲ್‌ಮನ್ ಅವರ ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯ.

ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್‌ನ ಮಾಲೀಕರು ಈ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ತಂತ್ರ ತಮ್ಮ ಹಕ್ಕಿನ ಉಲ್ಲಂಘನೆಯನ್ನು ತಡೆಯುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂದು ಹೇಳುತ್ತಾರಾದರೂ ಇದು ಜಾರಿಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಅನೇಕ ದೇಶಗಳ ಉದಾಹರಣೆಯನ್ನು ಮುಂದಿಟ್ಟುಕೊಂಡು ನೋಡಿದರೆ ಬಳಕೆದಾರನ ಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ಜ್ಞಾನದ ಬಾಗಿಲುಗಳನ್ನು ಮುಚ್ಚುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂಬುದೇ ನಿಜ.

ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಕಾಯ್ದೆಯನ್ವಯ ಅಸ್ತಿತ್ವದಲ್ಲೇ ಇರದ ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳನ್ನು ಈ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್‌ನ ಮಾಲೀಕರಿಗೆ ನೀಡಿಬಿಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಅಂಗವಿಕಲರು ತಮಗೆ ಓದಲು ಅನುಕೂಲವಾಗುವ ಮಾಧ್ಯಮಕ್ಕೆ ಒಂದು ಪುಸ್ತಕವನ್ನು ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು, ಸಂಶೋಧಕರು ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಅಥವಾ ಈ ಬಗೆಯ ಜ್ಞಾನದ ಮಾಧ್ಯಮಒಂದರಲ್ಲಿರುವ ವಿಷಯವನ್ನು ತಮ್ಮ ಸಂಶೋಧನೆಗೆ ಬಳಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು, ಹಾಗೆಯೇ ಸಿನಿಮಾ, ಸಾಫ್ಟ್‌ವೇರ್ ಇತ್ಯಾದಿಗಳನ್ನು ವೈಯಕ್ತಿಕ ಬಳಕೆಗಾಗಿ ಉಳಿಸಿ ಇಟ್ಟುಕೊಳ್ಳಲು (ಬ್ಯಾಕ್‌ಅಪ್) ಬೇಕಾದಂತೆ ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು, ಸಾಫ್ಟ್‌ವೇರ್‌ನಂಥ ಉತ್ಪನ್ನ ಗಳನ್ನು ಅವುಗಳನ್ನು ಉದ್ದೇಶಿತ ಉಪಯೋಗ ಕ್ಕಿಂತ ಭಿನ್ನ ಬಗೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬಳಸುವುದು, ಉದ್ದೇಶಿತ ವೇದಿಕೆಗಳಿಗಿಂತ ಭಿನ್ನವಾದ ವೇದಿಕೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಬಳಸಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗುವಂತೆ ಸಾಫ್ಟ್‌ವೇರ್‌ಗಳಂಥ ಉತ್ಪನ್ನಗಳನ್ನು ರಿವರ್ಸ್ ಇಂಜಿನಿಯರಿಂಗ್ ಮಾಡುವಂಥ ಕ್ರಿಯೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಕಾಯ್ದೆ ಅನುವು ಮಾಡಿಕೊಡುತ್ತದೆ.

ಆದರೆ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಕಾನೂನುಬದ್ಧವಾಗಿಯೇ ಇರುವ ಈ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕೆಲಸಗಳಿಗೂ ತಡೆಯೊಡುತ್ತದೆ.2011ರ ತಿದ್ದುಪಡಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಹೊಸ ರೂಪ ಪಡೆದುಕೊಂಡಿರುವ 1957ರ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಕಾಯ್ದೆ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಮೂಲಕ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಉಲ್ಲಂಘನೆಯನ್ನು ತಡೆಯುವ ವಿಧಾನಕ್ಕೆ ಕಾನೂನಿನ ಮಾನ್ಯತೆಯನ್ನು ನೀಡಿದೆ.

ತನ್ನ ಹಕ್ಕಿನ ಉಲ್ಲಂಘನೆಯನ್ನು ತಡೆಯುವು ದಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಮಾಲೀಕ ಅಳವಡಿಸಿರುವ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನವನ್ನು ಹ್ಯಾಕ್ ಮಾಡುವಂಥ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡಿದವರಿಗೆ ಎರಡು ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಕಾರಾಗೃಹ ವಾಸದಂಥ ಶಿಕ್ಷೆಯೂ ಹೊಸ ಕಾನೂನಿನಲ್ಲಿದೆ. ಹಾಗೆಂದು ಈ ಕಾನೂನು ಬಹಳ ಋಣಾತ್ಮಕವಷ್ಟೇ ಆಗಿದೆ ಎನ್ನಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಿಲ್ಲ.

ಇದರಲ್ಲಿ ಮೂರು ಅತಿ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಧನಾತ್ಮಕ ಅಂಶಗಳಿವೆ. ಮೊದಲನೆಯದ್ದು ಸಾರ್ವತ್ರಿಕ ಲಭ್ಯತೆಯ ವಸ್ತು-ವಿಷಯಗಳನ್ನು ಈ ಬಗೆಯ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಉಪಯೋಗಿಸಿ ಬಳಕೆದಾರರನ್ನು ನಿರ್ಬಂಧಿಸಲು ಅವಕಾಶವಿಲ್ಲ. ಎರಡನೆಯದ್ದು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಮಿತಿಯನ್ನು ಪರೀಕ್ಷಿಸುವ ಉದ್ದೇಶದಿಂದ ನಡೆಸಲಾಗುವ ಹ್ಯಾಕಿಂಗ್ ಅಪರಾಧವಲ್ಲ. ಮೂರನೆಯದ್ದು ಹೀಗೆ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಮಿತಿಗಳನ್ನು ಬಳಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಮತ್ತೊಂದು ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕ ವಿಧಾನವನ್ನು ಆವಿಷ್ಕರಿಸುವುದನ್ನು ಕಾನೂನು ತಡೆಯುತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ.

ಒಂದು ವಿಡಿಯೋ/ಆಡಿಯೋ ಕಂಪೆನಿ ಒಂದು ಡಿವಿಡಿಯನ್ನು ಕೇವಲ ಮೈಕ್ರೋಸಾಫ್ಟ್ ಮೀಡಿಯಾ ಪ್ಲೇಯರ್‌ನಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾತ್ರ ವೀಕ್ಷಿಸಲು ಅಥವಾ ಆಲಿಸಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಿರುವಂತೆ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ಮಾಡಿದ್ದರೆ ಲೀನಕ್ಸ್ ಹೊಂದಿರುವ ಬಳಕೆದಾರರು ಅದನ್ನು ತಮ್ಮ ಕಂಪ್ಯೂಟರ್‌ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನೋಡಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಿರುವಂತೆ ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿ ಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು ಅಪರಾಧವಲ್ಲ. ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಉಲ್ಲಂಘನೆಯಾಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ.

ಹಾಗೆಯೇ ಆಡಿಯೋ ಪುಸ್ತಕವೊಂದನ್ನು ಬಿಡುಗಡೆ ಮಾಡಿರುವ ಕಂಪೆನಿ ಅದನ್ನು ಅಂಧರು ಬಳಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲಾಗದಂತೆ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ಬಳಸಿದ್ದರೆ ಅಂಧರಿಗೆ ಅದನ್ನು ತಮಗೆ ಬೇಕಾದ ಸ್ವರೂಪಕ್ಕೆ ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿಕೊಂಡು ಬಳಸುವ ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ್ಯವನ್ನು ಕಾಯ್ದೆ ನೀಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಹಾಗೆಯೇ ಗೆಳೆಯನೊಬ್ಬನಿಂದ ಪಡೆದ ಡಿಆರ್‌ಎಂ ಇರುವ ಡಿವಿಡಿಯಿಂದ ಶಿಕ್ಷಕರೊಬ್ಬರು ತಮ್ಮ ತರಗತಿ ಅನುಕೂಲಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ಪ್ರತಿ ಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡು ವಿಡಿಯೋ ಕ್ಲಿಪ್‌ಗಳನ್ನು ರೂಪಿಸಿದರೂ ಅದು ಅಪರಾಧವಾಗು ವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಹಾಗೆಯೇ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞನೊಬ್ಬ ಅಂತರ ಜಾಲಸಂಪರ್ಕವನ್ನು ಬಳಸಿ ಆಡಬಲ್ಲ ಕಂಪ್ಯೂಟರ್ ಗೇಮ್ ಒಂದರಲ್ಲಿ ಸ್ಪೈವೇರ್ ಇದೆ ಅನುಮಾನಿಸಿ ಅದರ ಆಕರ ಸಂಕೇತಗಳನ್ನು ನೋಡಿ ಬದಲಾಯಿಸಲು ಪ್ರಯತ್ನಿಸಿದರೆ ಅದು ತಪ್ಪಲ್ಲ.

ಈ ಸವಲತ್ತನ್ನು ಭದ್ರತಾ ಏಜನ್ಸಿಗಳೂ ಬಳಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಿದೆ. ಹಾಗೆಯೇ ಜಾಗತಿಕ ಮಾರುಕಟ್ಟೆಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಪ್ರಖ್ಯಾತವಾಗಿರುವ ಒಂದು ಸಾಫ್ಟ್‌ವೇರನ್ನು ಹೋಲುವಂಥದ್ದೇ ಉತ್ಪನ್ನವನ್ನು ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಉತ್ಸಾಹಿಯೊಬ್ಬ ರೂಪಿಸಿ ಜಾಗತಿಕವಾಗಿ ಮಾರಾಟ ಮಾಡಲು ಹೊರಟರೂ ಅದನ್ನು ನಿಯಮ ತಪ್ಪು ಎನ್ನುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಆದರೆ ಇದರಲ್ಲಿ ಆತ ಅನುಕರಿ ಸುತ್ತಿರುವ ಉತ್ಪನ್ನ ಬಳಸಿರುವ ಆಕರ ಸಂಕೇತಗಳು ಇರಬಾರದಷ್ಟೇ.

ಎಲ್ಲವನ್ನೂ ಮಸಿ ನುಂಗಿತು ಎಂಬಂತೆ ಈ ಕಾಯ್ದೆಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಎರಡು ಋಣಾತ್ಮಕ ಅಂಶಗಳು ಅದರ ಧನಾತ್ಮಕತೆಗೆ ದೊಡ್ಡ ಮಿತಿಯನ್ನು ಹೇರಿಬಿಟ್ಟಿವೆ. ನಿರ್ದಿಷ್ಟ ಉತ್ಪನ್ನವನ್ನು ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಲು ಬೇಕಿರುವ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನವನ್ನು ಒದಗಿಸುವ ಕಂಪೆನಿಗಳು ಅದನ್ನು ಯಾರಿಗೆ ಮಾರಿದ್ದೇವೆ ಎಂಬ ದಾಖಲೆಗಳನ್ನು ಇಟ್ಟುಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕೆಂಬ ನಿಯಮವಿದೆ.

ಅಂದರೆ ಇದೊಂದು ಬಗೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪರೋಕ್ಷವಾಗಿ ಈ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನವನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವುದರ ಮೇಲೆ ಹೇರಿರುವ ನಿಯಂತ್ರಣದಂತಿದೆ. ಯಾರಿಗೆ ಮಾರಿದ್ದೇವೆಂಬ ದಾಖಲೆಯನ್ನು ಕಡ್ಡಾಯವಾಗಿ ಇಟ್ಟುಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಾ ಹೋಗುವ ಕ್ರಿಯೆಯೇ ಮಾರಾಟ ಗಾರರ ಉತ್ಸಾಹಕ್ಕೆ ತಣ್ಣೀರೆರಚುತ್ತದೆ.

ಹಾಗೆಯೇ ಬಳಕೆದಾರರು ತಮ್ಮ `ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸುವ ಹಕ್ಕನ್ನು` ಚಲಾಯಿಸಲು ಅಗತ್ಯವಿರುವ ಸವಲತ್ತು ಒದಗಿಸುವುದಕ್ಕೆ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಮಾಲೀಕರನ್ನು ಬಾಧ್ಯಸ್ಥರನ್ನಾಗಿಸಿಲ್ಲ. ಅಂದರೆ ಬಳಕೆದಾರನಿಗೆ ಹಕ್ಕಿದೆ. ಆದರೆ ಅದನ್ನು ಚಲಾಯಿಸುವ ಅವಕಾಶದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾತ್ರ ಖಾತರಿ ಇಲ್ಲ ಎಂಬ ಸ್ಥಿತಿ ಇದೆ.

ಲೇಖಕರು ಸೆಂಟರ್ ಫಾರ್ ಇಂಟರ್‌ನೆಟ್‌ಅಂಡ್ ಸೊಸೈಟಿಯ ಕಾರ್ಯನಿರ್ವಾಹಕ ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕರು

English translation below:

Digital Restrictions Management

As Richard Stallman the founder of the Free Software movement puts it the correct expansion of the acronym DRM is Digital Restrictions Management and not Digital Rights Management. According to his analysis DRM is used to limit the rights of consumers and enables rights-holders to exercise unethical control over the consumer's hardware, software and content.

Even though copyrights holders will tell us that DRM helps cut down on wilful and unwitting infringement. For consumers and members of the general public evidence from other countries reveal that DRM in most cases undermines access to knowledge. DRM permits the copyright holder to claim rights that don't exist as per copyright law and to restrict fair dealing (also referred to as far use) guarantees. Fair dealing protections include access by the disabled, use in research or academic context, archiving or making a personal backup, reverse engineering for academic reasons to to create interoperable/competing products/services etc.

The 2012 amendment to the Indian Copyright Act 1957 has resulted in legal recognition for effective technological measures [also called Technological Protection Measures or TPMs] and rights management information [RMI] applied for protecting the rights of the copyright-holder. Circumvention of such a measure could result in a 2 year jail term and a fine.

The DRM provisions per the amendment does three things correctly. One, it does not allow copyright-holder to use technological measure as a means to enclose public domain content or secure rights that are not granted to them under the Act. Two, any circumvention to exercise limitations and exceptions under the fair dealing provisions of the Act is not considered to be an offence. Three, it does not criminalise the creation of circumvention technologies. Unfortunately, however the Amendment also gets two things wrong. One, there are onerous recording keeping mandates for those providing circumvention technologies to consumers and members of the general public. Two, the provision does not make the rights-holder responsible for providing the means to consumers and members of the general public who wish to exercise their right to circumvention.

Suppose a movie studio released DVD version of its films with DRM that only worked with Microsoft Windows operating system. Those who bought the DVD but ran GNU/Linux or any other operating system would then have a right to circumvent the DRM and republish the content in an video encoding format. This would not be considered an offence because the customer is not attempting any copyright infringement.

Suppose a publishing house only released audio versions of its books with DRM that prevented accessibility to the content by the disabled. Another newly-introduced exception specifically for the disabled would apply if the rights-holder has ignored the disabled as a market but not making available accessible versions of their content. In other words, the disabled have a right to make accessible versions for themselves and therefore circumvent the DRM if necessary.

Suppose the very same movie studio also ensured that the DRM on its DVDs prevented customers from extracting video clips. If a teacher borrowed the film from a friend and then used circumvention technology to copy and paste video clips into her classroom presentation. This would not be considered an offence as she was only taking advantage of an exception meant for educational institutions.

Suppose a security researcher suspected the DRM technology in network enabled gaming console contained spy-ware. He would have the right to circumvent the DRM and reverse engineer the source code of the console in order to audit the code for the existence of back-doors. This exception will also be used by law enforcement agencies and military/intelligence organisations to purge our supply-chain of electronic infrastructure of spy-ware.

Finally assume a young entrepreneur from Bengaluru wanted to make a competing and yet interoperable product based on an existing product with global market penetration. Assume that the developers of the existing product used DRM to keep their source code and file format inaccessible to competitors. Again under the latest amendment our friend would have the right to circumvent the DRM as long as the code he write is not copied from the existing product.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/digital-restrictions-management

CIS's Position on Net Neutrality

sunil — 2015-12-09T13:06:06Z

As researchers committed to the principle of pluralism we rarely produce institutional positions. This is also because we tend to update our positions based on research outputs. But the lack of clarity around our position on network neutrality has led some stakeholders to believe that we are advocating for forbearance. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Please see below for the current articulation of our common institutional position.

Net Neutrality violations can potentially have multiple categories of harms — competition harms, free speech harms, privacy harms, innovation and ‘generativity’ harms, harms to consumer choice and user freedoms, and diversity harms thanks to unjust discrimination and gatekeeping by Internet service providers.
Net Neutrality violations (including some those forms of zero-rating that violate net neutrality) can also have different kinds benefits — enabling the right to freedom of expression, and the freedom of association, especially when access to communication and publishing technologies is increased; increased competition [by enabling product differentiation, can potentially allow small ISPs compete against market incumbents]; increased access [usually to a subset of the Internet] by those without any access because they cannot afford it, increased access [usually to a subset of the Internet] by those who don't see any value in the Internet, reduced payments by those who already have access to the Internet especially if their usage is dominated by certain services and destinations.
Given the magnitude and variety of potential harms, complete forbearance from all regulation is not an option for regulators nor is self-regulation sufficient to address all the harms emerging from Net Neutrality violations, since incumbent telecom companies cannot be trusted to effectively self-regulate. Therefore, CIS calls for the immediate formulation of Net Neutrality regulation by the telecom regulator [TRAI] and the notification thereof by the government [Department of Telecom of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology]. CIS also calls for the eventual enactment of statutory law on Net Neutrality. All such policy must be developed in a transparent fashion after proper consultation with all relevant stakeholders, and after giving citizens an opportunity to comment on draft regulations.
Even though some of these harms may be large, CIS believes that a government cannot apply the precautionary principle in the case of Net Neutrality violations. Banning technical innovations and business model innovations is not an appropriate policy option. The regulation must toe a careful line to solve the optimization problem: refraining from over-regulation of ISPs and harming innovation at the carrier level (and benefits of net neutrality violations mentioned above) while preventing ISPs from harming innovation and user choice. ISPs must be regulated to limit harms from unjust discrimination towards consumers as well as to limit harms from unjust discrimination towards the services they carry on their networks.
Based on regulatory theory, we believe that a regulatory framework that is technologically neutral, that factors in differences in technological context, as well as market realities and existing regulation, and which is able to respond to new evidence is what is ideal.

This means that we need a framework that has some bright-line rules based, but which allows for flexibility in determining the scope of exceptions and in the application of the rules. Candidate principles to be embodied in the regulation include: transparency, non-exclusivity, limiting unjust discrimination.
The harms emerging from walled gardens can be mitigated in a number of ways. On zero-rating the form of regulation must depend on the specific model and the potential harms that result from that model. Zero-rating can be: paid for by the end consumer or subsidized by ISPs or subsidized by content providers or subsidized by government or a combination of these; deal-based or criteria-based or government-imposed; ISP-imposed or offered by the ISP and chosen by consumers; Transparent and understood by consumers vs. non-transparent; based on content-type or agnostic to content-type; service-specific or service-class/protocol-specific or service-agnostic; available on one ISP or on all ISPs. Zero-rating by a small ISP with 2% penetration will not have the same harms as zero-rating by the largest incumbent ISP. For service-agnostic / content-type agnostic zero-rating, which Mozilla terms ‘equal rating’, CIS advocates for no regulation.
CIS believes that Net Neutrality regulation for mobile and fixed-line access must be different recognizing the fundamental differences in technologies.
On specialized services CIS believes that there should be logical separation and that all details of such specialized services and their impact on the Internet must be made transparent to consumers both individual and institutional, the general public and to the regulator. Further, such services should be available to the user only upon request, and not without their active choice, with the requirement that the service cannot be reasonably provided with ‘best efforts’ delivery guarantee that is available over the Internet, and hence requires discriminatory treatment, or that the discriminatory treatment does not unduly harm the provision of the rest of the Internet to other customers.
On incentives for telecom operators, CIS believes that the government should consider different models such as waiving contribution to the Universal Service Obligation Fund for prepaid consumers, and freeing up additional spectrum for telecom use without royalty using a shared spectrum paradigm, as well as freeing up more spectrum for use without a licence.
On reasonable network management CIS still does not have a common institutional position.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality

Copyright Amendment: Bad, but Could Have Been Much Worse

sunil — 2012-06-15T12:29:39Z

The changes to the Copyright Act protect the disabled - but are restrictive about cover versions and web freedom, writes Sunil Abraham in this article published in the Business Standard on June 10, 2012.

When the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, was passed unanimously by the Lok Sabha on May 22, it meant that there was little reason for celebration, some not-so-great news, and a lot of pretty bad news.

The only real reason for unqualified celebration is the amendment’s introduction of a robust exception for the disabled. It is bleeding-edge policy formulation, as it is right up there alongside the Treaty for the Visually Impaired currently being negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The Indian exception is more robust: first, it is disability-neutral, unlike the treaty which only addresses the needs of the print-impaired; and second, it is works-neutral, unlike the treaty which only addresses books and printed works. In brief, given the very limited circulation of copyrighted works amongst the disabled, they now can convert inaccessible works to accessible formats and share them with each other on a non-profit basis. No royalty needs to be paid to the rights-holders for this conversion and the resultant access. Other reasons to celebrate include the newly introduced exception for non-commercial lending and the extension of fair dealing (or fair use) to all works.

Now for some middling news. The Digital Rights Management provision makes it an offence punishable with a fine and a two-year jail term to circumvent “effective technological measures” (also called Technological Protection Measures) and remove “rights management information” (RMI). The provision protects public interest since it does not allow rights-holders to claim rights unavailable under copyright law, and does not prevent consumers and citizens from benefiting from the various fair dealing (or fair use) exceptions and limitations.

Unfortunately, the provision mandates onerous record-keeping for those providing circumvention technologies, and also does not insist that the rights-holder provide the means for circumvent when the consumer or citizen legitimately needs to do so.

The first piece of bad news is that an inadequate “safe harbour” provision has been introduced for Internet intermediaries. Like the Information Technology Act, the Copyright Act has also gotten the configuration of the intermediary liability regime wrong. This was the opportunity to finally protect common carriers, platforms for social media and commons-based peer-production (such as free software and open content). In short, search engines are finally legal in India, and so are ISPs, virtual private network providers and content delivery networks.

But unfortunately, social media platforms such as Facebook and peer-production platforms like Wikipedia are not afforded sufficient immunity to thrive as real-time participatory platforms. The take-down procedure is designed to provide instant relief to rights-holders, as intermediaries are supposed to remove content immediately. They have the option of reinstating content if the take-down notice is not followed within three weeks by a court order. This mechanism will have a chilling effect on free speech — given that Indian internet service providers very obviously privilege the interests of intellectual property rights-holders over those of the ISPs’ customers — as most recently illustrated by their over-compliance with certain John Doe court orders emerging from the Madras High Court.

The second piece of bad news is the extension of the term of protection for photographs. It has gone from being “sixty years after publication” to “sixty years after the death of the photographer”. Sixty years from publication was already in excess of the Agreement on Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement). Now we are in excess of WIPO Copyright Treaty requirements, even though India is not a signatory. The possibility of grandchildren earning royalties does not serve as an incentive for shutterbugs to take more photos or better photos. It is not even clear if one can monetise the average photo after the first decade. Therefore, the global public domain has been substantially impoverished, without any evidence that this will make the photographers reciprocally wealthier.

It does not stop there. In the age of hip-hop, trance, jhankar beats and turntables, one would have hoped that our law-makers would at least get the provision for “cover versions” or “remixes” right. Cover versions in India are doubly useful both in terms of aesthetics and profits — and yet the relevant provision can only be described as mediaeval. Cover versions can be produced only after a gap of five years; they have to be restricted to the same medium as the original; payment from them must be made in advance for 5,000 copies (should all those who sang commercially viable cover violations of “Kolaveri Di” be considered lawbreakers?); and there are strict limits on what are acceptable alterations to the original. The “alterations” have to be “reasonable” and “technically necessary”. Today, affordable yet sophisticated multimedia technologies allow teenagers to build professional sound recording studios in their bedrooms — and our government is seeking to restrict them to boring word-for-word and note-for-note covers.

And it gets worse. Bowing to pressure from foreign publishers’ associations, the government deleted the “parallel importation” provision at the last minute. The inclusion of this provision would have made it clear that works reproduced with the rights-holders’ permission in other countries could be imported into India. Foreign publishers and their lobbyists went all-out with a propaganda campaign predicting a dystopia filled with pirated books, surplus books dumped from overseas and starving, uncompensated authors. Had our government not caved, this clarification in law would have gone a long way in dismantling distribution monopolies and made the market much more competitive. The resultant increase in choice and reduction in cost would have benefited everyone. Human Resources Development Minister Sibal promised both Houses during the passage of the amendment that he would revisit this, and let’s hope he does so — especially for our libraries and our second-hand book stores, and for the students and disabled amongst us.

The writer is at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. sunil@cis-india.org

Click to read the original published by Business Standard.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/copyright-amendment

Two Tales of Transparency!

sunil — 2012-04-11T12:09:01Z

In a single week, two global Internet giants announce transparency efforts that have direct implications for privacy and free speech.

One, Google replaces 60 odd privacy policies with a single one across its products apparently to provide a unified experience for consumers, advertisers and law enforcement agencies. Google says that it is trying to make its privacy policy more accessible and transparent to its users and that nothing has changed. This is indeed true, as the respective privacy policies were modified when Google acquired these products. Google spent USD 1.9 billion acquiring 79 companies in 2011. This year's company filings state "we expect our current pace of acquisitions to continue.” Their multi-year acquisition spree has spawned 60 odd products that collect personal information. And beyond Google core offerings like Search, News, YouTube and Orkut – their advertising networks Adsense and Double Click keep tabs on you as you visit millions of other websites. This advertiser cum share-holder sweet spot has been created by centrally storing 9 months of comprehensive logs tied to IP address and other device details for all accounts. A blanket surveillance dream-come-true for rogue state actors. Even in most democratic regimes this far exceeds legally mandated data retention requirements. Fans will point out that Google's transparency record on user information requests, data retention and data portability is unmatched across the industry. But that is just saying that you are less evil than Microsoft and Facebook. In June 2007, Google reduced data retention from 24 to 18 months and in a letter to the European Commission privacy regulators it said “we ... firmly reject any suggestions that we could meet our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts with any retention period shorter than 18 months.” But come August 2008, Google reduces data retention from 18 months to 9 months in what it called an attempt to address regulatory concerns. Like Europeans, Indian citizens could also benefit if our law makers were to enact horizontal privacy statute and establish the office of the privacy commissioner. In an ideal world, a pro-consumer or pro-citizen Indian privacy commissioner would create evidence based policy and reduce data retention to say 6 weeks. If unfortunately, we go by the precedent set by multi-tiered blanket surveillance provisions in the IT Act, it looks like policy-makers have bought the flawed “more is better” argument emerging from business press cheerleaders of the global surveillance industry.

Two, Twitter announces technical capabilities to censor tweets using geo-location to be in compliance with legal orders from different jurisdictions. Again very little has changed. Twitter has in the past complied with legal orders. In terms of transparency – Twitter has adopted pretty high standards. It will notify the author about the removal and other users from that country with message stating that the tweet has been withheld. Which some predict will precipitate a Streisand effect. In addition, Twitter has expanded its partnership with ChillingEffects.org to publicly archive these legal orders. Some activists wonder if Twitter's role in the Arab Spring would have been undermined if it implemented legal orders from the Mubarak regime. Unfortunately for Twitter, initial praise for this comes from China's state-run newspaper and from the Thai government. But to be fair, unlike Google above, Twitter is sticking to absolute legal minimum. The use of the US jurisdiction in the past, as a free speech haven did benefit activists in authoritarian regimes but perhaps SOPA and PIPA signals the end of that. In India, given the draconian IT Act this could result in blocking of heavy metal tweets on account of them being “blasphemous” or Twitpics of Cartoons against Corruption for being an “annoyance”. Both offenses which are significant dilutions from the previous standards of “incitement of hatred” or “defamation”. There are two part to the solution here, one, Twitter giving the best fight it can to protect free speech and two, Indian citizens petitioning their MPs for the amendment of the IT Act.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/two-tales-of-transparency

Intermediary liability law needs updating

sunil — 2019-02-13T00:05:30Z

The time has come for India to exert its foreign policy muscle. There is a less charitable name for intermediary liability regimes like Sec 79 of the IT Act — private censorship regimes.

The article was published in Business Standard on February 9, 2019.

Intermediaries get immunity from liability emerging from user-generated and third-party content because they have no “actual knowledge” until it is brought to their notice using “take down” requests or orders.

Since some of the harm caused is immediate, irreparable and irreversible, it is the preferred alternative to approaching courts for each case. When intermediary liability regimes were first enacted, most intermediaries were acting as common carriers — ie they did not curate the experience of users in a substantial fashion. While some intermediaries like Wikipedia continue this common carrier tradition, others driven by advertising revenue no longer treat all parties and all pieces of content neutrally. Facebook, Google and Twitter do everything they can to raise advertising revenues. They make you depressed. And if they like you, they get you to go out and vote. There is an urgent need to update intermediary liability law.

In response to being summoned by multiple governments, Facebook has announced the establishment of an independent oversight board. A global free speech court for the world’s biggest online country. The time has come for India to exert its foreign policy muscle. The amendments to our intermediary liability regime can have global repercussions, and shape the structure and functioning of this and other global courts.

While with one hand Facebook dealt the oversight board, with the other hand it took down APIs that would enable press and civil society to monitor political advertising in real time. How could they do that with no legal consequences? The answer is simple — those APIs were provided on a voluntary basis. There was no law requiring them to do so.

There are two approaches that could be followed. One, as scholar of regulatory theory Amba Kak puts it, is to “disincentivise the black box”. Most transparency reports produced by intermediaries today are on a voluntary basis; there is no requirement for this under law. Our new law could require a extensive transparency with appropriate privacy safeguards for the government, affected parties and the general public in terms of revenues, content production and consumption, policy development, contracts, service-level agreements, enforcement, adjudication and appeal. User empowerment measures in the user interface and algorithm explainability could be required. The key word in this approach is transparency.

The alternative is to incentivise the black box. Here faith is placed in technological solutions like artificial intelligence. To be fair, technological solutions may be desirable for battling child pornography, where pre-censorship (or deletion before content is published) is required. Fingerprinting technology is used to determine if the content exists in a global database maintained by organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation. A similar technology called Content ID is used pre-censor copyright infringement. Unfortunately, this is done by ignoring the flexibilities that exist in Indian copyright law to promote education, protect access knowledge by the disabled, etc. Even within such narrow application of technologies, there have been false positives. Recently, a video of a blogger testing his microphone was identified as a pre-existing copyrighted work.

The goal of a policy-maker working on this amendment should be to prevent repeats of the Shreya Singhal judgment where sections of the IT Act were read down or struck down. To avoid similar constitution challenges in the future, the rules should not specify any new categories of illegal content, because that would be outside the scope of the parent clause. The fifth ground in the list is sufficient — “violates any law for the time being in force”. Additional grounds, such as “harms minors in anyway”, is vague and cannot apply to all categories of intermediaries — for example, a dating site for sexual minorities. The rights of children need to be protected. But that is best done within the ongoing amendment to the POCSO Act.

As an engineer, I vote to eliminate redundancy. If there are specific offences that cannot fit in other parts of the law, those offences can be added as separate sections in the IT Act. For example, even though voyeurism is criminalised in the IT Act, the non-consensual distribution of intimate content could be criminalised, as it has been done in the Philippines.

Provisions that have to do with data retention and government access to that data for the purposes of national security, law enforcement and also anonymised datasets for the public interest should be in the upcoming Data Protection law. The rules for intermediary liability is not the correct place to deal with it, because data retention may also be required of those intermediaries that don’t handle any third-party information or user generated content. Finally, there have to be clear procedures in place for reinstatement of content that has been taken down.

Disclosure: The Centre for Internet and Society receives grants from Facebook, Google and Wikimedia Foundation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/business-standard-february-9-2019-sunil-abraham-intermediary-liability-law-needs-updating

Services like TwitterSeva aren’t the silver bullets they are made out to be

sunil — 2016-10-06T16:31:51Z

TwitterSeva is great, but it should not be considered a sufficient replacement for proper e-governance systems. This is because there are several serious shortcomings with the TwitterSeva approach, and it is no wonder that enthusiastic police officers and bureaucrats are somewhat upset with the slow deployment of e-governance applications. They are also right in being frustrated with the lack of usability and scalability of existing applications that hold out the promise of adopting private sector platforms to serve citizens better.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, wrote this in response to the FactorDaily story on TwitterSeva, a special feature developed by Twitter’s India team to help citizens connect better with government services. Sunil's article in FactorDaily can be read here.

Let’s take a look at why the TwitterSeva approach is not adequate:

1. Vendor and Technology Neutrality: Providing a level ground for competing technologies in e-governance has been a globally accepted best practice for about 15 years now. This is usually done by using open standards policies and interoperability frameworks.

India does have a national open standards policy, but the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has only published one chapter of the Interoperability Framework for e-Governance .

The thing is, while Twitter might be the preferred choice for urban elites and the middle class, it might not be the choice of millions of Indians coming online. By implicitly signaling to citizens that Twitter complaints will be taken more seriously than e-mail or SMS complaints, the government is becoming a salesperson for Twitter. Ideally, all interactions that the state has with citizens should be such that citizens can choose which vendor and technology they would like to use. Ideally, the government should have its own work-flow so that it can harvest complaints, feedback and other communications from all social media platforms be it Twitter or Identica, Facebook or Diaspora, and publish responses back onto them.

By implicitly signalling to citizens that Twitter complaints will be taken more seriously than e-mail or SMS complaints, the government is becoming a salesperson for Twitter

Apart from undermining the power of choice for citizens, lack of vendor and technology neutrality in government use of technology undermines the efficient functioning of a competitive free market, which is the bedrock of future innovation.

When it comes to micro-blogging, Twitter has established a near monopoly in India. There are no clear signs of harm and therefore it would not be wise to advocate that the Competition Commission of India investigate Twitter. However, if the government helps Twitter tighten its grip over the Indian market, it is preventing the next cycle of creative destruction and disruption. Therefore, e-governance applications should ideally only “loosely couple” with the APIs of private firms so that competition and innovation are protected.

2. Holistic Approach and Accountability: Ideally, as the Electronic Service Delivery Bill 2011 had envisaged, every agency within the government was supposed to (within 180 days of the enactment of the Act) do several things: publish a list of services that will be delivered electronically with a deadline for each service; commit to service-level agreements for each service and provide details of the manner of delivery; provide an agency-level grievance redressal mechanism for citizens unhappy with the delivery of these electronic services.

Notwithstanding the 180-day commitment, the Bill required that “all public services shall be delivered in electronic mode within five years” after the enactment of the Bill with a potential three-year extension if the original deadline was not met. The Bill also envisaged the constitution of a Central Electronic Service Delivery Commission with a team of commissioners who “monitor the implementation of this Bill on a regular basis” and publish an annual report which would include “the number of electronic service requests in response to which service was provided in accordance with the applicable service levels and an analysis of the remaining cases.”

The Electronic Service Delivery Bill 2011 had a much more comprehensive and accountable plan for e-governance adoption in the country

Citizens suffering from non-compliance with the provisions of the Bill and unsatisfied with the response from the agency level grievance redressal mechanism could appeal to the Commission. The state or central commissioners after giving the government officials an opportunity to be heard were empowered to impose a fine of Rs 5000.

Unlike the piecemeal approach of TwitterSeva, the Bill had a much more comprehensive and accountable plan for e-governance adoption in the country.

3. Right To Transparency: Some of the interactions that the government has with citizens and firms may have to be disclosed under the obligation emerging from the Right to Information Act for disclosure to the public or to the requesting party. Therefore it is important that the government take its own steps for the retention of all data and records — independent of the goodwill and lifecycles of private firms.

Twitter is only 10 years old. It took 10 years for Orkut to shut down. Maybe Twitter will shut down in the next 10 years. How then will the government comply with RTI requests? Even if the government is not keen on pushing for data portablity as a right for consumers (just like mobile number portability in telecom, so that consumers can seamlessly shift between competing service providers), it absolutely should insist on data portability for all government use.

Twitter is only 10 years old. It took 10 years for Orkut to shut down. Maybe Twitter will shut down in the next 10 years. How then will the government comply with RTI requests?

This will allow it to shift to a) support multiple services, b) shift to competing/emerging services c) incrementally build its own infrastructure and also comply with the requirements of the Right to Information Act.

4. Privacy: Unfortunately, thanks to the techno-utopians behind the Aadhaar project, the current government is infected with “data ideology.” There is an obsession with collecting as much data as possible from citizens, storing it in centralized databases and providing “dashboards” to bureaucrats and politicians. This is diametrically opposed to the view of the security community.

Unfortunately, thanks to the techno-utopians behind the Aadhaar project, the current government is infected with “data ideology”

For example, Bruce Schneier posted on his blog in March this year (in a piece titled ‘Data is a Toxic Asset‘) saying: “What all these data breaches are teaching us is that data is a toxic asset and saving it is dangerous. This idea has always been part of the data protection law starting with the 2005 EU Data Protection Directive expressed as the principle of “Data Minimization” or “Collection Limitation”. More recently technologists and policy makers also use the phrase “Privacy by Design”. Introducing an unnecessary intermediary or gate-keeper between what is essentially transactions between citizens and the state is an egregious violation of a key privacy principle.”

5. Middle Class and Elite Capture: The use of Twitter amplifies the voices of the English-speaking, elite, and middle class citizens at the expense of the voices of the poor. While elites don’t exhibit fear when tagging police IDs and making public complaints from the comforts of their gated communities with private security guards shielding them the violence of the state, this might be a very intimidating option for the poor and disempowered.

While elites don’t fear tagging police IDs and making public complaints from the comforts of their gated communities, it’s intimidating for the disempowered

While the system may not be discriminatory in its design, it will have disparate impact on different sections of our society. In other words, the introduction of TwitterSeva will exacerbate power asymmetries in our society rather than ameliorating them.

The canonical scholarly reference for this is Kate Crawford’s analysis of City of Boston’s StreetBump smartphone, which resulted in an over-reporting of potholes in elite neighbourhoods and under-reporting from poor and elderly residents. This meant that efficiency in the allocation of the city’s resources was only a cover for increased discrimination against the powerless.

6. Security: The most important conclusion to draw from the Snowden disclosure is that the tin-foil conspiracy theorists who we used to dismiss as lunatics were correct. What has been established beyond doubt is that the United States of America is the world leader when it comes to conducting mass surveillance on netizens across the globe. It is still completely unclear how much access the NSA has to the databases of American social media giants. When the complete police force of a state starts to use Twitter for the delivery of services to the public, then it may be possible for foreign intelligence agencies to use this information to undermine our sovereignty and national security.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/factordaily-sunil-abraham-october-6-2016-services-like-twitterseva-are-not-the-silver-bullets-they-are-made-out-to-be

Essay Competition for Software Freedom Day

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:02:02Z

The Free Software Users Group of Bangalore and the Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration organise an essay competition for schools and colleges in Bangalore on the topic of "Software Freedom"

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/essay-competition-for-software-freedom-day

A2K3 Panel XI: Open Access to Science and Research

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:07:56Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam participated in the third Access to Knowledge hosted by The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School between September 8-10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference held at the Geneva International Conference Centre brought together hundreds of decision-makers and experts on global knowledge to discuss the urgent need for policy reforms.

Original Article on A2K3 website

Download Subbiah Arunachalam's Paper

Audio file of Session on Open Access to Science and Research (Ogg, MP3)

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. Made possible by the internet and author consent, OA supports wider and faster access to knowledge. This panel featured Leslie Chan, of the University of Toronto; Subbiah Arunachalam of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and Global Knowledge Partnership; Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology, UCT; and DK Sahu of Medknow Publications Pvt. Ltd. Peter Suber from the Yale Information Society Project and SPARC moderated this panel.

It’s a distant dream for most kinds of literature, where authors are unwilling to give up the revenue they currently earn from publishers. But it’s growing quickly for scholarly journal articles, where journals don’t pay for articles and authors write for impact, not for money. The result is a revolutionary opportunity to accelerate research and share knowledge. OA is especially important for researchers and medical practitioners in developing countries, where access to knowledge has been sharply reduced by four decades of fast-rising journal prices.

This panel will examine what universities and governments can do to promote OA, with a special focus on medical research and health information. Among the models discussed will be peer-reviewed OA journals, OA repositories, the WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), and the new policy from the U.S. National Institutes of Health requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository.

The questions to be addressed will include:

How do access barriers slow research in developing countries? How does OA remove those barriers?
What can universities do to promote OA?
What can governments, and public funding agencies, do to promote OA?
What special challenges do developing countries face in providing OA?
What are some concrete examples of successful OA policies and projects in developing countries?
Why is OA a critical issue for policy-makers concerned with public health, scientific innovation, and higher education?
How does OA accelerate the advance and spread of knowledge in medicine as well as in other disciplines?
How can OA promote the work of researchers in developing and transitional countries, both as readers and as authors?

PETER SUBER

OA literature is digital, online, free of charge, free of needless copyright
OA is compatible with peer review, copyright, revenue and profit, print, preservation, prestige
3622 peer-reviewed OA journals, 1220 OA repositories, 22 university OA mandates (15 countries), 27 funding agencies OA mandates (14 countries)
Part of the problem: journal prices have risen 4 times faser than inflation since mid-1980s. Indian institute of science is the best funded research library in india providing access to 10600 serials.
Harvard has 98990
Yale has 73900
Average ARL library = 50,566
U of Witwatersrand = 29,309
U of Malawi = 17000 ejournals, 95 print
The case for OA is especially strong for publicly funded research, medical research, research from developing countries

SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM

Why do we needopen access to science?
Science as Knowledge commons
Created by researchers, a communal activity, science is about sharing, internet has opened new opportunities
Primary goal of science is the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of humanity
Emergence of open access – seeks to restore knowledge commons to creators. Movement, like everything else, is uneven
Physicists vs. chemists
UK, Netherlands and USA – have had many more successes
Brazil – doing very well – but China and India are not doing so well with open access
Restore the knowledge commons is to the community
This movement is like any other movement which is uneven
Developments in India

3.1% papers in chemical abstracts
30,000 papers a year indexed in SCI
Problems of Access and Visibility

New Developments:

Consortia – able to provide a lot of journals
open courseware
arXiv

Problems: papers that are published are put in inaccessible journals, and people in global South laboratories would be unable to access this knowledge. The Government gives the money but the research then ends up flying out
The policy front:

Individual efforts
National Knowledge Commission has recommended OA
Number of institutional repositories
Need advocacy and training programmes
Action missing from key players

Some individuals are doing a great job and putting all their materials online
Medical information and developing countries

No nation can afford to be without access to S&T research capacity
Neglected diseases are not a priority for pharmaceutical companies
HINARI – any country that has per capita less than $1000 is eligible

DK SAHU

Infectious diseases (chikungunya goes Italian)
Non-infectious diseases (india becoming global hub for diabetes)
Industry effects (how safe are clinical trials)
Several examples (such as MedKnow, Journal of Postgraduate Medicine) of free access to no-fee journals.
A journal from India has the most visits from London
A journal called International Journal of Shoulder Surgery but visitors are from Melbourne
More original research articles, 40+ articles in 2005 vs. 160+ articles in 2008 in IJU, more issues per year for journals, check on scientific misconduct, international recognition (11 journals in SCI in 2 years)
Going online increases citations – this is an open access advantage
Scientific output of new economies: medicine
Open access publishing is not alone sufficient – there are disappearing journals. Commercial publishers are taking over, there is a lack of continuity, non-interoperability/archiving
20-80 phenomenon (majority of journals are not OA)
Local journals are not preferred (high IF journals)

LESLIE CHAN

Role of Universities and Researchers
You need citations in order to advance in academia – if your papers get picked up and ripple throughout the research arena. What about policy impact?
“Impact factor” is evil. Open access was meant to counter the tyranny of impact factor, so OA journals should not try to battle it out in this arena.
Issues involve “big science” and “lost science”, research literature as infrastructure, integrating the gold and green roads to open access.
Institutional repositories and open access journals
There’s a lot of Big Science that costs a lot of money (like LHC)
But we have another big hole – the 10-90Gap. 10% of the global health research spending is allocated to diseases affecting 90% of the population
The G8 countries account for 85% of most cited articles indexed in ISI
The other 126 countries account for 2.5%
How much of these journals are relevant in terms of content?
We are operating with a dominant model of knowledge dissemination from the Center to the Periphery
We end up having “lost science” in the developing world because of that knowledge
Perpetuate the cycle of knowledge poverty in this way
African countries need to have in place appropriate mechanisms and infrastructure for training and exploitation of knowledge. This will enable them to make meaningful evidence based policy that pertains to local needs
Researchers in developing countries ranked access to subscription-based journals as one of their most pressing problems
HINARI: health sciences

108 countries, 1043 institutions, 5000 journals
Collaboration of >45 publishers: free or reduced-cost access to journals for developing countries
Others: eIFL.net, AGORA: agricultural sciences, OERE: environmental sciences, PERI
Dissemination through information philanthropy. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/1001/lcp100109.html

Open access: the solution to the “lost science”
Two routes to Open Access (OA) – open access journals and respositories
African health sciences: two years ago there was a n article published in this journal and authors found that over 50% of these drugs were substandard or fake. This got the local newspaper, and then BBC, and then other researchers started looking at it
Open Access repositories:
Institutionally-based (universities, etc) or subject-based (e.g. PubMet Central, arXiv.org)
Collect copies of articles published by the institutions researchers
Researchers themselves deposit knowledge
Benefits for authors (research output instantly accessible for all (higher impact)
Research output of international research community accessible to author
Partnerships/collaborative projects develop as a result
Career prospects advanced – publications noted by authorities
Opportunities for new research discoveries, data mining etc
Alternative impact assessment
Benefits for funding bodies: what has been discovered with our financial support? Was it a good investment?
Researchers have a moral and intellectual obligation to ensure that their research is accessible
Universities share a common goal and public mission advancement of knowledge for the betterment of human kind
Open access is key to the MDG

EVE GRAY

When we talk about open access, we talk about change and change delivery.
It’s not just intellectual property and copyright issues, but values, cultures, systems, practices, everything that underlie the process moving towards scientific research
We faced the biggest problem in facing change – we’ve seen a massive overhaul, of transformative reports, of leveraging the country into a different direction. Undoing the damage of apartheid and colonialism
What is meant by international? What is meant by local?
African knowledge for Africa: we need to rejuvenate, regenerate our own knowledge
SA: first heart transplant in the world. Have their own vaccines. Operate as a leading scientific country
Growing international competitiveness – publication is perceived as a matter of journal articles in international journals. Little or no support for publication in nationally-based publications
Much research output in grey literature, not easily findable or accessible
The Medicines and Related Substances Control Act, 2001
Research has to address the burning economic issues of a country
Things are changing…slowly
Support for open access publications
What needs to be done – open access journals are necessary.
Changing values and promotion systems – we have to somehow pick up on the vision of that vibrant African dance movement, translate this feeling
Providing support for publication efforts
Expand the range of publication outputs
Ensuring the social impact of research
There is a huge amount of research being pumped out and being printed out by NGOs
Great literature is almost inaccessible in universities
Could not access African journals – no access from their own countries or neighboring countries
Electric Book Works has manuals for health-care workers – manuals are very high-quality, out of University of Cape Town
Often forgotten that science information is necessary to trickle down, if everything is online, we can get things to trickle down
Harvard said: it is our duty to disseminate our research. Stanford: Caroline Handy – when you publish research, research for community use is part of the duty

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research

Open Access Day celebrated in India

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:06:01Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance co-organised joint celebrations of Open Access Day in Jamia Millia Islamia campus on the 14th of October 2008. Around 50 people attended the event from different departments in Jamia there were also some participants from the Indian Linux Users Group. CIS also published an Open Access flyer on this day featuring quotations from Sam Pitroda, MS Swaminathan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, Frederick Noronha, Barbara Kirsop and Samir Brahmachari.

Speaking at Tagore Hall at Jamia Millia Islamia, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, pointed out that “there are over 25,000 scientific journals published in the world today but even the richest university in India cannot afford to subscribe to more than 1,200 journals. It is as though, Indian scientists and students are competing in a race with their legs bound.” Prof. Arunachalam called upon the student community to lobby for Open Access mandates for research outputs funded by tax-payers.Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. October 14, 2008 was the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, USA. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals.

Speaking at the celebrations at Jamia, Dr. Zakir Thomas of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) traced the limited historical role that IPR has played in the development for drugs for Tuberculosis. Dr. Thomas is the project director of Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), a project of CSIR. The government of India has already committed Rs. 150 crores to the OSDD project which is targeting neglected diseases from developing countries. Dr. Thomas also introduced the OSDD project and spoke about alternative systems of incentives that are more appropriate in the academic community such as attribution, citation and collaboration – all closely linked career growth in an academic or university context.

Dr. Lynn, a professor at the Department of Bio-informatics at JNU and Dr. Bhardwaj Scientist CSIR introduced the OSDD web platform and pointed out to various improvements over existing methods of research. While in peer-reviewed papers readers are only provided with reference number when experiments are discussed – on the OSDD platform readers can access the complete experiment details, including data even for failed experiments. This is critical in reducing wastage of valuable resources and efforts in attempting to re-invent the wheel.

Dr. Bhardwaj pointed out that she was already collaborating with students from the Jamia Millia Islamia campus on her projects hosted on OSDD. She said that the open access and open source models gives rise to many new collaborations both at the local and international level. Dr. Bhardwaj also announced that two CSIR open access journals were being launched by Dr. Samir Brahmachari - Director General on the occasion of World Open Access day.

Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia who presided over the meeting spoke of the challenges faced by faculty and students in the Indian context. Some international journals demand Rs. 40,000 from the authors in spite of assigning copyright. He predicted that the open access movement will lead to more Indian authors being published and cited. He also hoped that open access would become a norm instead of a novelty.

Download Open Access Flyer

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india

Essay Competition

sunil — 2009-09-23T10:02:28Z

In partnership with Free Software User Group - Bangalore, the Centre for Internet and Society is organising a essay competition for school and college students from Bangalore. The last date for submitting entries is 8th November 2008. Three prizes of Rs. 3,000/- each are available for college students, and three 3 prizes of Rs. 1,000/- each are available for school students.

Poster and Cover Letter

Download an electronic copy of the poster and covering letter that has been sent to around 350 school and colleges in Bangalore city.

Process of Judging

Volunteers from the Free Software User Group will together constitute a committee that will anonymously and individual score all entries. The score will be consolidated across judges to determine the final winners.

Terms and Conditions

Copyright: The copyright of the essay will remain with the participant.
License: All submissions will automatically be considered licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 India License.
The collective decision of the judges will be considered final.

Rules

Participants must be bona fide students of a school or college in Bangalore.
The word limit for essays is 1200 words.
Essays can be submitted either in English or in Kannada.
Electronic submission should be in an Open Format [Text - .txt, Rich Text Format - .rtf, Open Document Format - .odt, Portable Document Format - .pdf]

Thanks

Free Software Users Group, Bangalore, for acting as co-organiser for the competition.
Renuka Prasad, Professor, R.V.College of Engineering for the concept, providing leadership and organising the databases of schools and colleges.
Anivar Aravind for providing advice and support.
Hiran Venugopalan, Engineering Student, for designing the poster.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/essay-competition

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam

sunil — 2008-10-31T09:31:27Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0395.jpg

Dr. Zakir Thomas

sunil — 2008-10-31T09:33:44Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0388.jpg

Dr. Andrew Lynn

sunil — 2008-10-31T09:36:55Z

Dr. Andrew Lynn

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0384.jpg

Dr. Anshu Bharadwaj

sunil — 2008-10-31T09:38:40Z

Dr. Anshu Bharadwaj

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0393.jpg

Privacy vs. Transparency: An Attempt at Resolving the Dichotomy

sunil — 2015-03-08T06:26:21Z

The right to privacy has been articulated in international law and in some national laws. In a few countries where the constitution does not explicitly guarantee such a right, courts have read the right to privacy into other rights (e.g., the right to life, the right to equal treatment under law and also the right to freedom of speech and expression).

With feedback and inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Geetha Hariharan. I would like to apologize for not providing proper citation to Julian Assange when the first version of this blog entry was published. I would also like to thank Micah Sifry for drawing this failure to his attention. The blog post originally published by Omidyar Network can be read here. Also see http://newint.org/features/2015/01/01/privacy-transparency/

In other countries where privacy is not yet an explicit or implicit right, harm to the individual is mitigated using older confidentiality or secrecy law. After the Snowden affair, the rise of social media and the sharing economy, some corporations and governments would like us to believe that “privacy is dead”. Privacy should not and cannot be dead, because that would mean that security is also dead. This is indeed the most dangerous consequence of total surveillance as it is technically impossible to architect a secure information system without privacy as a precondition. And conversely, it is impossible to guarantee privacy without security as a precondition.

The right to transparency [also known as the right to information or access to information] – while unavailable in international law – is increasingly available in national law. Over the last twenty years this right has become encoded in national laws – and across the world it is being used to hold government accountable and to balance the power asymmetry between states and citizens. Independent and autonomous offices of transparency regulators have been established. Apart from increasing government transparency, corporations are also increasingly required to be transparent as part of generic or industry specific regulation in the public interest. For instance, India’s Companies Act, 2013, requires greater transparency from the private sector. Other areas of human endeavor such as science and development are also becoming increasingly transparent though here it is still left up to self-regulation and there isn’t as much established law. Within science and research more generally, the rise of open data accompanied the growth of the Open Access and citizen science movement.

So the question before us is: Are these two rights – the right to transparency and the right to privacy – compatible? Is it a zero-sum game? Do we have to sacrifice one right to enforce the other? Unfortunately, many privacy and transparency activists think this is the case and this has resulted in some conflict. I suggest that these rights are completely compatible when it comes to addressing the question of power. These rights do not have to be balanced against one another. There is no need to settle for a sub-optimal solution. Rather this is an optimization problem and the solution is as follows: privacy protections must be inversely proportionate to power and as Julian Assange says transparency requirements should be directly proportionate to power.[*]

In most privacy laws, the public interest is an exception to privacy. If public interest is being undermined, then an individual privacy can be infringed upon by the state, by researchers, by the media, etc. And in transparency law, privacy is the exception. If the privacy of an individual can be infringed, transparency is not required unless it is in the public interest. In other words, the “public interest” test allows us to use privacy law and transparency law to address power asymmetries rather than exacerbate them. What constitutes “public interest” is of course left to courts, privacy regulators, and transparency regulators to decide. Like privacy, there are many other exceptions in any given transparency regime including confidentiality and secrecy. Given uneven quality of case law there will be a temptation by the corrupt to conflate exceptions. Here the old common-law principle of “there is no confidence as to the disclosure of iniquity” – which prevents confidentiality law from being used to cover malfeasance or illegality – can be adopted in appropriate jurisdictions.

Around 10 years ago, the transparency movement gave birth to yet another movement – the open government data movement. The tension between privacy and transparency is most clearly seen in the open government data movement. The open government data movement in some parts of the world is dominated by ahistorical and apolitical technologists, and some of them seem intent on reinventing the wheel. In India, ever since the enactment of the Right to Information Act, 2003, 30 transparency activists are either killed, beaten or criminally intimidated every year. This is the statistic from media coverage alone. Many more silently suffer. RTI or transparency is without a doubt one of the most dangerous sectors within civil society that you could choose to work in. In contrast, not a single open data activist has ever been killed, beaten or criminally intimidated. I suspect this is because open data activists do not sufficiently challenge power hierarchies. Let us look a little bit closely at their work cycle. When a traditional transparency activist asks a question, that is usually enough to get them into trouble. When an open data activist publishes an answer [a dataset nicely scrubbed and machine readable, or a visualization, or a tool] they are often frustrated because nobody seems interested in using it. Often even the activist is unclear what the question is. This is because open data activist works where data is available. Open data activists are obsessed with big datasets, which are easier to find at the bottom of the pyramid. They contribute to growing surveillance practices [the nexus between Internet giants, states, and the security establishment] rather that focusing on sousveillance [citizen surveillance of the state, also referred to as citizen undersight or inverse surveillance]. They seem to be obsessed only with tools and technologies, rather than power asymmetries and injustices.

Finally, a case study to make my argument easier to understand – Aadhaar or UID, India’s ambitious centralized biometric identity and authentication management system. There are many serious issues with its centralized topology, proprietary technology, and dependence on biometrics as authentication factors – all of which I have written about in the past. In this article, I will explain how my optimization solution can be applied to the project to make it more effective in addressing its primary problem statement that corruption is a necessary outcome of power asymmetries in India.

In its current avatar – the Aadhaar project hopes to assign biometric-based identities to all citizens. The hope is that, by doing authentication in the last mile, corruption within India’s massive subsidy programmes will be reduced. This, in my view, might marginally reduce retail corruption at the bottom of the pyramid. It will do nothing to address wholesale corruption that occurs as subsidies travel from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. I have advocated over the last two years that we should abandon trying to issue biometric identities to all citizens, thereby making them more transparent to the state. Let us instead issue Aadhaar numbers to all politicians and bureaucrats and instead make the state more transparent to citizens. There is no public interest in reducing privacy for ordinary citizens – the powerless – but there are definitely huge public interest benefits to be secured by increasing transparency of politicians and bureaucrats, who are the powerful.

The Indian government has recently introduced a biometric-based attendance system for all bureaucrats and has created a portal that allows Indian citizens to track if their bureaucrats are arriving late or leaving early. This unfortunately is just bean counting [for being corrupt and being punctual are not mutually exclusive] and public access to the national portal was turned off because of legitimate protests from some of the bureaucrats. What bureaucrats do in office, who they meet, and which documents they process is more important than when they arrive at or depart from work. The increased transparency or reduced privacy was not contributing to the public interest.

Instead of first going after small-ticket corruption at the bottom of the pyramid, maximization of public interest requires us to focus on the top, for there is much greater ROI for the anti-corruption rupee. For example: constructing a digital signature based on audit trails that track all funds and subsidies as they move up and down the pyramid. These audit trails must be made public so that ordinary villagers can be supported by open data activists, journalists, social entrepreneurs, and traditional civil society in verification and course correction.

I hope open data activists, data scientists, and big data experts will draw inspiration from the giants of the transparency movement in India. I hope they will turn their attention to power, examine power asymmetries and then ask how the Aadhaar project can be leveraged to make India more rather than less equal.

Videos

Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights

Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector

The videos can also be watched on Vimeo:

[*].http://prospect.org/article/real-significance-wikileaks “Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has.”

Read the presentation on Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security and Privacy made at the Pecha Kucha session here. (ODP File, 35 kb)

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author(s) of this blog are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Omidyar Network. We make no representations as to accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of any information presented by individual authors of the blogs and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries or damages arising from its display or use.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency