Centre for Internet and Society

Citizen Activism the Past Decade

Nilofar Ansher — 2015-04-24T11:52:44Z

Call for Contributions to the ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ newsletter, ‘Citizen Activism the Past Decade’. Deadline: August 15, 2012.

The past decade (2001 – 2011) has been marked by unprecedented democratic protests across the globe. Not only have citizens risen against autocratic regimes or systemic corruption, which is not unprecedented in itself, but also, a spark in one region inflamed solidarity among neighbouring nations to pick up the placards and march for change. Plenty has been written about the strategic deployment of social media, Web 2.0 platforms and Smart-gadgets by the digital natives (the youth and the old alike) to rewrite the rules of citizen activism.

In this issue of the newsletter, we explore the mechanics of activism aided by media: web, social, digital, and traditional. What do we understand by a cause and how does it find resonance at the local and global platforms? Is the digital native a community player or a global citizen? How do digital natives connect, collaborate, mobilize and bring about their visions of change? The aim is to not establish or reinforce these dichotomies, if indeed they exist, but to understand the dimensions of the stage the digital natives operate on and if that stage is a synecdoche for global youth-led civic action. A case in point: ‘Slut Walk’ moved from being a one-off march in Toronto to becoming a global movement and came full circle when small towns and cities across the world organized protest marches with a local ‘twist’.

Topics that contributors can explore:

What do we understand by citizen activism? How has citizen activism changed over the last 10 years with the advent of new media tools?
Youth as 'change agents'. Are protest movements youth oriented today? How are civil rights movements of the past decade different from the wave of movements that marked the 60s? (women's lib, LGBT rights, civil rights, disability rights). Explore the mechanics of organizing, mobilizing and measuring the success of a campaign in both the cases.
Participatory Politics and Web 2.0 | Value and power of the Network in effecting change | Mobilizing support and consensus within the network |studies on politically active youth using social media | digital natives as apathetic citizens | Is Slacktivism still a misunderstood term?
Kony 2012 video campaign | interviews | what went wrong and what did they do right? | Rise of DIY activism | mechanics of digital activism | resources, tools and strategies
Rise of the ‘Glocal’ (global with local resonance) cause | Slut Walk and Co – global protests inspiring local campaigns | Children of globalization with global stakes supporting local causes – how does this work?
Role of new media as a vehicle for civic engagement | Are new media and traditional media mutually exclusive in influencing citizen action? | How are new media strategies deployed by citizens in comparison with traditional media engagement?
Learning from past campaigns: citizen activism initiates and strategies in history that inspire modern campaigns (The ‘Walk to Work’ protest in Uganda protesting against fuel price hike and removal of subsidies is similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi March in pre-independence India to protest against Salt Tax).
Finding commonalities in citizen activism across Asia, Africa and Middle East | Explore the citizen action campaigns that have shaped political discourse in the past decade | Explore some of the most successful youth action campaigns of the past decade
How do we measure value, quality and success of campaigns? When does a protest officially end? Studies that explore the life-cycle of a protest or movement
The future of activism: new technologies, new demography, new forms of engagement | art and activism | Gamification
Role of non-governmental organizations and civil society networks in fostering political change | collaboration between NGOs and social media activists / independent protesters
State and the empowered citizen | State response to protest | surveillance and censorship
Technologies of protest
Studying citizen activism | digital native research methodology to study citizen activism

To know more about the topics you can write about, please write to: nilofar.ansh@gmail.com (Nilofar Ansher, Community Manager). Contributions can be in the form of essays, notes, commentaries, reviews (book or paper), dialogues and chat transcript, poems, sketches / graphics. Essay word count between 800-1,600 words. Send your entries along with a brief bio and a profile picture by August 15, 2012.

View previous issues of the 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' newsletter here: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/newsletter

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/citizen-activism-the-past-decade

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia

nitika — 2013-12-31T11:48:02Z

The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K team) is pleased to share with you the key accomplishments about the work it accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013 in this report. In accordance with the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge Program’s (CIS-A2K) Konkani Work Plan 2013-14 the program has invested time and effort to build Konkani Wikimedia community and projects.

Highlights

Increased editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K has been organising different programs and workshops. The idea is to bring in as many volunteers as possible who can contribute to Konkani Wikipedia for years to come. We have organised these outreach sessions mainly in Devanagari, Romi and Kannada scripts. As a result of these programs we have been able to significantly increase no. of editors, consistently have minimum of 5-6 active editors per month and build a community of volunteers. You can also view level of editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia for the past few months in the chart below:


Above: Edits Per Month on Konkani Wikipedia (Mar-13 to Dec-13) (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Increased number of articles on Konkani Wikipedia

Total number of articles increased from 150 in Sep 2013 to 315 in Nov 2013. The number of articles have doubled over a period of 3 months. We should keep in mind that out of those who edited in Devanagari; 95% of them were completely new to the input method and had to spend considerable time learning and practicing it.


Above: No. of articles on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Translated Media Wiki messages

CIS-A2K organised translation sprint to help translate Media Wiki interface messages. We achieved translating 79% of these messages in Konkani Devanagari while all 100% messages have already been translated in Romi script

Re-release of Konkani Vishwaksh under Creative Commons License

Upon CIS-A2K‘s explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. This is a huge step to help preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era. Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume hard copy encyclopedia (3632 pages) published by Goa University; a work that took over 14 years to develop. It encompasses the world’s information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. To know more about click here and here

Initiated & Completed 30% of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

Goa University in collaboration with the CIS-A2K is digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh. 37 participants are enrolled in this project who are working to digitize the encyclopedia in a time bound manner. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized. The program started on 19th October and in just about 2 months 30% of the encyclopedia had already been digitized. You can monitor the progress of this project on Wikisource. Here are the links for Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3 and Volume 4. Please note that some of the participants firstly digitize the encylopedia either in their Sandbox or offline and then move it to Wikisource. To know more about the project click here.

Signed an MoU with Goa University

Goa University entered into a three year MoU with CIS for building Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University and CIS-A2K will work together to help build Konkani Wikipedia and community.

White paper by a Linguist

Fr. Pratap Naik, S.J. B.Sc., B.Ed. M.A. (Linguistics), M.Phil. (Linguistics), Ph.D. (Linguistics) has written a white paper discussing issues faced by Konkani language and his views on how it should be dealt on Wikimedia projects. We'll soon upload the white paper on Wikimedia Commons and make the link available.

14 Outreach session, over 450 participants, in 3 months

CIS-A2K organised about 14 outreach sessions and reached out to over 450 people to create awareness about Konkani Wikipedia and the community between Sep-Dec 2013. Details of these sessions can be found here.

Got consensus from field experts

Over the past few months CIS-A2K has spoken with Konkani Wikipedians (such as Frederick Noronha, Deepak D'Souza, Seby Fernandes) Konkani linguists (such as Fr. Pratap), professors from Konkani Department at Goa University (Dr. Madhavi Sardesai and Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodkar), cultural experts (such as Prof. Alito Siqueira and Harriet Vidyasagar) and other experts to propose a solution for Konkani Wikipedia that faces a problem of usage of multiple scripts. To a great extent we have got consensus from different field experts that we should strive to create separate Wikis for each script, at least those which prove to be active.

Wikipedians Speak

One of the ongoing projects of CIS-A2K is 'Wikipedians Speak' which are small videos of Wikipedians that captures their expereinces, learnings and challenges. As a part of this project CIS-A2K published several videos of Konkani Wikipedians.

Link to the post published on Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/work-accomplished-konkani-wikipedia

CIS-A2K Narrative Report (September 2012 – June 2013)

Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2013-11-30T11:18:56Z

This narrative report captures the work done by the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team in the first ten months of the grant. The report also throws some light on the CIS-A2K program strategy in the next one year.

This narrative report was originally published on the Wikipedia page. Access it here.

Background to the Access to Knowledge Programme

The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant to support the growth of Indian language Wikimedia communities to the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) to expand their Access to Knowledge program (A2K) in India. The grant enabled CIS to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand upon Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. Further, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects and wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

Section A: Introduction

Objective of the Narrative Report

This narrative report captures the work done by the A2K program during the period of September 2012 to June 2013. It examines projects and activities and its impact and outcomes over a period of the initial Ten months of the Grant. This report will also inform CIS-A2K program’s strategy for the next one year to achieve the goals set out by its donor, Wikimedia Foundation, and goals listed in our Work Plans (which were developed in consultation with the Wikimedia community in India). Importantly, this Narrative Report is critical for the Wikimedia community in India, Global Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation to get a comprehensive overview of A2K’s work and to critically assess the A2K program’s eligibility for further support.

Context

Though the mandate of the CIS-A2K program was clearly articulated before the commencement of the program, it should be noted, that the context in which the program had to undertake its work was very disturbed. Majority of the Wikimedia community in India saw CIS-A2K as an extension of the India Program as the entire team of the India Program moved into the CIS’s A2K program, except for the Director. Thus the CIS-A2K program inherited the not so conducive image of the India Program that was operational until August 2012. It should be noted that by August 2012, the Wikimedia community in India was extremely critical of the India Program’s work and achievement.[1]

Further, the community explicitly expressed lack of faith and Trust in the India Program’s method of work.[2] Thus, it is important to note that the CIS-A2K program did not start with a clean slate but had to first address multiple challenges, before it could take on active implementation of various programmatic activities. These challenges include:

building trust with the Wikimedia community in India;
building a collaborative relationship with Wikimedia India Chapter;
finding a new leadership to anchor the program that was left vacant in August 2012.

A2K Program Achievements (September 2012 to June 2013)

CIS Access to Knowledge (A2K) team started working on facilitating the improvement of Indian language Wikimedia projects with special focus on Indic Wikipedias in September 2012. Some key activities during the period of September 2012 to June 2013 are:

Number of newsletters published: 10
Number of events conducted: 49
Number of Wikipedia Education Programs conducted: 5
Number of people reached: about 1314
Number of women participants: approximately 406 (30.9%)
Number of community meet-ups & IRCs: 13
Number of sites across India where Wikimedia events were conducted: 18
Number of valid usernames: 582
Number of blogs posted: 58
Number of Print and Electronic Media mentions: 28
Number of Hackathons supported: 2
Number of community celebration events: 7
Number of Institutional partnerships: 13

CIS hired A2K Programme Director, T. Vishnu Vardhan, through an open and multi-stakeholder process of selection.[3] Representatives from Wikimedia India Chapter, Wikimedia community in India and Wikimedia Foundation were actively part of the selection process. This process was extremely critical and ensured participation of the Wikimedia community in India and the WMIN Chapter in deciding the leadership of the program.

Noted academician Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana was hired as Adviser to A2K.[4] This was done upon the request of the selection committee that was constituted for the selection of the program Director and in consultation with the WMF.

A2K proactively interacted with the WMIN Chapter Executive Committee and built collaborative working relationship.
Most of the A2K programs executed in collaboration with WMIN Chapter and community.
Began a new project on visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedias [5] [6] Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro are working on this. Two blog posts have been published so far. This was appreciated by the Wikimedia community in India and the WMF. Further, the WMF has expressed interest in extending these visualizations at a global level.
A2K has successfully reached out to the Wikipedians across Indian Language communities through conducting outreach programs, resolving technical bugs, supporting with required logistics, merchandise and media publicity, building public relations and communications.
Work-plans for the growth of Indic Wikipedias[7] were developed in a participatory manner with active collaboration from Wikimedia community in India and Wikimedia India Chapter Executive Committee.
Proactive open disclosure of A2K budget. and proposed revisions to the budget seeking feedback from the Wikimedia community in India towards building transparency.
CIS-A2K gave significant media visibility to Indian Language Wikipedias both in print and electronic media.

Section B: A2K Programme Impact

In discussing the A2K program’s impact we have presented below both the tangible and intangible aspects of our work.

Intangible Impact

The A2K team has left no stone unturned since the commencement of the program in September 2012 to work in a transparent manner. We have taken the following measures in being transparent:

Periodic publication of A2K work and outcomes through monthly newsletters.
Circulation of A2K monthly newsletters and notifications on various India related Wikimedia mailing lists.
Real-time listing and communication of activities on A2K Meta page.
Active documentation of all events and activities, which were published as blogs on CIS.
Prior announcements of all the events organized or supported by A2K.
Open and collaborative process of hiring Program Director.
Keeping the Wikimedia India Chapter EC in the loop on all programmatic developments since March 2013.
Proactive disclosure of A2K program budget and proposed revised budget to the Indian Wikimedia community.

In addition to this A2K has explored various possibilities of collaboration with the Indian Wikimedia community and Chapter alike. The biggest instance is the A2K Wok Planning exercise for 2013-14, where multiple stakeholders were consulted. These include

Some English-language Wikimedia community members from India;
Wikimedia India chapter Executive Committee;
Indian language Wikimedians and
A few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Some of the collaborative and community building efforts of A2K were:

Support to community-led activities and facilitating community participation and ownership (e.g. Wiki Women’s Month).
Mobilization of the Indian Wikimedia community in organizing mega community events like Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam.
Engagement with WMI Chapter EC and built a collaborative relationship.
Wikipedia Education programs in 4 Indian languages done in collaboration with the local Wikimedia community.
Supporting Wikimedians in conducting outreach events.
Almost all the A2K events since February were done in collaboration with WMI Chapter and the Wikimedia community in India.
A2K team actively participated in various community meet-ups.
A2K has provided significant media visibility to Indian Language Wikipedias, especially in mainstream English press.

These transparency and collaboration efforts resulted in building trust among the Wikimedia India communities, where in they have begun to constructively engage with the A2K program’s work. This is a significant achievement since the closure of India program in August 2012. However, there are still some Wikimedians who prefer to ignore the A2K program, which indicates that the A2K program still needs to prove its worth. Thus it could be said that the A2K program has been partly successful in winning the faith of the Indian Wikimedia communities and still needs to put in more effort in this direction. The A2K team is committed to achieve this by demonstrating success through its work during the next phase of this program.

Tangible Impact

It is difficult for the CIS-A2K program to either take direct credit for the growth or direct blame for the lack of it in the Indian language Wikimedia projects. However, we believe that we have been one of the factors — and sometimes a key factor — in impacting the growth of the Wikimedia projects and communities in India since the commencement of the project.

Though the A2K program has done some amount of work with almost all Indian language Wikipedias, the A2K team has had relatively more involvement in 10 Indic languages - Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu - during September 2012 to June 2013.

In addition to this based on the various outreach work done by A2K we have attempted to present an analysis of direct new Wikipedia users that have emerged in languages impacted by the A2K program, keeping in mind that community mobilization will always be an autonomous activity to some extent.


Graph 1: Growth of Articles in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to June 2013

The growth momentum in Indian languages over the eight month period of September 2012 to June 2013 looks healthy.
Some language Wikipedias have been growing at a phenomenal rate than others in terms of percentage change since September 2012.
Punjabi, Assamese and Odia Wikipedias have a growth rate of 82%, 59%, and 37% respectively and are the top 3 Indian language Wikipedia projects during the ten month period.
In terms of absolute number of articles, Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi and Hindi Wikipedias have grown by about 5,812; 5,008; 3050; and 2,734 articles respectively.
However, given the small size of the Wikipedia communities in Punjabi, Nepali, Kannada, Odia and Sanskrit the growth achieved by them is much commendable and all efforts have to be put to ensure that this momentum continues by strengthening these communities and also expanding them.


Graph 2: Active Editors in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to June 2013

There is a fluctuation in the number of active editors in all Indian language Wikipedias.
The active editors on Assamese, Marathi and Gujarati Wikipedias have been consistently coming down, which is a cause of concern.
It is important to note that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Nepali Wikipedias where the number of Active Editors were declining earlier have shown a remarkable turnaround. The efforts of the A2K program, especially in Telugu and Kannada, over the last 4 months could have resulted in this positive change.
It seems the Wikipedia Education Program, Nepal has been instrumental in bringing significant number of new active editors on Nepali Wikipedia.
Overall the active editors on Malayalam Wikipedia have crossed the 100 mark numerous times, making it the first Indian language Wikipedia to reach this benchmark. However, in month of May and June 2013 this dropped to a 2 digit figure again.
Looking at the trends Tamil Wikipedia may soon reach the 100 active editor mark.
Even Bengali community could cross 100 active editors if concerted efforts are put in.
The Assamese Wikipedia, which received support from A2K program until January 2013, had a consistent active editor population which was around 20 people. However, once the support from the A2K dwindled since February a declining trend can be noticed. One could deduce that the A2K program has had critical relevance in the growth of Assamese Wikipedia. The decline over the last 5 months also alerts us to the possibility of building dependencies on the A2K program, which is a concern that we need to address going forward.


Graph 3: Monthly growth of New Editors on Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to June 2013

On an average 94 new editors have joined Indian language Wikipedias every month.
Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil Wikipedias have consistently seen more than 10 new editors joining almost every month since Jan 2013.
Hindi, Marathi and Telugu have many new editors joining per month.
Total of 849 new people have become editors for Indian language Wikipedia since Sep 2012.
However, the conversion rate of new editors into active editors is still a challenge across all Indian language Wikipedias.


Graph 4: Snapshot of “Page Views” of Indian Language Wikipedias in September 2012 & June 2013

Overall the “Page View” trends of Indian Language Wikipedias until April 2013 look positive. but since the last two months the trend is in the decline. However, it should be noted that the month on month “Page View” trends keep fluctuating.
Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedias have shown highest percentage growth in page views since September 2012.
In absolute numbers Bengali Wikipedia has seen a spectacular growth of 3,000,000 page-views, Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedias witnessed a growth of about 927,150 and 365,913 a page-views respectively.
Based on the the absolute numbers of “Page Views” for Indian Wikipedias it could be speculated that there is a significant increase in demand for knowledge and information in Indian languages on the internet.

In the below given Graph 5, we have also looked at the direct impact the A2K programme had in cultivating new editors on Indian language Wikipedias through various outreach programs that conducted during September 2012 to June 2013.


Graph 5: New Editors from CIS-A2K Outreach September 2012-June 2013

It should be noted that during the 10 month period CIS-A2K reached out to a total of 1,314 participants. This is approximate 130 people per month. However, the username data for more than 700 participants could not be ascertained, due to incorrect inefficient data collection and input. This includes participants giving wrong usernames, trouble with the handwriting of some of the participants, etc. We have already taken note of this issue and have put in measures to efficiently capture the new user data. Hence, we have only presented an analysis of 582 participants, whose usernames are valid.

The analysis of this data reveals that more than 120 users have done more than 5 edits, which is about 21 per cent of the participants with valid usernames. Further, 25 participants have done more than 100 edits on English and various Indian language Wikipedias, which constitutes 4 per cent of the total participants that the A2K programme has reached out to. Further 11 users have become very active editors on Indian language Wikipedias with more than 1000 edits to their credit.

Section C: Learning and Challenges

Outreach

One of the biggest constraints with the existing outreach efforts across India including that of CIS-A2K's is that they are all based on light-touch model. We have learned that a light touch outreach with no follow up, no hand-holding, no support system will not be able to yield desired results. We need to have a thoroughly thought out well-designed outreach programs where there should be continuous interaction with the participants for a minimum of 2-3 months. CIS-A2K approach to outreach should be different from usual Wikipedia editing training. Further, any outreach with an educational institution on the lines of a "Wikipedia Education Program" requires at least 3-4 months commitment from everyone concerned (i.e. student, institution, community and CISA2K).

This in no way means diminish the importance of the light-touch model of 1/2 or 1 day Wikipedia editing training workshops, as seldom you get institutions/groups who are willing to commit to a long-term engagement. Thus a mixed approach is more pragmatic, while more energies need to put in long-term engagements.
There is a strand of criticism about effectiveness of physical outreach in general. However physical outreach for Indian languages is extremely essential as this is the lead exercise by which language communities have strengthened themselves over the years, though this has been very slow. The need to involve human element, face-to-face interaction and two-way communication is an extremely important factor of for growth of Indian language communities.
The need for each language community is different with respect to outreach. There are some communities that are more comfortable with conducting physical outreach while other communities are more efficient with outreach on social networking sites. For instance the Odia Wikipedia community where the average age of the active members is less than 25 is more active on Social Media and extensively uses it to network among themselves and to also discuss about the Wikipedia, whereas the Telugu Wikipedia is more comfortable with physical meetings and primarily uses Village Pump for all community discussions.
Based on the interaction with most of the Indian language Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K noticed that except for some communities like Malayalam, an institutional partnership is something that might not be easily taken up by community members. This is so because it requires high level of effort, time and strong network, amongst several other things. CIS-A2K has been focusing to address this need in general and in the five focus language areas in particular.

Work Plan Development and Community Communications

Even after sending multiple invitations, it took a lot of effort by CIS-A2K to encourage the larger community to engage and participate actively in the development of language focused work plan. CIS-A2K put its best efforts in inviting the community members through meta pages, village pumps, language and city-wide mailing lists, Indian mailing list, India English mailing list, meet-ups, IRCs, social-media channels to give their valuable suggestions and feedback. However, very few community members showed interest and helped in refining the plans. Better feedback could be gathered during physical and informal meetings with the community members.
Less than 10% active volunteers across all Indian language communities are active on Meta and even less on Indian mailing lists. During some informal conversations some community members expressed that it is too much of an additional burden to also visit Meta and engage. Taking into consideration that most of the language communities have less than 20 active volunteers, pragmatically speaking it is a huge ask to expect them to actively participate on Meta or mailing lists. Thus one cannot have a uniform standard and uniform mode of communication with different language communities. Thus CIS-A2K needs to explore various means of engaging with the Wikimedia community in India and should adopt a mixed channel approach of gauging community feedback. Though this is requires additional efforts on the team.
The mediums listed show a significant effort was made to solicit feedback and participation. It's okay and understandable that strategic planning is not for everyone, that volunteers economize their time devoted to the movement. So CIS-A2K does not necessarily see it as a failure that participation was low. What CIS-A2K aimed to do was to make sure participation was solicited, encouraged, and made possible. Of course ideally we would want higher participation, but CIS-A2K is careful not to confuse and turn higher participation in strategizing into a goal in itself.
In spite of this CIS-A2K took the risk and went ahead with a participatory and continuous mode of evaluation. We foresee a challenge in actively involving the community in quarterly evaluation cycles as this would require them also to introspect. In the five focus language communities such an introspection exercise was not done systematically before and a mandatory imposition may not be productive either for the Community or for CIS-A2K. The challenge would be that in the first 2 quarterly cycles CIS-A2K could miss meeting its own evaluation criteria. However, the opportunity here is to train the community to systematically introspect, which will go a long way in strengthening the Indian language Wikipedias and the associated communities.
Some programs, especially institutional partnerships, have a higher risk of failure than others. Though CIS-A2K committed to a very granular break-down of outcomes, it may require significant revisions. Hence it is extremely important for CIS-A2K to review and revise the plans and goals every 3-4 months.

Community Engagement/Development

Indian language communities are able to grow and cultivate new editors who come from similar background as their’s. For example, we find that the Telugu community comprises primarily in the age group of 30-50 years, while on the other hand, the Odia community consists of relatively younger editors between the age group of 20-30 years. Hence, it is essential that the community building programs take this aspect into consideration and work to diversify the community mix by engaging with people belonging to varied backgrounds.
Transparency and accountability are essential to build community trust. CIS-A2K has already taken various measures in this direction. However, there are occasions when more demands are placed on CIS-A2K, which consumes a lot of CIS-A2K's time and effort. The challenge is to struck a balance between the demands of transparency and accountability and the actual work they describe.
Meetups, one-on-one meetings/talk with community members are an essential ingredient to build long-term relationship. This is especially very important for nascent language communities with few editors. These kind of personal interactions help community members to know and connect with other Wikipedians. It also helps build trust and working relationship between community members and the A2K team.
CIS-A2K recognizes the potential role of Wikimedia India Chapter in growing the Wikimedia movement in India. Though CIS-A2K's work doesn't depend on the India Chapter, there is a huge potential for collaboration between the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS-A2K. CIS-A2K has put in its best efforts to build a cordial working relationship with the India Chapter. However, the extent of the collaboration would depend on the India Chapter's capacity and interest.

Section D: Progress Report

A detailed progress report of the A2K program activities has been presented on a monthly basis below. Most of the activities have been documented as blog posts or news-items on the CIS website. All of the A2K events, blog-posts and news-items can be seen here.

Outreach Sessions in September 2012

Note: Although most of these workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the reports for all of these were written during September 2012:

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012). A total of 25 participants came for this workshop. There were 15 new editors (of which 13 were female).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012). About 30 participants including students and teachers attended the workshop.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012). Nearly 50 participants including students and teachers from eight different schools apart from the students and teachers of Spring Dale School attended the workshop.
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012). About 32 participants attended the session on Day 1 and 10 participants attended the session on Day 2.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012). About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop.
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (By Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012). There was coverage in the Hindu on September 28, 2012. About 60 students participated in the event.

Outreach Sessions in October 2012

Bengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects! (October 7, 2012, Bangalore). Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Jessie Wild led the session. Seven Kannada wikipedians participated in the event.
Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad (by Nitika Tandon, October 19, 2012). The Access to Knowledge team was approached by Gaurav Prashar, Assistant Dean at Inmantec College, Ghaziabad to organize the workshop. Over 120 participants attended the workshop including MCA, BCA, BBA students and faculty members.
Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success! (organised by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, October 28, 2012). Subhashish Panigrahi shares the experience in a blog post.
First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized! (Co-organised by CIS and Pune Odia Wikipedia community, Pune, October 27, 2012). The Access to Knowledge team showed the participants the Chatasabha, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians were connected to Facebook

Outreach Sessions in November 2012

Odia Wikipedia Workshop at AML (Academy of Media Learning, Bhubaneswar, November 10, 2012). Odia Wikipedians like Ansuman Giri, Manoranjan Behera and Diptiman Panigrahi participated in this event.
Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session (Bharati Vidyapeeth, Delhi, November 19, 2012). A Wikipedia introductory session was organised at Bharati Vidyapeeth Engineering College in Delhi early this year and a follow up session was organised by CIS on November 19, 2012. About 15 participants attended the follow up session.
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB (co-organized with CIS and with Odia Wikipedians, KMBB College, Bhubaneswar November 18, 2012). The agenda for the two-and-a-half hour session was to educate students about open source movement, journey of Wikipedia and how to contribute to Odia Wikipedia and how it would help them. Nine active Odia Wikipedians joined to support this event.

Outreach Sessions in December 2012

Marathi Wiki Workshop at TISS (co-organised with the Wikimedia India Chapter, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, December 8, 2012). There were about 25 participants (MA and PhD level) and 5 conductors - Yogesh, Nikita, Moksh, Kartik and Nitika.
Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (NMAIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka December 21, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute). Subhashish Panigrahi led the session. About 170 engineering students took part in this event.
Wikipedia Workshop at SRM (SRM University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, December 17, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute). Noopur Raval participated in the event. About 40 students from different engineering colleges in Chennai participated in the workshop.

(Note: The following events were also conducted in December 2012. However, reports for these events were published later in January.)
Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Nitika Tandon, January 15, 2013). The workshop was conducted on December 12 and 13, 2012 along with the Wikipedia community members for M.A. and Ph.D. students at the Goa University. Over 35 participants attended the two-day workshop.
Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 19, 2013). The workshop was conducted on December 14, 2012. Over 30 participants attended the session.
Promoting GLAM in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 24, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team organised an introductory Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM) session at Goa State Central Library on December 13, 2012. About 45 people from over 10 different GLAM institutes in Goa participated in the event.
Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level (by Nitika Tandon, January 25, 2013). An introductory session on Konkani in Wikipedia was conducted at the Konkani Department in Goa University on December 12, 2012. About 30 participants took part in the event.

Outreach Session in January 2013

A Wiki Workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad (RKGIT, Ghaziabad, January 17, 2013). Around 65 mechanical engineering students from second and third year participated in this workshop.

Outreach Session in February 2013

Digital Literacy Workshop at Department of Arts, Delhi University (University of Delhi, February 5, 2013). A digital literacy workshop was organised at the Department of Arts, Delhi University for students pursuing their masters in Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies on February 5, 2013. About 30 students and 4 faculty members attended the workshop.

Outreach Sessions in March 2013

Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (organised by CIS, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Goa, March 7, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team was invited by Nikhil Dixit, Public Relations Officer at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani – Goa (BITS Goa) to organise Wikipedia session on March 7, 2013. About 30 people participated in the event.
Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop on Women's Day (organised by CIS, Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, March 8, 2013). Telugu Wikipedians Dr. Rajasekhar and Rahmanuddin alongwith T. Vishnu Vardhan led this event.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia India Chapter, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the event.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by CIS, Institution of Engineers, JLB Road, Mysore, March 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led this workshop.
Wikipedia Indian Languages Workshop at IIT, Bombay (organised by CIS, IIT Mumbai, March 28, 2013). Noopur Raval led the event.

Outreach Sessions in April 2013

Telugu Wikipedia Workshop (April 9, 2013 at the Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad). Telugu Wikipedians Arjunarao, Rahmanuddin and Pavithran along with T. Vishnu Vardhan led this half-day workshop. This was organized as a pre-event to Telugu Wiki-Mahotsavam.
Telugu Wikipedia Workshop (April 11, 2013 at the Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Telugu Wikipedians Radhkrishna and Rajachandra led this half-day workshop. This was organized as part of the Telugu Wiki-Mahotsavam.
Telugu Wikipedia Advance level Workshop (April 11, 2013 at the Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Telugu Wikipedians Arjunarao and Rahmanuddin led this demonstration. This was organized as part of the Telugu Wiki-Mahotsavam.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (April 29, 2013, Govinda Pai Research Centre, MGM College Udupi). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia.

Outreach Sessions in May 2013

Wikipedia workshop (May 8, 2013, TISS, Mumbai). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop to the students of Post Graduate Diploma in Community Media. A total of 14 students and 1 teacher attended this multi-lingual Wikipedia training workshop.

Outreach Sessions in June 2013

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (June 4, 2013, Ramakrishna Vidyalaya, Hassan). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia.
Wikipedia workshop (June 10, 2013, Internet Institute, Palm Grove, Bangalore). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop. This orientation workshop on Wikipedia was attended by representatives from about 25 Civil Society organizations across India. This was followed up by a hands-on Wikipedia training workshop.
Kannada Wikipedia workshop for bloggers (June 24, 2013, Suchitra, Bangalore). Dr U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop and gave a presentation on Kannada Wikipedia.

Education Programme Updates

Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education program at Guwahati University (by Nitika Tandon, October 22, 2012). The program was launched on October 14, 2012 with 15 post-graduate students (90 per cent of these are women students) under the guidance of Prof. Dulumoni Goswami, Head of the Department of Education, Guwahati University.
Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates (by Shiju Alex, October 29, 2012). This program is the first of its kind in an Indic language, and Malayalam community is doing the program in collaboration with the IT@School, a project of the Department of General Education, # Government of Kerala, setup in 2001, to foster the IT education in schools. Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). This was a competition to raise Wikipedia awareness and help students discover the joy of writing articles in their native language and an attempt to connect producers having knowledge in Gujarati to a wide audience of more than 4,00,000 readers.
Gujarat Wikipedia Education program:Rajkot (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). This report analyses a series of meetings and workshops held in Rajkot, a city in Gujarat, India during the month of October 2012 including students from the Galaxy Education System, Christ College students and members from the Wikipedia community.
First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 30, 2012). Odia wikipedians launched this program at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, Dhenkanal on November 8, 2012 to bring students to edit articles on Odia wikipedia through a series of assessments by professors.
Odia Education Program (Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal, Orissa, January 26, 2013). This is the first Odia Education Program which ran for three months and 16 students took active part in contributing on various articles on Odia Wikipedia.
Odia Wikipedia Community Brings Wikipedia Education Program to IIMC, Dhenkanal (by Subhashish Panigrahi, February 28, 2013). Sixteen student wikipedians signed up and took part in editing more than a dozen articles on Odia Wikipedia.

Hackathons

Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad (organized by CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, October 26 – 27, 2012).
A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi (CIS, New Delhi, November 11, 2012)

Meetups

Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia! (Kolkata, November 3, 2012). The journeys of three Wikipedians — Jayanta Nath, Deepon Saha and Ashwin Baindur are examined. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the meeting.
Wikivoyage, November 18, 2012: Ravikiran presented the Wikivoyage project and discussions on Wiki Project Karnataka. A total of 13 participants attended this meeting.
Wikidata, December 2, 2012: Lydia Pintscher presented the Wikidata project. The talk covered history of Wikidata project, state of the project and Wikidata India opportunities. About 13 people attended this event.
Wikimedia Meet-up, Hyderabad (7 Hyderabad based Wikimedians attended this meet-up. Abhijith Jayanthi - SIG Hyderabad, Rahimanuddin Shaik - SIG Telugu, Dr. Rajasekhar; Veera Venkata Chowdary, Tausif, Sai Anudeep, and Akhila Thumma came together for a discussion meeting with the CIS-A2K Program Director T. Vishnu Vardhan.
Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Kolkata Wiki Community, March 14, 2013). Four Wikipedians from Kolkata, Wikimedia Foundation's mobile Developer Yuvaraj Pandian and OPW intern Sucheta Ghoshal joined T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi for this event.
Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Cuttack, March 16, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi met Odia Wikipedians in Cuttack to discuss about the current state of Odia Wikipedia and understand the community building strategies.
Odia Wikipedia – Bhubaneswar Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Bhubaneswar, March 17, 2013).
First Telugu Wiki Meetup @ CIS, Bangalore (co-organised by Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K on June 2, 2013). S.J. Veera conducted the meet-up.

Celebration and Events

Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary (organized by the Odia Wiki Community with support from CIS and Academy for Media Learning, January 29, 2013, Bhubaneswar). The event attracted good coverage in the local media:

Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai (by Noopur Raval, Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala, Mumbai, November 4, 2012).
Wiki Women's Day in Goa (organised by the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Nirmala Institute of Education, Panaji, Goa, March 8, 2013). The workshop was organised on International Women's Day. Rohini Lakshane and Nitika Tandon led the workshop.
Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (organised by Telugu Wikipedia Community and CIS, Hyderabad, April 9 – 11, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan was one of the trainers at the Wikipedia Academy at Centre for Good Governance on April 9, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan spoke about the Access to Knowledge work in one of the sessions of Wikimedia. Meeting with Media Heads on April 10, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on A2K’s plans for the growth of Telegu Wikipedia in 2013-14 at the Telegu Wikipedia general meeting on April 11, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan also gave a talk about Access to Knowledge in the digital era at the Wiki Chaitanya Vedika on April 11, 2013.

Events Participated In

Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 (organized by Wikipedia Club, Pune, January 12 – 13, 2013).
GNUnify 2013 (organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research, Pune, February 15 – 17, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.
Creative Commons comes to India (co-organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research in Pune, February 15, 2013, and CIS the Wikimedia India Chapter, Chitrakala Parishad, Bangalore, February 25, 2013).The Access to Knowledge team participated in the CC meetings organized in Bangalore.
Fifty-fourth Bangalore Wikimedia Meet-up at IIM, Bangalore (organized by Radhakrishna Arvapally, SIG (Special Interest Group) Chair, Bangalore (a part of the Wikimedia India Chapter) with support from Solutions IQ, Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Indian Institute of Management, February 25, 2013). Sudhwana Jogalekar (President, Wikimedia India) spoke on Wikimedia Projects. T. Vishnu Vardhan (program Director, A2K, CIS) gave a talk on 'Accessibility to Knowledge'. Joe Justice (Founder WikiSpeed) and Vibhu Srinivasan gave a presentation of WikiSpeed Car project. Chief Guest K.S. Viswanath (Vice President, Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM) gave the welcome address. Noopur Raval participated in the event.
Knowledge Sharing through GLAM at Bangalore (organized by Wikimedia India and Creative Commons, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishad, Kumara Krupa Road, Bangalore, February 25, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event. CIS supported the event.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia Chapter India, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia Women's Workshop Bangalore 2013 (organised by Wikimedia India, Servelots Infotech, Jayanagar, Bangalore, March 8, 2013). The event was covered by Kannada Prabha on March 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia at Avenir (organised by the Wikipedia community, Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata, West Bengal, March 11, 2013). CIS supported the event.
Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications program (HEIRA) of CSCS Bangalore organizes a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report. During this period, CIS established partnerships with the Goa University, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Regional Research Centre, Udupi, etc.

Section E: Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project


Given above is a chart depicting the visualization of Indic Wikipedia project

CIS hired Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Sajjad Anwar to work on visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia. Their project takes basic parameters, like page views, total articles and total editors, and compares them over time and across projects:

They have looked into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divided the visualisation into three different focus areas:
1. Basic parameters
2. Geographic patterns of edits
3. Exploring topics that receive greatest number of edits. You can read more about Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters
They also worked on visualisation of the page views statistics and the project specific pages. The page views indicate the number of unique visits Wikipedia project concerned has received in one month. You can read more about Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages
Readership Dashboard: The Readership Dashboard combines a line graph showing the movement of page view for a project across the years and bar graphs showing a separate variable for the same project.
Motion Charts: The motion charts help compare Indic Wikipedia Projects across Languages on various parameters such as new editors, new articles, active editors, total editors etc.
Calendar Charts: The calendar charts limits each chart section to 12 months allowing the user to focus on more granular movements of the variable concerned, say the number of new editors per month or page views per month, etc.

Section F: The Access to Knowledge Work Plan (2013 – 2014)

The Access to Knowledge team assessed 12 of the active Indic-language communities based on the community dynamics, growth patterns in readership, and community and edit contribution for drafting this work plan. In putting together this work plan the Access to Knowledge team has extensively engaged with various stakeholders. These include: a) some Wikimedia community in India members across various Indian-language Wikimedia projects; b) some English-language Wikimedia community members from India; c) Wikimedia India chapter executive committee; d) some potential institutional partners; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) Access to Knowledge program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff. Five languages were selected as core language areas. These include: Bengali, Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telegu. Some key factors that determined the selection of languages areas included:

The Access to Knowledge team's existing ties with knowledge institutions, groups and individuals.
Willingness of language community to interact and engage with the Access to Knowledge team.
Considering Wikimedia India Chapter EC's suggestion that Access to Knowledge team should work on at least one incubation project.
Access to Knowledge team's familiarity with the languages.

However, choosing these five languages do not necessarily mean that the A2K program would not focus on the other languages rather there would be more programmatic support and organizational ties to be built.

Language Area Work Plans

The language area work plans are linked to the individual meta-pages:

The expected and dream targets for the languages are shown below:

Expected and dream targets for languages
Parameters	Telugu		Odia		Kannada		Bengali		Konkani
	Expected target	Dream target	Expected target	Dream target	Expected target	Dream target	Expected target	Dream target	Target
No. of Editors	755	905	120	350	600	1000	930	1200	NA
No. of New editors	200	350	35	100	300	700	30	100	24
No. of Acitve editors	25	40	20	40	50	70	100	150	NA
No. of Aritcles	54000	55000	5000	6000	25000	30000	27000	28000	500
No. of Outreach Events	29	34	12	15	12	20	5	15	12

The detailed plan with projection of outcomes and expected impact of the A2K program activities could be accessed here.

Overall Community Support

Besides the specific programs mentioned under individual language area plans, A2K team will provide overall support to all Indian-language Wikipedia communities. This includes but is not limited to:
Creating awareness through online editing videos, editing guides and digital coverage all in local Indian languages.
Supporting outreach activities
Capacity building to multiply outreach efforts. This would include training sessions to improve presentation skills, audience engagement skills with mock presentations and video recording for feedback. The first Train-the-Trainer program is being planned in June.
Facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst community members with an aim to foster creation of new project ideas in the form of physical meet-ups, hangouts/Skype calls, and small/large scale conferences.
Organize language specific IRCs where community members from that specific language could discuss their plans, issues, concerns, and anything at all.
Encourage community members to share feedback, suggestions or details of any kind of support on A2K's Meta help page.
Supporting communities for bug reporting and following up for resolution. A detailed overall community support page can be found here.

Section G: Team Orientation and Development

Team’s Professional Development

A one-day orientation was organized in CIS where Wikimedia board members Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala helped the Access to Knowledge team members to develop an agenda for a period of 6-7 months. They helped team members to find overlaps, prioritise and recognize possibilities to make best use of available resources. The board members also shared learnings, principles and concepts from other movements that could be applied to the Access to Knowledge program.
A one-day orientation program was organized with Wikimedia India Chapter Executive Committee Members to find common minimum program on which both the Chapter and the Access to Knowledge team could work together to achieve common objectives. The orientation also helped define overlapping areas and how the two oragnisations will handle them.
A one-day orientation program was organised with Wikimedia community in India Members such as Tinu Cherian who gave a talk on how to leverage mainstream and social media; Gautam John who organized a workshop on organisational procedures for greater transparency and accountability, and Arun Ramarathnam who spoke about best practices for working with Wikipedia community. This orientation was organized as a part of training and skill development for the Access to Knowledge team members.
Since March 2013 CIS-A2K started having weekly Team Learning Sessions on every Wednesday. However, given the hectic schedules of the Team these could not be organized in a regular manner.

Exits and New Hires

CIS has an office in New Delhi with a five-member team for the Access to Knowledge program. The team is currently headed by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director (Access to Knowledge). Other team members include Tejaswini Niranjana (Distinguished Fellow), Dr. U.B. Pavanaja (Program Officer, Indian Language Initiatives), Nitika Tandon (Program Manager) and Subhashish Panigrahi (Program Officer).

	T. Vishnu Vardhan: Vishnu Vardhan was hired as the new program Director-Access to Knowledge at CIS. Vishnu Vardhan has over the last 11 years worked in various capacities as researcher, grant manager, teacher, project consultant, information architect and translator. Vishnu Vardhan managed the Art, Crafts and Culture portfolio of Sir Ratan Tata Trust and also worked as Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore.
	Dr. U.B. Pavanaja joined the team as program Officer, India Language Initiatives on March 4, 2013. Dr. Pavanaja holds a Master’s degree from Mysore University and Ph.D. from Mumbai University. He was a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, for about 15 years. He is one of the earliest editors of Kannada Wikipedia. He has to his credit many firsts, viz., first Kannada website, first Kannada online magazine, first Indian language (Kannada) website to receive Golden Web Award, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for Palm OS, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for WinCE device (HP Jornado 720), first Indian language version (Kannada) of universally popular Logo (programming language for children) software, etc.
	Tejaswini Niranjana is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai joined A2K as an Adviser. She guides the Access to Knowledge team in expanding the Indian language Wikipedias and helps in increasing the number of active editors through strategic partnerships with Higher Education institutions across India.

The following staff left the organisation:

Shiju Alex, Program Manager, Access to Knowledge left the organization on November 16, 2012.

Noopur Raval, Program Officer, Access to Knowledge left the organization on April 24, 2013.

Section H: Additional Links and Data

Blog Entries

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report: January – June 2012 (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012).
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012).
The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012).
Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex, September 30, 2012).
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012).
Bengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 16, 2012).
Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad (by Nitika Tandon, October 19, 2012).
Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education Program at Guwahati University (by Nitika Tandon, October 22, 2012).
Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates (by Shiju Alex, October 29, 2012).
Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 29, 2012).
Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012).
Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012).
First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 31, 2012).
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Academy of Media Learning (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 10, 2012).
A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi (a guest blog post by Yuvraj Pandian, November 11, 2012).
Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad (a guest blog post by Yuvi Panda, November 19, 2012).
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 19, 2012).
Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants (by Nitika Tandon, November 19, 2012).
Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 19, 2012).
Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai (by Noopur Raval, November 21, 2012).
First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 30, 2012).
Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 30, 2012).
Marathi Wiki Workshop at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 8, 2012).
Non Unicode ISCII Text Can be Converted to Unicode Now! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 19, 2012).
A Wikipedia Workshop at SRM University, Chennai (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 27, 2012).
New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups (by Noopur Raval, December 27, 2012).
A Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 30, 2012).
Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 30, 2012).
Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Nitika Tandon, January 14, 2013).
Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 19, 2013).
Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 (by Subhashish Panigrahi, January 21, 2013).
A Wiki Workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad (by Subhashish Panigrahi, January 22, 2013).
Bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in Public Domain (by Nitika Tandon, January 22, 2013).
Promoting GLAM in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 24, 2013).
Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level (by Nitika Tandon, January 25, 2013).
Digital Literacy Workshop at Department of Arts, Delhi University (by Nitika Tandon, February 5, 2013).
Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary (by Subhashish Panigrahi, February 19, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia Community Brings Wikipedia Education Program to IIMC, Dhenkanal (by Subhashish Panigrahi, February 28, 2013).
Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (by Nitika Tandon, March 19, 2013).
Ahmednagar — Marathi Wikipedia Workshop (by Tanveer Hasan, March 18, 2013). This is a report contributed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society.
Wiki Women's Day in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, March 19, 2013).
Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 3, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia - Bhubaneswar Community Meetup (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 4, 2013).
Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2013).
Indian WikiWomen celebrate Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain, April 29, 2013). This is a guest blog post by Netha Hussain.
Odia Wikipedia: Needs Assessment (by Subhashish Panigrahi, May 11, 2013).
Access to Knowledge Work Plan: Synopsis of Feedback by Wikipedians (by Nitika Tandon, May 20, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants (by Subhashish Panigrahi, May 30, 2013).
CIS Signs MOU with TISS, Mumbai (May 31, 2013).
A Telugu Wiki Meetup @ CIS, Bangalore (April 2013 - June 2014) (a guest blog post by S J Veera, June 2, 2013).
Access To Knowledge Work Plan (April 2013 - June 2014) (by T Vishnu Vardhan, June 10, 2013).
My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad (by T Vishnu Vardhan, June 19, 2013).
Wikipedia Visual Editor (by Nitika Tandon, June 27, 2013).
A 'Kannada' Wikipedia Workshop for Bloggers (by U B Pavanaja, June 28, 2013).

Press Coverage

Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (OdishaDiary.com, October 31, 2012).
‘Some Indian laws could be challenging’ (by Kalyan Subramani, Bangalore Mirror, November 15, 2012).
A Report of the Odia Wikipedia Workshop held in KMBB College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar (Sambad, November 19, 2012).
OdishaDiary conferred prestigious Odisha Youth Inspiration Award 2012 to Odia Wikipedia team (by Pravuprasad Routray, Orissa Diary, November 23, 2012).
A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).
વિકિપીડિયા ગુજરાતી માં પણ છે (by Harsh Kothari, Cybersafar, November 28, 2012).A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).
First Odia Wikipedia Education Program concludes at IIMC, Dhenkanal (OdishaDiary Bureau, January 27, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia's 9th Anniversary and Workshop on Application of Odia in Media (Sambad, January 30, 2013).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନ‌ବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ (Odishan.com, February 4, 2013).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନ‌ବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ (Sambad, February 4, 2013).
Odia language workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia: Application of Odia language in e-media (Odishaviews.com, February 5, 2013).
Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media (Odishaviews.com, March 2, 2013).
Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media (India Education Diary.com, March 2, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop, Mysore — Coverage in Prajavani (Prajavani, March 25, 2013).
CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Prajavani (Prajavani, May 24, 2013).
CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Udayavani (Prajavani, May 24, 2013).
A Feature on Wikipedia and Telugu Wikipedians on HMTV (Prajavani, May 30-31, 2013).
Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme on HMTV (Prajavani, June 1, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Prajavani, June 5, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Samyukta Karnataka, June 5, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Vijaya Karnataka, June 5, 2013).
Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion on Suvarna News (Suvarna News 24x7, June 13, 2013).
Wiki donors (TimeOut Bengaluru, June 21, 2013).

Newsletters

The following newsletters have been published:

September 2012 Bulletin
October 2012 Bulletin
November 2012 Bulletin
December 2012 Bulletin
January 2013 Bulletin
February 2013 Bulletin
March 2013 Bulletin
April 2013 Bulletin
May 2013 Bulletin
June and July 2013 Bulletin (During this month the CIS-A2K Newsletter was redesigned based on feedback from the community and thus the June Newsletter was clubbed with July 2013).

Talk @ CIS

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller (CIS, Bangalore, November 12, 2012). Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk on Wikipedia.

Section I: Budget Utilization

Currency in INR	2012-13 (Per month)	1st Year (10 months)	Budget Utilization (Sept. 2012 to June 2013)
People
Prg. Manager	1,17,000	1,170,000	1,170,000
Prg. Officer	58,800	5,88,000	580,000
Prg. Officer	1,44,000	14,40,000	1,008,000
Communications role	60,000	6,00,000	2,20,000
New Prg. Director	2,00,000	2,000,000	1,000,000
Consultant	34,500	3,45,000	2,76,000
Benefits – All	6,250	62,500	0
Staff costs	6,20,550	6,205,500	4,262,000
Rent	47,300	4,73,000	5,70,000
Janitorial	2,750	27,500	48,634
Utilities	7,500	75,000	61,836
Telephone	4,000	40,000	47,819
Office pantry	5,000	50,000	38,765
Office space	66,550	6,65,500	7,67,054
Travel
SF travel	77,726	7,77,257	1,81,887
Wikimania travel	0	0	0
Domestic travel	1,10,000	1,100,000	1,373,469
Travel	1,87,726	1,877,257	1,555,356
Printed materials	50,000	5,00,000	38,800
Design, Creative	55,000	5,50,000	1,25,400
Volunteer development	50,000	500,000	0
Postage & Mailing	2,500	25,000	5,800
Office supplies	7,500	75,000	50,192
General expenses	1,65,000	1,650,000	2,20,192
Total before fees	1,039,826	10,398,257	6,804,602
Admin fee	51,991	5,19,913	5,19,913
Program fee	51,991	5,19,913	5,19,913
Total	1,143,808	11,438,082	7,844,428

Notes:

The above table gives a picture of the A2K program budget utilization (un-audited) for the period Sept. 2012 to June 2013. Thus it is important that these figures be read as provisional figures, which could change post the statutory audit as per the Indian laws binding a Registered Society.
Approximately there is a 31% underspending of the Budget during the ten month period. This is mainly because of the transition of the program to CIS took sometime along with delays in the recruitment of the New Program Director. CIS-A2K has requested the WMF for a reallocation of the Budget since then.

Footnotes

[1]. Independent Report from Tory Read on India Education Program

[2]. Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot. Wikimedia-India Mail archive

[3]. Most recent updates on the hiring of the Programme Director for the A2K programme. Wikimedia-India mail archive

[4]. The Access to Knowledge - Bulletin - January '13

[5]. Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters

[6]. Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages

[7]. CIS-A2K Work Plan (Draft). Wikimedia-India mail archive

[8]. CIS-A2K Budget, Utilization Report and proposed revision. Wikimedia-India mail archive

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-access-to-knowledge-narrative-report-september-2012-june-2013

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

CIS's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind

pranesh — 2013-07-03T12:01:25Z

Pranesh Prakash read out an abridged version of this statement as his closing remarks in Marrakesh, where the WIPO Treaty for the Blind (the "Marrakesh Treaty") has been successfully concluded. The Marrakesh Treaty aims to facilitate access to published works by blind persons, persons with visual impairment, and other print disabled persons, by requiring mandatory exceptions in copyright law to enable conversions of books into accessible formats, and by enabling cross-border transfer of accessible format books.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I am truly humbled to be here today representing the Centre for Internet and Society, an Indian civil society organization. If I may assume the privilege of speaking on behalf of my blind colleagues at CIS who led much of our work on this treaty, and the many blindness organizations we have been working with over the past five years who haven't the means of being here today, I would like to thank you and all the delegates here for this important achievement. And especially, I would like to thank the World Blind Union and Knowledge Ecology International who renewed focus on this issue more than 2 decades after WIPO and UNESCO first called attention to this problem and created a "Working Group on Access by the Visually and Auditory Handicapped to Material Reproducing Works Produced by Copyright".

While doing so, I would like to remember my friend Rahul Cherian — a young, physically impaired lawyer from India — who co-founded Inclusive Planet, was a fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society, and was a legal adviser to the World Blind Union. He worked hard on this treaty for many years, but very unfortunately did not live long enough to see it becoming a reality. His presence here is missed, but I would like to think that by concluding this treaty, all the distinguished delegations here managed to honour his memory and work.

I am grateful to all the distinguished delegations here for successfully concluding a reasonably workable treaty, but especially those — such as Brazil, India, Ecuador, Nigeria, Uruguay, Egypt, South Africa, Switzerland, and numerous others — who realized they were negotiating with blind people's lives, and regarded this treaty as a means of ensuring basic human rights and dignity of the visually impaired and the print disabled, instead of regarding it merely as "copyright flexibility" to be first denied and then grudgingly conceded. The current imbalance in terms of global royalty flows and in terms of the bargaining strength of richer countries within WIPO — many of who strongly opposed the access this treaty seeks to facilitate right till the very end — is for me a stark reminder of colonialism, and I see the conclusion of this treaty as a tiny victory against it.

It is historic that today WIPO and its members have collectively recognized in a treaty that copyright isn't just an "engine of free expression" but can pose a significant barrier to access to knowledge. Today we recognize that blind writers are currently curtailed more by copyright law than protected by it. Today we recognize that copyright not only may be curtailed in some circumstances, but that it must be curtailed in some circumstances, even beyond the few that have been listed in the Berne Convention. One of the original framers of the Berne Convention, Swiss jurist and president, Numa Droz, recognized this in 1884 when he emphasized that "limits to absolute protection are rightly set by the public interest". And as Debabrata Saha, India's delegate to WIPO during the adoption of the WIPO Development Agenda noted, "intellectual property rights have to be viewed not as a self contained and distinct domain, but rather as an effective policy instrument for wide ranging socio-economic and technological development. The primary objective of this instrument is to maximize public welfare."

When copyright doesn't serve public welfare, states must intervene, and the law must change to promote human rights, the freedom of expression and to receive and impart information, and to protect authors and consumers. Importantly, markets alone cannot be relied upon to achieve a just allocation of informational resources, as we have seen clearly from the book famine that the blind are experiencing. Marrakesh was the city in which, as Debabrata Saha noted, "the damage [of] TRIPS [was] wrought on developing countries". Now it has redeemed itself through this treaty.

This treaty is an important step in recognizing that exceptions and limitations are as important a part of the international copyright acquis as the granting of rights to copyright holders. This is an important step towards fulfilling the WIPO Development Agenda. This is an important step towards fulfilling the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This is an important step towards fulfilling Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights and Article 30 of the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities, all of which affirm the right of everyone — including the differently-abled — to take part in cultural life of the community.

While this treaty is an important part of overcoming the book famine that the blind have faced, the fact remains that there is far more that needs to be done to bridge the access gap faced by persons with disabilities, including the print disabled.

We need to ensure that globally we tackle societal and economic discrimination against the print disabled, as does the important issue of their education. This treaty is a small but important cog in a much larger wheel through which we hope to achieve justice and equity. And finally, blind people can stop being forced to wear an eye-patch and being pirates to get access to the right to read.

I also thank the WIPO Secretariat, Director General Francis Gurry, Ambassador Trevor Clark, Michelle Woods, and the WIPO staff for pushing transparency and inclusiveness of civil society organizations in these deliberations, in stark contrast to the way many bilateral and plurilateral treaties such as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the India-EU Free Trade Agreement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement have been, and are being, conducted. I hope we see even more transparency, and especially non-governmental participation in this area in the future.

I call upon all countries, and especially book-exporting countries like the USA, UK, France, Portugal, and Spain to ratify this treaty immediately, and would encourage various rightholders organizations, and the MPAA who have in the past campaigned against this treaty and now welcome this treaty, to show their support for it by publicly working to get all countries to ratify this treaty and letting us all know about it.

I congratulate you all for the "Miracle of Marrakesh", which shows, as my late colleague Rahul Cherian said, "when people are demanding their basic rights, no power in the world is strong enough to stop them getting what they want".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind

CIS Welcomes Standing Committee Report on IT Rules

pranesh — 2013-04-03T10:54:52Z

The Centre for Internet and Society welcomes the report by the Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation, in which it has lambasted the government and has recommended that the government amend the Rules it passed in April 2011 under section 79 of the Information Technology Act.

Click to read the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report on the IT Rules. A modified version was published in CiOL on March 27, 2013.

These rules have been noted by many, including CIS, Software Freedom Law Centre, and Society for Knowledge Commons, and many eminent lawyers, as being unconstitutional. The Standing Committee, noting this, has asked the government to make changes to the Rules to ensure that the fundamental rights to freedom of speech and privacy are safeguarded, and that the principles of natural justice are respected when a person’s freedom of speech or privacy are curtailed.

Ambiguous and Over-reaching Language

The Standing Committee has noted the inherent ambiguity of words like "blasphemy", "disparaging", etc., which are used in the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, and has pointed out that unclear language can lead to harassment of people as has happened with Section 66A of the IT Act, and can lead to legitimate speech being removed. Importantly, the Standing Committee recognizes that many categories of speech prohibited by the Intermediary Guidelines Rules are not prohibited by any statute, and hence cannot be prohibited by the government through these Rules. Accordingly, the Standing Committee has asked the government to ensure "no new category of crimes or offences is created" by these Rules.

Government Confused Whether Rules Are Mandatory or Advisory

The Standing Committee further notes that there is a discrepancy in the government’s stand that the Intermediary Guidelines Rules are not mandatory, and are only "of advisory nature and self-regulation", and that "it is not mandatory for the Intermediary to disable the information, the rule does not lead to any kind of censorship". The Standing Committee points out the flaw in this, and notes that the language used in the rules is mandatory language (“shall act” within 36 hours). Thus, it rightly notes that there is a "need for clarity on the aforesaid contradiction". Further, it also notes that there is "there should be safeguards to protect against any abuse", since this is a form of private censorship by intermediaries."

Evidence Needed Against Foreign Websites

The government has told the Standing Committee that "foreign websites repeatedly refused to honour our laws", however, it has not provided any proof for this assertion. The government should make public all evidence that foreign web services are refusing to honour Indian laws, and should encourage a public debate on how we should tackle this problem in light of the global nature of the Internet.

Cyber Cafes Rules Violate Citizens’ Privacy

The Standing Committee also pointed out that the Cyber Cafe Rules violated citizens’ right to privacy in requiring that "screens of the computers installed other than in partitions and cubicles should face open space of the cyber café". Unfortunately, the Standing Committee did not consider the privacy argument against retention of extensive and intrusive logs. Under the Cyber Cafe Rules, cyber cafes are required to retain (for a minimum of one year) extensive logs, including that of "history of websites accessed using computer resource at cyber café" in such a manner that each website accessed can be linked to a person. The Committee only considered the argument that this would impose financial burdens on small cybercafes, and rejected that argument. CIS wishes the Committee had examined the provision on log maintenance on grounds of privacy as well."

Government’s Half-Truths

In one response, the government notes that "rules under Section 79 in particular have undergone scrutiny by High Courts in the country. Based on the Rules, the courts have given reliefs to a number of individuals and organizations in the country. No provision of the Rules notified under Sections 43A and 79 of the IT Act, 2000 have been held ultra vires."

What the government says is a half-truth. So far, courts have not struck down any of the IT Rules. But that is because none of the High Court cases in which the vires of the Rules have been challenged has concluded. So it is disingenuous of the government to claim that the Rule have "undergone scrutiny by High Courts". And in those cases where relief has been granted under the Intermediary Guidelines, the cases have been ex-parte or have been cases where the vires of the Rules have not been challenged. The government, if it wants to defend the Rules, should point out to any case in which the vires of the Rules have been upheld. Not a single court till date has declared the Rules to be constitutional when that question was before it.

Lack of Representation of Stakeholders in Policy Formulation

Lastly, the Standing Committee noted that it is not clear whether the Cyber Regulatory Advisory Committee (CRAC), which is responsible for policy guidance on the IT Act, has "members representing the interests of principally affected or having special knowledge of the subject matter as expressly stipulated in Section 88(2) of the IT Act". This is a problem that we at CIS also noted in November 2012, when the CRAC was reconstituted after having been defunct for more than a decade.

CIS hopes that the government finally takes note of the view of legal experts, the Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, the Parliamentary motion against the Rules, and numerous articles and editorials in the press, and withdraws the Intermediary Guidelines Rules and the Cyber Cafe Rules, and instead replaces them with rules that do not infringe our constitutional rights.

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness, and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities. It was among the organizations that submitted evidence to the Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation on the IT Rules.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-welcomes-standing-committee-report-on-it-rules

CIS Submission to TRAI Consultation on Free Data

pranesh — 2016-07-01T16:04:27Z

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) held a consultation on Free Data, for which CIS sent in the following comments.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) asked for public comments on free data. Below are the comments that CIS submitted to the four questions that it posed.

Question 1
Is there a need to have TSP agnostic platform to provide free data or suitable reimbursement to users, without violating the principles of Differential Pricing for Data laid down in TRAI Regulation? Please suggest the most suitable model to achieve the objective.

Is There a Need for Free Data?

No, there is no need for free data, just as there is no need for telephony or Internet. However, making provisions for free data would increase the amount of innovation in the Internet and telecom sector, and there is a good probability that it would lead to faster adoption of the Internet, and thus be beneficial in terms of commerce, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and many other ways.

Thus the question that a telecom regulator should ask is not whether there is a need for TSP agnostic platforms, but whether such platforms are harmful for competition, for consumers, and for innovation. The telecom regulator ought not undertake regulation unless there is evidence to show that harm has been caused or that harm is likely to be caused. In short, TRAI should not follow the precautionary principle, since the telecom and Internet sectors are greatly divergent from environmental protection: the burden of proof for showing that something ought to be prohibited ought to be on those calling for prohibition.

Goal: Regulating Gatekeeping

TRAI wouldn’t need to regulate price discrimination or Net neutrality if ISPs were not “gatekeepers” for last-mile access. “Gatekeeping” occurs when a single entity establishes itself as an exclusive route to reach a large number of people and businesses or, in network terms, nodes. It is not possible for Internet services to reach their end customers without passing through ISPs (generally telecom networks). The situation is very different in the middle-mile and for backhaul. Even though anti-competitive terms may exist in the middle-mile, especially given the opacity of terms in “transit agreements”, a packet is usually able to travel through multiple routes if one route is too expensive (even if that is not the shortest network path, and is thus inefficient in a way). However, this multiplicity of routes is generally not possible in the last mile.¹ This leaves last mile telecom operators (ISPs) in a position to unfairly discriminate between different Internet services or destinations or applications, while harming consumer choice.

However, the aim of regulation by TRAI cannot be to prevent gatekeeping, since that is not possible as long as there are a limited number of ISPs. For instance, even by the very act of charging money for access to the Internet, ISPs are guilty of “gatekeeping” since they are controlling who can and cannot access an Internet service that way. Instead, the aim of regulation by TRAI should be to “regulate gatekeepers to ensure they do not use their gatekeeping power to unjustly discriminate between similarly situated persons, content or traffic”, as we proposed in our submission to TRAI (on OTTs) last year.

Models for Free Data

There are multiple models possible for free data, none of which TRAI should prohibit unless it would enable OTTs to abuse their gatekeeping powers.

Government Incentives For Non-Differentiated Free Data

The government may opt to require all ISPs to provide free Internet to all at a minimum QoS in exchange for exemption from paying part of their USO contributions, or the government may pay ISPs for such access using their USO contributions.

TRAI should recommend to DoT that it set up a committee to study the feasibility of this model.

ISP subsidies

ISP subsidies of Internet access only make economic sense for the ISP under the following ‘Goldilocks’ condition is met: the experience with the subsidised service is ‘good enough’ for the consumers to want to continue to use such services, but ‘bad enough’ for a large number of them to want to move to unsubsidised, paid access.

Providing free Internet to all at a low speed.
1. This naturally discriminates against services and applications such as video streaming, but does not technically bar access to them.
Providing free access to the Internet with other restrictions on quality that aren’t discriminatory with respect to content, services, or applications.

Rewards model

A TSP-agnostic rewards platform will only come within the scope of TRAI regulation if the platform has some form of agreement with the TSPs, even if it is collectively. If the rewards platform doesn’t have any agreement with any TSP, then TRAI does not have the power to regulate it. However, if the rewards platform has an agreement with any TSP, it is unclear whether it would be allowed under the Differential Data Tariff Regulation, since the clause 3(2) read with paragraph 30 of the Explanatory Memorandum might disallow such an agreement.

Assuming for the sake of argument that platforms with such agreements are not disallowed, such platforms can engage in either post-purchase credits or pre-purchase credits, or both. In other words, it could be a situation where a person has to purchase a data pack, engage in some activity relating to the platform (answer surveys, use particular apps, etc.) and thereupon get credit of some form transferred to one’s SIM, or it could be a situation where even without purchasing a data pack, a consumer can earn credits and thereupon use those credits towards data.

The former kind of rewards platform is not as useful when it comes to encouraging people to use the Internet, since only those who already see worth in using in the Internet (and can afford it) will purchase a data pack in the first place. The second form, on the other hand is quite useful, and could be encouraged. However, this second model is not as easily workable, economically, for fixed line connections, since there is a higher initial investment involved.

Recharge API

A recharge API could be fashioned in one of two ways: (1) via the operating system on the phone, allowing a TSP or third parties (whether OTTs or other intermediaries) to transfer credit to the SIM card on the phone which have been bought wholesale. Another model could be that of all TSPs providing a recharge API for the use of third parties. Only the second model is likely to result in a “toll-free” experience since in the first model, like in the case of a rewards platform that requires up-front purchase of data packs, there has to be a investment made first before that amount is recouped. This is likely to hamper the utility of such a model.

Further, in the first case, TRAI would probably not have the powers to regulate such transactions, as there would be no need for any involvement by the TSP. If anti-competitive agreements or abuse of dominant position seems to be taking place, it would be up to the Competition Commission of India to investigate.

However, the second model would have to be overseen by TRAI to ensure that the recharge APIs don’t impose additional costs on OTTs, or unduly harm competition and innovation. For instance, there ought to be an open specification for such an API, which all the TSPs should use in order to reduce the costs on OTTs. Further, there should be no exclusivity, and no preferential treatment provided for the TSPs sister concerns or partners.

“0.example” sites

Other forms of free data, for instance by TSPs choosing not to charge for low-bandwidth traffic should be allowed, as long as it is not discriminatory, nor does it impose increased barriers to entry for OTTs. For instance, if a website self-certifies that it is low-bandwidth and optimized for Internet-enabled feature phones and uses 0.example.tld to signal this (just as wap.* were used in for WAP sites and m.* are used for mobile-optimized versions of many sites), then there is no reason why TSPs should be prohibited from not charging for the data consumed by such websites, as long as the TSP does so uniformly without discrimination. In such cases, the TSP is not harming competition, harming consumers, nor abusing its gatekeeping powers.

OTT-agnostic free data

If a TSP decides not to charge for specific forms of traffic (for example, video, or for locally-peered traffic) regardless of the Internet service from which that traffic emanates, as as long as it does so with the end customer’s consent, then there is no question of the TSP harming competition, harming consumers, nor abusing its gatekeeping powers. There is no reason such schemes should be prohibited by TRAI unless they distort markets and harm innovation.

Unified marketplace

One other way to do what is proposed as the “recharge API” model is to create a highly-regulated market where the gatekeeping powers of the ISP are diminished, and the ISP’s ability to leverage its exclusive access over its customers are curtailed. A comparison may be drawn here to the rules that are often set by standard-setting bodies where patents are involved: given that these patents are essential inputs, access to them must be allowed through fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licences. Access to the Internet and common carriers like telecom networks, being even more important (since alternatives exist to particular standards, but not to the Internet itself), must be placed at an even higher pedestal and thus even stricter regulation to ensure fair competition.

A marketplace of this sort would impose some regulatory burdens on TRAI and place burdens on innovations by the ISPs, but a regulated marketplace harms ISP innovation less than not allowing a market at all.

At a minimum, such a marketplace must ensure non-exclusivity, non-discrimination, and transparency. Thus, at a minimum, a telecom provider cannot discriminate between any OTTs who want similar access to zero-rating. Further, a telecom provider cannot prevent any OTT from zero-rating with any other telecom provider. To ensure that telecom providers are actually following this stipulation, transparency is needed, as a minimum.

Transparency can take one of two forms: transparency to the regulator alone and transparency to the public. Transparency to the regulator alone would enable OTTs and ISPs to keep the terms of their commercial transactions secret from their competitors, but enable the regulator, upon request, to ensure that this doesn’t lead to anti-competitive practices. This model would increase the burden on the regulator, but would be more palatable to OTTs and ISPs, and more comparable to the wholesale data market where the terms of such agreements are strictly-guarded commercial secrets. On the other hand, requiring transparency to the public would reduce the burden on the regulator, despite coming at a cost of secrecy of commercial terms, and is far more preferable.

Beyond transparency, a regulation could take the form of insisting on standard rates and terms for all OTT players, with differential usage tiers if need be, to ensure that access is truly non-discriminatory. This is how the market is structured on the retail side.

Since there are transaction costs in individually approaching each telecom provider for such zero-rating, the market would greatly benefit from a single marketplace where OTTs can come and enter into agreements with multiple telecom providers.

Even in this model, telecom networks will be charging based not only on the fact of the number of customers they have, but on the basis of them having exclusive routing to those customers. Further, even under the standard-rates based single-market model, a particular zero-rated site may be accessible for free from one network, but not across all networks: unlike the situation with a toll-free number in which no such distinction exists.

To resolve this, the regulator may propose that if an OTT wishes to engage in paid zero-rating, it will need to do so across all networks, since if it doesn’t there is risk of providing an unfair advantage to one network over another and increasing the gatekeeper effect rather than decreasing it.

Question 2

Whether such platforms need to be regulated by the TRAI or market be allowed to develop these platforms?

In many cases, TRAI would have no powers over such platforms, so the question of TRAI regulating does not arise. In all other cases, TRAI can allow the market to develop such platforms, and then see if any of them violates the Discriminatory Data Tariffs Regualation. For government-incentivised schemes that are proposed above, TRAI should take proactive measure in getting their feasibility evaluated.

Question 3

Whether free data or suitable reimbursement to users should be limited to mobile data users only or could it be extended through technical means to subscribers of fixed line broadband or leased line?

Spectrum is naturally a scarce resource, though technological advances (as dictated by Cooper’s Law) and more efficient management of spectrum make it less so. However, we have seen that fixed-line broadband has more or less stagnated for the past many years, while mobile access has increased. So the market distortionary power of fixed-line providers is far less than that of mobile providers. However, competition is far less in fixed-line Internet access services, while it is far higher in mobile Internet access. Switching costs in fixed-line Internet access services are also far higher than in mobile services. Given these differences, the regulation with regard to price discrimination might justifiably be different.

All in all, for this particular issue, it is unclear why different rules should apply to mobile users and fixed line users.

Question 4

Any other issue related to the matter of Consultation.

None.

In India’s mobile telecom sector, according to a Nielsen study, an estimated 15% of mobile users are multi-SIM users, meaning the “gatekeeping” effect is significantly reduced in both directions: Internet services can reach them via multiple ISPs, and conversely they can reach Internet services via multiple ISPs. See Nielsen, ‘Telecom Transitions: Tracking the Multi-SIM Phenomena in India’, http://www.nielsen.com/in/en/insights/reports/2015/telecom-transitions-tracking-the-multi-sim-phenomena-in-india.html↩

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-submission-trai-consultation-free-data

CIS Submission to TRAI Consultation Note on Model for Nation-wide Interoperable and Scalable Public Wi-Fi Networks

2016-12-12T13:59:00Z

This submission presents responses by the CIS on the Consultation Note on Model for Nation-wide Interoperable and Scalable Public Wi-Fi Networks published by the TRAI on November 15, 2016. Our analysis of the solution proposed in the Note, in brief, is that there is no need of a solution for non-existing interoperability problem for authentication and payment services for accessing public Wi-Fi networks. The proposed solution in this Note only adds to over-regulation in this sector, and does not incentivise new investment in the sector, but only establishes UIDAI and NPCI as the monopoly service providers for authentication and payment services.

The comments were authored by Japreet Grewal, Pranesh Prakash, Sharath Chandra, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Sunil Abraham, and Udbhav Tiwari, with expert comments from Amelia Andersdotter.

1. Preliminary

1.1. This submission presents responses by the Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) [1] on the Consultation Note on Model for Nation-wide Interoperable and Scalable Public Wi-Fi Networks (“the Note”) published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (“TRAI”) on November 15, 2016 [2].

1.2. The CIS welcomes the effort undertaken by TRAI to map regulatory and other barriers to deployment of public Wi-Fi in India. We especially appreciate that TRAI has recognised [3] two key barriers to provision of public Wi-Fi networks identified and highlighted in our earlier response to the Consultation Paper on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi [4]: 1) over regulation (including, licensing requirements, data retention, and Know Your Customer policy), and 2) paucity of spectrum [5].

2. General Responses

2.1. Before responding to the specific questions posed by the Note, we would like to make the following observations.

2.2. There is no need of a solution for non-existing interoperability problem for authentication and payment services for accessing public Wi-Fi networks. The proposed solution in this Note only adds to over-regulation in this sector. The proposed solution does not incentivise new investment in the sector, but only establishes UIDAI and NPCI as the monopoly service providers for authentication and payment services.

2.3. As the TRAI has consulted widely with industry and other stakeholders before it settled on the list of priority issues contained in Section C.6 of the Note, we are surprised to find that this Note aims to address only the problem of lack of “seamless interoperable payment system for Wi-Fi networks” (Section C.6.d. Of the Note), and does not discuss and propose solutions for any other key barriers identified by the Note.

2.4. The Note fails to clarify the “interoperability” problem in the payment system for usage of public Wi-Fi networks that it is attempting to solve. The Note identifies that lack of “single standard” for “authentication and payment mechanisms” for accessing public Wi-Fi networks as a key impediment to provide scalable and interoperable public Wi-Fi networks across the country [6]. By conceptualising the problem in this manner, TRAI has bundled together two completely different concerns - authentication and payment - into one and this is at the root of the problems emanating from the proposed solution in this Note.

2.5. Lack of standard process for authentication is created by over-regulation via Know Your Customer (“KYC”) policies, and selection of eKYC service provided by UIDAI as the only acceptable authentication mechanism for all users of public Wi-Fi networks across India, creating further economic and legal challenges for smaller would-be providers of public Wi-Fi networks as they assess their liabilities and start-up costs. Additionally, since this would amount to making UID/Aadhaar enrolment mandatory for any user of public wi-fi networks, it seems to create a contradiction with previously communicated policy from the UIDAI and the Government that no such obligation should arise. Supreme Court has also mandated over successive Orders that enrolment for UID/Aadhaar number should remain optional for the citizens and residents.

2.6. As was observed by the respondents to the TRAI Consultation concluded earlier this year, there is no interoperability problem that needs to be solved regarding payments for accessing public Wi-Fi networks. Payment services continue to be evolved and payment aggregator services provided by existing companies may be expected to resolve many of the outstanding issues of service proliferation in the upcoming years, at least in the absence of additional mandatory technical measures imposed by the government. Bundling of payment with authentication will only undermine the already existing independent market for payment aggregators, and further enforce mandatoriness of UID/Aadhaar number.

2.7. Further, the payment mechanism proposed would seem to worsen difficulties for tourists and foreigners in accessing public Wi-Fi in India, as well adds an additional layer of authentication in a system already identified (even in the Note itself) to be overburdened by regulations regarding KYC and data retention. Section C.6.b of the Note highlights the problems faced by foreigners and tourists when the authentication mechanism is premised upon use of One Time Password (OTP) that requires a functioning local mobile phone number. It contradicts itself later by proposing an authentication method that requires the user to not only download an application onto their mobile/desktop device, but also to enrol for UID/Aadhaar number and/or to use their existing UID/Aadhaar number. Instead of reducing the existing barriers to provision of and access to public Wi-Fi, which the Note is supposed to achieve, it creates significant new barriers.

2.8. The technological architecture advanced by the Note upholds support of governance and surveillance projects that, in addition to being costly in their implementation and thereby slowing down the objective of getting India connected, are also of questionable value to the security of the Indian polity. UID, UPI, and related projects risk undermining cyber-security through their reliance on centralised architectures and interfere with healthy competitive market dynamics between commercial and non-commercial actors.

2.9. The Note continues to only consider and enable commercial models for the provision of public Wi-Fi networks. We have identified this as a problematic assumption in our last submission [7]. It is most crucial that TRAI does not ignore and fail to promote and facilitate the possibility of not-for-profit models that involve grassroot communities, academia, and civil society.

2.10. Last but not the least, the term “Wi-Fi” refers to a particular technology for establishing wireless local area networks. Further, the term is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance [8]. It is this not a neutral term, and it must not be used as a general and universal synonym for wireless local area networks. We recommend that TRAI may consider using a technology-neutral term, say “public wireless services” or “public networking services”, to describe the sector. Following the terminology used in the Note, we have decided to continue using the term “Wi-Fi” in this response. This does not reflect our agreement about the appropriateness of this term. Important: The recommendation for technology-neutral regulation also comes with the qualification that safeguards like regulations on Listen Before Talk and Cycle Time are required to prevent technologies like LTE-U from squatting on spectrum and interfering with connections based on other standards.

3. Specific Responses

Q1. Is the architecture suggested in the consultation note for creating unified authentication and payment infrastructure will enable nationwide standard for authentication and payment interoperability?

3.1. No. The proposed infrastructure is likely to be costly for a large number of actors to implement and undermine some of the ongoing innovation in the Indian digital payment services industry. Rather than being helpful, it risks introducing additional requirements on an industry that TRAI has already identified as facing a number of large challenges.

3.2. There is no need for a unified architecture that provides nationwide standard for authentication and payment interoperability. It does not offer any incentive towards provision of public Wi-Fi networks. Neither is there an interoperability problem at the physical or data link layers that has been pointed out, nor is government mandated interoperability required at the payment or ID layer since there are private entities that provide such interoperability (like, payment aggregators). Additionally, we believe it is inappropriate that the TRAI is trying to predict the most suitable business/technological model for digital payments to be used for accessing commercial Wi-Fi networks. India has a booming online payments industry, and it must be allowed to evolve in an enabling regulatory environment that allow for competition and ensures responsible practices.

3.3. The Note identifies several structural impediments to expansion of public Wi-Fi networks in India, namely paucity of backhaul connectivity infrastructure (Section C.6.a), Inadequate associated infrastructure to offer carrier grade Wi-Fi network (Section C.6.c), dependency of authentication mechanism on pre-existing (Indian) mobile phone connection (Section C.6.b), and limited availability of spectrum to be used for public Wi-Fi networks (Section C.6.e). All these are crucial concerns and none of them have been addressed by the architecture suggested in the Note.

Q2. Would you like to suggest any alternate model?

3.4. Yes. The model proposed in the Note is likely to exclude several types of potential users (say, foreigners and tourists), and impose a single authentication and payment service provider for accessing public Wi-Fi networks, which may undermine both competition and security in the market for these services.

3.5. Internationally, there are cities and regions (say, the city of Barcelona and the Catalonia region in Spain) where public Wi-Fi networks have been provided in a pervasive and efficient manner by taking a light regulatory approach that enables opportunities for potential providers to set up their own infrastructures and additionally have access to backhaul. Further, reducing legal requirements on authentication should be considered in place of government mandated technical architectures for authentication and payment. In particular, allowing for anonymous access to Public Wi-Fi or wireless connectivity would reduce both the administrative and the technical burden on potential providers at the hyper-local level, especially for providers whose main activity it is not, and cannot be, to provide internet services (say, event venues, malls, and shops).

3.6. The CIS suggests the following steps towards conceptualising an “alternative model”:

remove existing regulatory disincentives,
urgently explore policies to promote deployment of wired infrastructures in general, and to enable a larger range of actors, including local authorities, to invest in and deploy local infrastructures by reducing licensing requirements in particular,
examine spectrum requirements for provision of public Wi-Fi, and
provide incentives, such as allowing telecom service providers to share backhaul traffic over public Wi-Fi, and ways for telecom service providers to lower their costs if they also make Internet access available for free.

Q3. Can Public Wi-Fi access providers resell capacity and bandwidth to retail users? Is “light touch regulation” using methods such as “registration” instead of “licensing” preferred for them?

3.7. CIS holds that capacity and bandwidth are neither comparable to tangible goods nor to digital currency. They are a utility, and the provider of the utility has to accept that their customers use the utility in the way they see fit, even if that use entails sharing said capacity and bandwidth with downstream private persons or customers. Wi-Fi capabilities are currently a built-in standardised feature of all consumer routers. Any individual, community, or store with access to an internet connection and a consumer router could become a public Wi-Fi access provider at no additional cost to themselves, furthering the goals of the Indian government in its Digital India strategy to ensure public and universal access to the internet.

3.8. In order to exploit the opportunities awarded by a large amount of entities in the Indian society potentially becoming Public Wi-Fi providers, TRAI should require neither registration nor licensing of these actors. Imposing administrative burdens on potential public Wi-Fi access providers creates legal uncertainty and will cause a lot of actors, who may otherwise contribute to the goals of Digital India, not to do so. This is particularly true for community organisers and citizens, who may not have access to legal assistance and therefore may avoid contributing to the goals of the government.

3.9. Light touch regulation when it comes to both granting license to public Wi-Fi access providers as well as authentication of retail users, however, are needed not only as an exceptional practice for such instances but as a general practice in case of entities offering public Wi-Fi services, either commercially or otherwise. Further, additional laxity in administrative responsibilities is needed to incentivise provision of free, that is non-commercial, public Wi-Fi networks.

Q4. What should be the regulatory guidelines on “unbundling” Wi-Fi at access and backhaul level?

3.10. The Note refers to unbundling of activities related to provision of Wi-Fi but it does not define the term. It is neither explained which specific activities at access and backhaul levels must be considered for unbundling.

3.11. While unbundling should clearly be allowed and any regulatory hurdles to unbundling should be removed, any such decision must be taken with a focus on urgently addressing the stagnated growth in landline and backhaul, as identified in Section C.6.a of the Note. Relying only on spectrum intensive infrastructures, such as mobile base stations, for providing connectivity, creates a heavy regulatory burden for the TRAI, while simultaneously not ensuring optimal connectivity for business and private users. The CIS is concerned that the focus of the Note on standardising a government-mediated authentication and payment mechanism detracts attention from this urgent obstacle to the fulfillment of the Digital India plans of accelerated provision of broadband highways, universal access, and public, especially free, access to internet services.

3.12. From the example of European telecommunications legislations, implementation of policy measures to ensure that vertical integration between infrastructure (say, cables, switches, and hubs) providers and service (say, providing a subscriber with a household modem or a SIM card) providers in the telecommunications sector does not become a barrier to new market entrants has yielded much success in countries that have pursued it, like Sweden and Great Britain.

3.13. Further, there should be no default assumption of bundling by the TRAI. In particular, the TRAI should consider reviewing all regulations that may cause bundling to occur when this is not necessary, and put in place in a monitoring mechanism for ensuring that bundled practises (especially in electronic networks, base station infrastructures, backhaul and similar) do not cause competitive problems or raise market entry barriers [9]. In most EU countries, especially where the corporate structure of incumbent(s) is not highly vertically integrated, interconnection requirements for electronic network providers of wired networks in the backhaul or backbone (effectively price regulated interconnection), and a conscious effort to ensure that new market players can enter the field, have ensured a competitive telecommunications environment. TRAI may consider reviewing the European regulation on local loop unbundling (1999) and discussions on functional separation (especially by the British regulatory authority Ofcom), within an Indian context.

Q5. Whether reselling of bandwidth should be allowed to venue owners such as shop keepers through Wi-Fi at premise? In such a scenario please suggest the mechanism for security compliance.

3.14. Yes. Venue owners should be allowed to provide public Wi-Fi service both on a commercial and non-commercial basis.

3.15. It is not clear from the Note and the question what type of security concerns the TRAI is seeking to address. In terms of payment security, the payment industry already has a large range of verification and testing mechanisms. The CIS objects to the mandatory introduction of the proposed payment system so as to ensure greater security for Wi-Fi access providers and the users.

3.16. As far as hardware-related security issues are concerned, it is again unclear why consumer equipment compliant with existing Wi-Fi standards would not be sufficiently secure in the Indian context. Wi-Fi has proven to be a sturdy technical standard, its adoption is high in multiple jurisdictions around the world, and it also enjoys great technical stability. Similar security assessments could easily be made for alternative wireless technologies, such as WiMaX.

3.17. The CIS foresees problems is in the allocation of risk and liability by law. The already existing legal obligation to verify the identity of each user, for instance, is likely to introduce a large administrative burden on potential Public Wi-Fi providers, which may lead to such potential providers abstaining from entering the market. Should the identification requirement be removed, however, other concerns pertaining to legal obligations may arise. These include liability for user activities on the web or on the internet (cf. copyright infringement, libel, hate speech). We propose a “safe harbour” mechanism in these cases, limiting the liability of the potential public Wi-Fi provider.

Q6. What should be the guidelines regarding sharing of costs and revenue across all entities in the public Wi-Fi value chain? Is regulatory intervention required or it should be left to forbearance and individual contracting?

3.18. The market segments identified by the TRAI in Section F.18 of the Note should normally all be competitive markets themselves, and so do not require regulatory assistance in sharing of costs and revenues. The more elaborate the requirements imposed on each actor of each market segment identified by the TRAI in Section F.18, the more costly the roll-out of public Wi-Fi is going to be for the market actors. Such a cost is not avoided by price regulation.

3.19. The TRAI may instead consider introducing public funding for backhaul roll-out in remote areas, where the market is unlikely to engage in such roll-out on its own. Presently, some Indian states (such as Karnataka) are committing to public funding for wireless access in remote areas. The Union Government can assist such endeavours.

Endnotes

[1] See: http://cis-india.org/.

[2] See: http://trai.gov.in/Content/ConDis/20801_0.aspx.

[3] See Section C.6 of the Note.

[4] See: http://trai.gov.in/Content/ConDis/20782_0.aspx.

[5] See: http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/cis-submission-to-trai-consultation-on-proliferation-of-broadband-through-public-wifi-networks.

[6] See Section E.11. of the Note.

[7] See: http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/cis-submission-to-trai-consultation-on-proliferation-of-broadband-through-public-wifi-networks.

[8] See: https://www.wi-fi.org/.

[9] See: Monitoring bundled products in the telecommunications sector is also recommended by the OECD: http://oecdinsights.org/2015/06/22/triple-and-quadruple-play-bundles-of-communication-services-towards-all-in-one-packages/.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/cis-submission-trai-note-on-interoperable-scalable-public-wifi

CIS Statement on Right to Privacy Judgment

amber — 2017-08-31T18:13:14Z

In an emphatic endorsement of the right to privacy, a nine judge constitutional bench unanimously upheld a fundamental right to privacy. The events leading to this bench began during the hearings in the ongoing Aadhaar case, when in August 2015, Mukul Rohatgi, the then Attorney General stated that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy.

reliance was on two Supreme Court judgments in MP Sharma v Satish Chandra (1954) and Kharak Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh (1962): both cases, decided by eight- and six-judge benches respectively, denied the existence of a constitutional right to privacy. As the subsequent judgments which upheld the right to privacy were by smaller benches, he claimed that MP Sharma and Kharak Singh still prevailed over them, until they were overruled by a larger bench. This landmark judgment was in response to a referral order to clear the confusion over the status of privacy as a right.

We, at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcome this judgement and applaud the depth and scope of the Supreme Court’s reasoning. CIS has been producing research on the different aspects of the right to privacy and its implications for the last seven years and had the privilege of serving on the Justice AP Shah Committee and contributing to the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy.[1] We are honoured that some of our research has also been cited by the judgment.[2] Such judicial recognition is evidence of the impact sound research can have on policymaking.

In the course of a 547 page judgment, the bench affirmed the fundamental nature of the right to privacy reading it into the values of dignity and liberty. The judgment is instructive in its reference to scholarly works and jurisprudence not only in India but other legal systems such as USA, South Africa, EU and UK, while recognising a broad right to privacy with various dimensions across spatial, informational and decisional spheres. We note with special appreciation that women’s bodily integrity and citizens’ sexual orientation are among those aspects of privacy that were clearly recognised in the judgment. For researchers studying privacy and its importance, this judgment is of great value as it provides clear reasoning to reject oft-quoted arguments which are used to deny privacy’s significance. The judgement is also cognizant of the implications of the digital age and emphasise the need for a robust data protection framework.

The right to privacy has been read into into Article 21 (Right to life and liberty), and Part III (Chapter on Fundamental Rights) of the Constitution. This means that any limitation on the right in the form of reasonable restrictions must not only satisfy the tests evolved under Article 21, but where loss of privacy leads to infringement on other rights, such as chilling effects of surveillance on free speech, the tests for constitutionality under those provisions for also be satisfied by the limiting action. This provides a broad protection to citizens’ privacy which may not be easily restricted. We expect that this judgment will have far reaching impacts, not just with respect to the immediate Aadhaar case, but also to in a score of other matters such as protection of sexual choice by decriminalising Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, oversight of statutory search and seizure provisions such as Section 132 of the Income Tax Act, personal data collection and processing practices by both state and private actors and mass surveillance programmes in the interest of national security.

As this judgment comes in response to a referral order, the judges were not dealing with any questions of fact to ground the legal principles in. Subsequent judgments which deal with privacy will apply these principles and further evolve the contours of this right on a case-by-case basis. For now, we welcome this judgment and look forward to its consistent application in the future.

[1]. http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_privacy.pdf

[2]. CIS was quoted in the judgement on footnote 46, page 33 and 34: http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/pdf/LU/ALL%20WP(C)%20No.494%20of%202012%20Right%20to%20Privacy.pdf The quote is " Illustratively, the Centre for Internet and Society has two interesting articles tracing the origin of privacy within Classical Hindu Law and Islamic Law. See Ashna Ashesh and Bhairav Acharya ,“Locating Constructs of Privacy within Classical Hindu Law”, The Centre for Internet and Society, available at https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/loading-constructs-of-privacy-within-classical-hindu-law. See also Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya, “Identifying Aspects of Privacy in Islamic Law”, The Centre for Internet and Society, available at https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/identifying-aspects-of-privacy-in-islamic-law " Further, research commissioned by CIS cited in the judgment includes a reference in page 201 footnote 319, "Bhairav Acharya, “The Four Parts of Privacy in India”, Economic & Political Weekly (2015), Vol. 50 Issue 22, at page 32."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-statement-on-right-to-privacy-judgment

CIS Response to Draft E-Commerce Policy

amber — 2019-04-26T06:40:34Z

CIS is grateful for the opportunity to submit comments to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion on the draft national e-commerce policy. This response was authored by Amber Sinha, Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda.

Access our response to the draft policy here: Download (PDF)

The E-Commerce Policy is a much needed and timely document that seeks to enable the growth of India's digital ecosystem. Crucially, it backs up India's stance at the WTO, which has been a robust pushback against digital trade policies that would benefit the developed world at the cost of emerging economies. However, in order to ensure that the benefits of the digital economy are truly shared, focus must not only be on the sellers but also on the consumers, which automatically brings in individual rights into the question. No right is absolute but there needs to be a fair trade-off between the mercantilist aspirations of a burgeoning digital economy and the civil and political rights of the individuals who are spurring the economy on. We also appreciate the recognition that the regulation of e-commerce must be an inter-disciplinary effort and the assertion of the roles of various other departments and ministries. However, we also caution against over-reach and encroaching into policy domains that fall within the mandate of existing laws.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-response-to-draft-e-commerce-policy

CIS Comments on TRAI Consultation Paper on Promoting Local Telecom Equipment Manufacturing

sinha — 2017-11-26T02:56:15Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) sent comments to the TRAI Consultation Paper on promoting telecom equipment manufacturing. CIS submission drew primarily from the research done in the Pervasive Technologies project.

Read TRAI's Consultation Paper on Promoting Local Telecom Equipment Manufacturing

Preliminary

This submission presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society, India ("CIS") on the Consultation Paper on Promoting Local Telecom Equipment Manufacturing dated 18.09. 2017, released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), under Department of Telecom, Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies (“the TRAI Consultation Paper”).
We commend TRAI for its efforts at seeking inputs from various stakeholders on this important and timely issue and are thankful for the opportunity to put forth our views.
We have addressed questions 3 and 5 of the TRAI Consultation Paper. Question numbers referred to in our submission correspond to those in the TRAI Consultation Paper.
Further, the Department of Industrial Planning and Promotion (DIPP) invited comments on SEPs and their availability on FRAND terms on 01. 03. 2016.[1] CIS submitted a detailed response to the consultation, and our present submission will draw significantly from our earlier response[2], as well as new empirical research concluded in the since the time of the consultation.

About CIS

CIS[3] is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. Our areas of focus include IP rights, openness, internet governance, telecommunication reform, free speech, intermediary liability, digital privacy, cyber-security, and accessibility for persons with diverse abilities.
We strive to maximise public benefit, useful innovation, vibrant competition and consumer welfare. This submission is consistent with our commitment to the domestic goals (as enumerated in Make in India and Digital India), and the protection of India's national interest at the international level.

Submission on the Issues for Resolution

“Q.3 Are the existing patent laws in India sufficient to address the issues of local manufacturers? If No, then suggest the measures to be adopted and amendments that need to be incorporated for supporting the local telecom manufacturing industry.”

We submit that amendments to the Patents Act, 1970 may not be preferred, presently. It may be noted that there have been no judgments concluded by Indian courts on disputes relating to licensing of SEPs, yet. Justice Bakhru’s landmark order in Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (Publ) v. Competition Commission of India (2016) provided valuable clarity on the issue of conflict between remedies under Patents Act, 1970 and Competition Act, 1970. As various other matters are yet to be conclusively decided, and given the complex legal questions involved around the interpretation of Patents Act, 1970 and Competition Act, 2002, and constitutional issues around the jurisdiction of regulators and the power of judicial review of the courts, we believe that it would be prudent to examine the ruling of the courts on these issues in some detail, before considering amendments.

However, to support the local telecom manufacturing industry the Government of India may adopt and implement the following measures:

Develop Model Guidelines to improve the working of Indian Standard Setting Organisations (SSOs): Given the increasing complexity and time-consuming nature of SEP litigation in India, there is a tangible threat of the abuse of the FRAND process, it might be useful for the government to make suggestions on the working of Indian SSOs. The functioning of Indian SSOs has not been satisfactory and it is suggested that the government develop Model Guidelines that may be adopted by Indian SSOs, taking into account India specific requirements. The India specific requirements include a large and exponentially growing mobile device market which has made it possible for manufacturers, patent owners and implementers alike to achieve financial gains even with a low margin. We believe that this measure will also enable the fulfillment of the objectives of the Make in India and Digital India initiatives.

We recommend that various stakeholders, including IP holders, potential licensees and users of IP, civil society organizations, academics, and, government bodies, including the Indian Patent Office, the Department of Telecommunications, the DIPP, TRAI, and, the CCI be consulted in the creation of these Model Guidelines.

In our opinion, the Model Guidelines may cover (a) the composition of the SSO; (b) the process of admitting members; (c) the process of the determination of a standard or technical specification; (d) the process of declassification of a standard or technical specification; (e) the IPR Policy; (f) resolution of disputes; (g) applicable law.
Initiate the formation of a patent pool of critical mobile technologies and cap royalty payments: In light of the observed inadequacies in the IPR policies of various SSOs in India, as well the spate of ongoing patent infringement lawsuits around mobile technologies, we recommend that the government intervene in the setting of royalties and FRAND terms by setting up a patent pool of critical mobile technologies and apply a compulsory license with a five per cent royalty. Further, patent pools should be required to offer FRAND licenses on the same terms to both members and nonmembers of the pool.

Our motivations for this proposal are manifold. In our opinion, it is nearly impossible for potential licensees to avoid inadvertent patent infringement. As a part of our research on technical standards applicable to mobile phones sold in India, we have found nearly 322 standards so far.[4] It is submitted that carrying out patent searches for all the standards would be extremely expensive for potential licensees. Further, even if such searches were to be carried out, different patent owners, SSOs and potential licensees disagree on valuation, essentiality, enforceability, validity, and coverage of patents. In addition, some patent owners are non-practising entities and may not be members of SSOs. The patents held by them are not likely to be disclosed. More importantly, homegrown manufacturers that have no patents to leverage and may be new entrants in the market would be especially disadvantaged by such a scenario. Budget phone manufacturers, standing to incur losses either as a result of heavy licensing fees, or, potential litigation, may close down. Alternatively, they may pass on their losses to consumers, driving the now affordable phones out of their financial reach. With the objectives of Make in India and Digital India in sight, it is essential that Indian consumers continue to have access to devices within their purchasing power.

Further, how did we arrive at a cap of 5 percent? The rationale for this figure is the royalty cap imposed by India in the early 1990s. As part of regulating foreign technology agreements, the (former) Department of Industrial Development (later merged with DIPP) capped royalty rates in the early 1990s. Payment of royalties was capped at either a lump sum payment of $2 million, or, 5 percent on the royalty rates charged for domestic sale, and, 8 percent for export of goods pertaining to “high priority industries”.[5] Royalties higher than 5 percent or 8 percent, as the case may be, required securing approval from the government. While the early 1990s (specifically, 1991) was too early for the mobile device manufacturing industry to be listed among high priority industries, the public announcement by the government covered computer software, consumer electronics, and electrical and electronic appliances for home use. The cap on royalty rates was lifted by the DIPP in 2009.[6] It is submitted in the case of mobile device technology, we are witnessing a situation similar to that of the 1990s. In this sphere, most of the patent holders are multinational corporations which results in large royalty amounts leaving India. At the same time, litigation over patent infringement in India has limited the manufacture and sale of mobile devices of homegrown brands. While SEP litigation in India is indeed comparable to international SEP litigation on broader issues raised, specifically competition law concerns, but differs crucially where the parties are concerned. International SEP litigation is largely between multinational corporations with substantial patent portfolios, capable of engaging in long drawn out litigations, or engaging in other strategies including setting off against each other’s patent portfolios. Dynamics in the Indian market differ – with a larger SEP holder litigating against smaller manufacturers, many of whom are indigenous, homegrown.

In June, 2013, we had recommended to the erstwhile Hon’ble Minister for Human Resource Development[7] that a patent pool of essential technologies be established, with the compulsory licensing mechanism. Subsequently, in February, 2015, we reiterated this request to the Hon’ble Prime Minister.[8] We propose that the Government of India initiate the formation of a patent pool of critical mobile technologies and mandate a five percent compulsory license.[9] As we have stated in our request to the Hon’ble Prime Minister, we believe that such a pool would “possibly avert patent disputes by ensuring that the owners' rights are not infringed on, that budget manufacturers are not put out of business owing to patent feuds, and that consumers continue to get access to inexpensive mobile devices. Several countries including the United States issue compulsory licenses on patents in the pharmaceutical, medical, defence, software, and engineering domains for reasons of public policy, or to thwart or correct anticompetitive practices.”[10] We believe that such a measure will not be in breach of our international obligations under the TRIPS Agreement.
Increase transparency in the patent system by making patentees comply with the law: The Patents Act, 1970 requires patentees and licensees to submit a statement on commercial working of the invention to the Controller every year.[11] Form 27 under section 146(2) of the Act lists the details necessary to be disclosed for compliance of the requirement of “working”. A jurisprudential analysis reveals the rationale and objective behind this mandatory requirement. Undeniably, the scheme of the Indian patent regime makes it amply clear that “working” is a very important requirement, and the public as well as competitors have a right to access this information in a timely manner, without undue hurdles. Indeed, as the decision[12] in Natco Pharma v. Bayer Corporation[13] reveals, the disclosures in Form 27 were crucial to determining the imposition of a compulsory license on the patentee. Thus, broadly, Form 27 disclosures can critically enable willing licensees to access patent “working” information in a timely manner.

However, there has been little compliance of this requirement by the patentees, despite the Indian Patent Office (IPO) reiterating the importance of compliance through the issuance of multiple public notices[14] (suo motu and in response to a public interest litigation filed in 2011[15]), and, reminding the patentees that noncompliance is punishable with a heavy fine.[16] Findings of research submitted by one of the parties[17] in the writ of the 2011 public interest litigation Shamnad Basheer v. Union of India and others[18] reveal as follows. First, a large number of Form 27s are unavailable for download from the website of the IPO. This possibly indicates that the forms have either not been filed by the patentees with the IPO, or have not been uploaded (yet) by the IPO. Second, a large number of filings in the telecom sector remain incomplete.

In 2015, CIS queried the IPO website for Form 27s of mobile device patents to arrive at a similar conclusion. We obtained 4,916 valid Form 27s, corresponding to 3,126 mobile device patents from public online records. These represented only 20.1% of all Forms 27 that should have been filed and corresponded to only 72.5% of all mobile device patents for which Forms 27 should have been filed. Forms 27 were missing for almost all patentees, and even among Forms 27 that were obtained, almost none contained useful information regarding the working of the subject patents or fully complying with the informational requirements of the Indian Patent Rules.[19]

Further, in our study, we observed that patentees adopted drastically different positions regarding the definition of patent working, some arguing that importation of products into India or licensing of Indian suppliers constituted working, while others even went so far as to argue that the granting of a worldwide license to a non-Indian firm constituted working in India. Several significant patentees claimed that they or their patent portfolios were simply too large to enable the provision of information relating to individual patents, and instead provided gross revenue and product sale figures, together with historical anecdotes about their long histories in India.

The Indian government has made little or no effort to monitor or police compliance with Form 27 filings, undoubtedly leading to significant non-compliance. We also propose the alteration of the Form 27 template[20] to include more disclosures.[21] Presently, patentees are required to declare number of licensees and sub-licensees. We specifically propose that the format of Form 27 filings be modified to include patent pool licenses, with an explicit declaration of the names of the licensees and not just the number.
Require royalty rates to be decided on the basis of the Smallest Saleable Patent Practicing Component: Most modern telecommunication and IT devices are complex with numerous technologies working in tandem. Different studies indicate that the number of patents in the US applicable to smartphones is between 200,000 and 250,000.[22] A comprehensive patent landscape of mobile device technologies conducted by CIS reveals that nearly 4,000 patents are applicable to mobile phones sold in India.[23] It is thus extremely difficult to quantify the exact extent of interaction and interdependence between technologies in any device, in such a way that the exact contribution of the patented technology to the entire device can be determined. Thus, we submit that royalty rates for SEPs should be based on the smallest saleable patent practising component, and not on the net price of the downstream product.

The net cost of the device is almost always several times that of the chipset that implements the patented technology. Armstrong et al[24] have found that the cost of a 4G baseband chip costs up to $20 including royalties in a hypothetical $400 phone sold in the US. One of the litigating parties in the ongoing patent infringement lawsuits in India has stated that one of the reasons for preferring to leverage its patents as downstream as possible in the value chain is that it will earn the company more royalties.[25] In instances where patent exhaustion occurs much earlier in the value chain, such as in the case of the company’s cross-licenses with Qualcomm (another company that owns patents to chip technologies), the company does not try to obtain royalties from the selling prices of devices for the cross-licensed technologies. It is submitted that such market practices could be detrimental to the government’s objectives such as providing a mobile handset to every Indian by 2020 as a part of the Digital India programme.[26] It is also worth noting in this context that the mobile device is the first and only medium of access to the Internet and telecom services for a large number of Indians, and, consequently, the only gateway to access to knowledge, information and critical services, including banking.[27]

“Q.5 Please suggest a dispute resolution mechanism for determination of royalty distribution on FRAND (Fair Reasonable and Non Discriminatory) basis.”

The licensing of SEPs on FRAND terms requires the parties to negotiate “reasonable” royalty rates in good faith, and apply the terms uniformly to all willing licensees. It is our submission that if the parties cannot agree to FRAND terms, they may enter into binding arbitration. Further, if all efforts fail, there exist remedies under the Patents Act and the Competition Act, 2002 to address the issues.

Section 115 of the Patents Act empowers the court to appoint an independent scientific adviser “to assist the court or to inquire and report upon any such question of fact or of opinion (not involving a question of interpretation of law) as it may formulate for the purpose.”[28] Such an independent adviser may inform the court on the technical nuances of the matter.

Further, under the Patents Act, pending the decision of infringement proceedings the Court may provide interim relief, if the plaintiff proves first, a prima facie case of infringement; second, that the balance of convenience tilts in plaintiff’s favour; and, third, that if an injunction is not granted the plaintiff shall suffer irreparable damage. However, it is our suggestion that courts adopt a more cautious stance towards granting injunctions in the field of SEP litigation. First, in our opinion, injunctions may prove to be a deterrent to arrive at a FRAND commitment, in particular, egregiously harming the willing licensee. Second, especially in the Indian scenario, where litigating parties operate in vastly different price segments (thereby targeting consumers with different purchasing power), it is difficult to establish that “irreparable damage” has been caused to the patent owner on account of infringement. Third, we note the approach of the European Court of Justice, which prohibited the patent holder from enforcing an injunction provided a willing licensee makes an offer for the price it wishes to pay to use a patent under the condition that it deposited an amount in the bank as a security for the patent holder.[29] Fourth, we also note the approach of the Federal Trade Commission in the USA, which only authorizes patent holders to seek injunctive relief against potential licensees who have either stated that they will not license a patent on any terms, or refuse to enter into a license agreement on terms that have been set in the final ruling of a court or arbitrator.[30] Further, as Contreras (2015)[31] observes, that the precise boundaries of what constitutes as an unwilling licensee remains to be seen. We observe a similar ambiguity in Indian jurisprudence, and accordingly submit that courts should carefully examine the conduct of the licensee to injunct them from the alleged infringement.

Concluding Remarks

We are thankful to TRAI for the opportunity to make these submissions. It would be our pleasure and privilege to discuss these comments with the TRAI; and, supplement these with further submissions if necessary. We also offer our assistance on other matters aimed at developing a suitable policy framework for SEPs and FRAND in India, and, working towards the sustained innovation, manufacture and availability of mobile technologies in India.

[1] Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on Frand Terms, available at https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/discussion-paper-on-standard-essential-patents-and-their-availability-on-frand-terms (last accessed November 13, 2017)

[2] Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshane, “CIS’ Comments on Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on Frand Terms” (April 23, 2016); available at https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-on-department-of-industrial-policy-and-promotion-discussion-paper-on-standard-essential-patents-and-their-availability-on-frand-terms

[3] www.cis-india.org

[4] Rohini Lakshané, CIS, List of Technical Standards and IP Types (Working document), available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8SgjShAjhbtaml5eW50bS01d2s/view?usp=sharing (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[5] Kumkum Sen, News on Royalty Payments Brings Cheer in New Year, available at http://www.businessstandard.com/article/economypolicy/newsonroyaltypaymentbringscheerinnewyear11001 0400044_1.html (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[6] See Sanjana Govil, Putting a Lid on Royalty Outflows How the RBI Can Help Reduce India’s IP Costs , available at http://cisindia.org/a2k/blogs/lidonroyaltyoutflows (last accessed 13 November, 2017) for a discussion on the introduction of royalty caps in the early 1990s, and its success in reducing the flow of money out of India.

[7] Nehaa Chaudhari, Letter for Establishment of Patent Pool for Low cost Access Devices through Compulsory

Licenses, available at http://cisindia.org/a2k/blogs/letterforestablishmentofpatentpoolforlowcostaccessdevices (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[8] See Rohini Lakshané, Open Letter to PM Modi, available at http://cisindia.org/a2k/blogs/openlettertoprimeministermodi (last accessed 13 November, 2017) for further details of CIS’ proposal.

[9] Rohini Lakshané, FAQ: CIS’ proposal to form a patent pool of critical mobile technology, September 2015, available at http://cisindia.org/a2k/blogs/faqcisproposalforcompulsorylicensingofcriticalmobiletechnologies (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[10] Id.

[11] Section 146(2) of the Patents Act, 1970.

[12] Sai Vinod, Patent Office Finally Takes Form 27s Seriously, available at http://spicyip.com/2013/02/patentofficefinallytakesform27s.html (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[13] Order No. 45/2013 (Intellectual Property Appellate Board, Chennai), available at http://www.ipab.tn.nic.in/0452013.htm (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[14] Intellectual Property India, Public Notice, available at

http://www.ipindia.nic.in/iponew/publicNotice_Form27_12Feb2013.pdf ((last accessed 13 November, 2017) and Intellectual Property India, Public Notice, available at http://ipindia.nic.in/iponew/publicNotice_24December2009.pdf (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[15] Supra note 11.

[16] Id.

[17] See research findings available at http://spicyip.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/05/FORM27WP1Rcopy.pdf (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[18] In the High Court of Delhi, W.P.(C) 5590/2015. This litigation is currently ongoing. See, illustratively, Mathews P. George, Patent Working in India: Delhi HC issues notice in Shamnad Basheer v. Union of India & Ors. – I , available at http://spicyip.com/2015/09/patentworkinginindiadelhihcissuesnoticeinshamnadbasheervunionofindiaorsi.html (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[19] Contreras, Jorge L. and Lakshané, Rohini and Lewis, Paxton, Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products (October 1, 2017). NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3004283

[20] Form 27, The Patents Act, available at http://ipindia.nic.in/ipr/patent/manual/HTML%20AND%20PDF/Manual%20of%20Patent%20Office%20Practice%20and%20Procedure%20%20html/Forms/Form27.pdf (last accessed November 13, 10`7).

[21] However, we came across some complaints raised by patentees and industry observers regarding the structure of the Form 27 requirement - namely, patents covering complex, multi-component products that embody dozens of technical standards and thousands of patents are not necessarily amenable to the individual-level data requested by Form 27. See Contreras, Jorge L. and Lakshané, Rohini and Lewis, Paxton, Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products (October 1, 2017). NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3004283

[22] Mark Lemley and Carl Shapiro, Patent Holdup and Royalty Stacking, 85 Tex. L. Rev. at 2015 ; See also, for e.g.,

RPX Corporation, Amendment No. 3 to Form Sl,11 Apr. 2011, at 59, available at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1509432/000119312511101007/ds1a.htm (last accessed 22 April, 2016), quoting “Based on our research, we believe there are more than 250,000 active patents relevant to today’s

smartphones…” .; See further Steve Lohr, Apple Samsung Case Shows Smartphone as Legal Magnet, New York Times, 25 Aug. 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/technology/applesamsungcaseshowssmartphoneaslawsuitmagnet.html (last accessed November13, 2017).

[23] Jorge L. Contreras and Rohini Lakshané, Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2756486 (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[24] Ann Armstrong, Joseph J. Mueller and Timothy D. Syrett, The SmartphoneRoyalty Stack:Surveying Royalty Demands for the Components Within Modern Smartphones, available at https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Editorial/Publications/Documents/TheSmartphoneRoyaltyStackArmstrongMuellerSyrett.pdf (last accessed 13 November, 2017)

[25] Florian Mueller, Ericsson Explained Publicly why it Collects Patent Royalties from Device (Not Chipset) Makers, available at http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/01/ericssonexplainedpubliclywhyits.Html (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[26] Romit Guha and Anandita Singh Masinkotia, PM Modi’s Digital India Project:Government to Ensure that Every Indian has a Smartphone by 2019, available at http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/20140825/news/53205445_1_digitalindiaindiatodayfinancialservices (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[27] Nehaa Chaudhari, Standard Essential Patents on Low Cost Mobile Phones in India: A Case to Strengthen Competition Regulation? available at http://www.manupatra.co.in/newsline/articles/Upload/08483340C1B94BA4B6A9D6B6494391B8.pdf (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

[28] Section 115 of the Patents Act, 1970.

[29] Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd v. ZTE Corp. and ZTE Deutschland , Judgment of the Court (Fifth Chamber) of 16 July 2015 in GmbH C170/13.

[30] Third Party United States Fed. Trade Commission’s Statement on the Public Interest, In re Certain Wireless Communication Devices, Portable Music and Data Processing Devices, Computers and Components Thereof, U.S. Int’l Trade Comm’n, Inv. No. 337TA745 (Jun. 6, 2012).

[31] Jorge L. Contreras, A Brief History of FRAND: Analyzing Current Debates in Standard Setting and Antitrust Through a Historical Lens , 80 Antitrust Law Journal 39 (2015), available at h ttp://ssrn.com/abstract=2374983 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2374983 (last accessed 13 November, 2017).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/cis-comments-on-promoting-local-telecom-equipment-manufacturing

CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017

sunil — 2016-04-29T09:36:45Z

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalyzing the growth of the free and open knowledge movement in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008. Since September 2012, we at CIS-A2K, have been actively involved in growing the movement in India through (i) a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for the period September 2012 - June 2014, (ii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2014 - June 2015 and (iii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2015 - June 2016. Based on the productive experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed this work plan for July 2016 to June 2017.

This was originally published on Meta-wiki on April 2, 2016.

We have revised the work plan template taking into account the changed proposal plan sent out by WMF and in light of the feedback that we have received from FDC assessment during last proposal application. The FDC feedback is taken into account at the level of design, RoI and ensuring quality for all our activities.

CIS-A2K responses towards Indic communities concerns

During the last plan period CIS-A2K received the following complaints, suggestions, and feedback. We have attempted to address the concerns under redesigned CIS-A2K 2.0. This table was first prepared during our progress report for the current grant and A2K would like to acknowledge the learnings derived out of the suggestions and feedback it received during the last plan. Please see the table here.

Background to CIS-A2K Program

CIS-A2K is working with the Indic Wikimedia communities since December 2008, when Jimbo Wales came to India and visited Bangalore. In mid-2012 CIS-A2K received a financial grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and since then it has been actively involved in growing the Wikimedia and free knowledge movement in India. Following a grant received from WMF for the period September 2012 to June 2014, CIS-A2K received FDC Grant for the periods July 2014 to June 2015 and July 2015 to June 2016. Based on the 41-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has prepared this year's work plan for July 2016 to June 2017.

Objective

CIS-A2K is committed to improve Wikimedia movement in India by supporting Indic Wikimedia communities and working on Wikimedia projects and collaborating with FOSS and other like minded movement partners. It also strives to catalyse the growth of open and free knowledge movement in South Asia and especially in India. Our main objectives are:

Bringing content under Creative Commons and similar free licenses;
Supporting and empowering Indic Wikimedia communities;
Building and maintaining institutional partnerships in order to support the open knowledge movement and creation of open knowledge resources;
Planning and executing Wikimedia projects with wider community participations and effective consultation;
Fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem;
Building sustainable communities and grooming potential leaders to represent the communities and projects globally.

Context

CIS-A2K has focussed on creating sustainable programmes and capacity development for communities in the last few years. CIS-A2K intends to continue its work during the proposed grant period and would continue to focus on the following Indian language Wikimedia projects: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, Telugu (Focus Language Areas, FLA). In order to achieve higher RoI, A2K will be including Tulu in its language plan from this plan period.

CIS-A2K will continue to provide general support and service to all other Indian language Wikimedia communities for all Wikimedia projects as necessary and as requested by the communities or individuals from the community through its request page and needs assessment workshops.

Community strengthening initiatives will be prioritised in order to address the poor participation of Wikimedians from Indian sub continent in particular and global south in general. CIS-A2K has rolled out initiatives such as Train the Trainer and MediaWiki training, focused edit-a-thons and GLAM activities.

CIS-A2K and Indian language Wikimedia communities would greatly benefit from collaborating with these initiatives and CIS-A2K during this grant period would attempt to bring these communities closer with a series of interactions, hack-a-thons and training sessions.

Our institutional partnerships have played a very important role in content donation, generation of content, attracting new readers and editors and collaborating opportunities with existing community members. They have provided much needed press coverage towards Indian language Wikimedia projects. The institution partnerships and WEP have been redesigned as per community suggestions.

Methodology

This work plan has been prepared based on an extensive engagement with various Wikimedia movement participants and enthusiasts in India. These include:

Wikimedia community members across all Indic communities: We have talked to a large number of Indic Wikimedia community members and specially community members of our focused language areas;
Institutional Partners of CIS-A2K: We have taken feedback and suggestions from our institutional partners regarding the challenges of conducting WEP;
Like-minded advocates of free and open knowledge;
Surveys and Interviews.

Performance against plans and projected targets

Overall

Kannada

Konkani

Marathi

Odia

Telugu

Progress against goals set

Language Area Work Plans

CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts across four focus language areas Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu during the previous work plans. CIS-A2K proposed and initiated Marathi as a focus language project during the last proposal plan. As A2K's strategy of working with FLA has resulted in community building and sustainable outreach efforts, we intend to work with the nascent Tulu community towards making Tulu Wikipedia live.

The Tulu Wikipedia plan is a 'minimal cost program' and is not budgeted same as the other FLA. A2K has been able to build a strong community in Mangalore for the Kannada and Konkani Wikimedia projects. Tulu community draws its editor base and institutional support from Mangalore, hence A2K's plans towards Kannada and Konkani Wikimedia projects can also have the added dimension of Tulu Wikipedia incubation activities.

Detailed work-plan for each of these language areas may be seen here (in alphabetical order):

Woman's day editathon at Christ University

Some of the key factors that determined the July 2016-June 2017 work plan:

Development of Focus Language Area Plan: A2K's strategy of building a plan along with the consultation of the community and further customised as per the feedback received by communities and FDC Staff have resulted well across five languages. CIS-A2K is pleased to inform that during July 2015-June 2016 it engaged with all the five focus language area plans as it has been able to recruit program officers and program associates for the vacant positions. It is important to note that while we are engaging with Tulu Wikipedia community with intentions of making Tulu Wikipedia live, it is also a 'minimal cost' program. It helps A2K in acheiving higher RoI for monetary resources and optimisation of staff and volunteer expertise.
A2K 2.0 as a response to FDC and Indic Wikimedians' Feedback: As a learning derived out of FDC, WMF Board and Indic Wikimedians suggestions, CIS-A2K has revised its program structure and composition of work. Please find details of revised divisional of responsibilities of A2K team.
Partnership and networking with institutions and groups: CIS-A2K has had the privilege of partnering with educational institutions and developmental organisations. These partnerships and collaborations not only resulted in significant quality-content contributions, but also lead to the diversification and expansion of that particular language Wikimedia community. In order to strengthen the communities, increase participation and conduct GLAM activities and attract content donation A2K would look out for possible institutional partnerships.
Providing sustainability and developing leadership skills: A2K has always worked towards enabling Indian Language Wikimedia communities to achieve sustainability and visibility amongst the global communities. We have been greatly privilege to work with the Focus Language Communities and would like to pass on our learning through collaborations with other language communities, while exiting few of our current FLA programs. Through our skill building initiatives such as Train-the-Trainer, Media Wiki Training and Train-a-Wikipedian A2K has also been able to support growth of a new community of volunteers to support the existing community.

Community Strengthening Initiatives

CIS-A2K started two community strengthening initiatives— Train-the-Trainer and MediaWiki Training to grow and strengthen the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated communities, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The earlier iteration of these two programs played an important role in connecting the Indian language Wikimedia communities and fostering multi-lingual projects. This year also CIS-A2K proposes to undertake these two successful community strengthening initiatives. In mid-March 2016, CIS-A2K conducted a 2-day-long nationwide Wikipedia Education Program review workshop that brought students and faculty members from institutions that are running WEP in partnership with CIS-A2K and several important topics such as structural challenges such as academic schedule, institutional interest, faculty buy-in and more importantly response by the students were discussed. This year also CIS-A2K proposes to conduct such a workshop.

Creating Movement Resources

CIS-A2K has been creating resources to help Indic Wikimedia communities. All the resources are created after assessing the communities' need assessment and close interactions with many of the active community members.

CIS-A2K proposed to create the following resources (this also include printed resources):

Wikipedia editing tutorials
PEG and IEG application handbooks;
Handbook on how apply for various WMF scholarships;
Handbook on best practices for Wiki-events, workshops, meetup, outreach and other programs;
FAQ for content donors –give this job to a law school intern. No need of this handbook to be translated to Indian languages.
Bookmarks creation to increase awareness about Indian Wikimedia Projects;

General Support and Service to the Movement

CIS-A2K regularly supports Indic-language Wikimedia communities to conduct workshops, edit-a-thons and events to improve their projects. All these requests are placed at CIS-A2K request page and fulfilled after extensive community discussion and needs assessment.

Currently CIS-A2K is working on a program named Train-a-Wikipedian (TAW) to identify enthusiastic Indic Wikipedians and train and groom them to develop their editing skills. We'll continue empowering Indic Wikimedia community members through this program.

Learning and Evaluation

Following the Global metrics and discussions some members of the Wikimedia community, the A2K program had put together some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work during the last year. We have included some more metrics for evaluation this year.

Evaluation tools

Participation

Number of active editors involved
Number of newly registered users
Number of individuals involved

Content

Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia article pages
Number of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects
Number of bytes added to and/or deleted from Wikimedia projects

Reports

CIS-A2K will undertake monthly and annually review of our work using the above evaluation tools. CIS-A2K report activities and progress to Wikimedia foundation in monthly meetings.^[1] CIS-A2K team will also report the successes and learnings to the Wikimedia India & the Global Community. CIS-A2K team will actively review progress of each language area plan in collaboration with the respective Wikimedia community. Based on this feedback we will undertake mid-course corrections, should there be a need. To summarize following reports will be published in the year of 2016 - 2017:

Progress report (for the current grant)
Impact Report (July 2016 - June 2017)
Monthly report to Wikimedia foundation;
Monthly Newsletters
Annual report to CIS

Monthly Review and Learning Sessions

Last year we wrote about conducting monthly review and learning sessions. Currently CIS-A2K is conducting monthly learning sessions to critically reflect on the successes and failures of our work internally. The learnings are shared with Wikimedia Foundation for their feedback and suggestion. We'll continue conducting monthly reviews and learnings and progress will be shared with Wikimedia Foundation. We will try to share the same the Wikimedia India members.

Budget

Please find link to CIS-A2K program budget for proposed grant period July 2016-June 2017 here

Feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here.
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.

Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at tanveer@cis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please write to us and we can set up a telephone/Skype call.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-a2k-work-plan-july-2016-june-2017

Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary

subha — 2013-02-28T04:32:29Z

Odia Wikipedia saw its first edit on January 29, 2004. After a dormancy of many years it got revived in 2011. To commemorate the effort of many volunteer wikipedians, a celebratory event was organized on January 29, 2013 in Bhubaneswar. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event.

Odia Wikipedia recently has celebrated its 9 ^th anniversary. January 29 is considered to be that day when someone made a first edit on it. Communities from Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Nalconagar joined hands to celebrate this event with a panel discussion on "Application of Odia language in e-media". The discussion was coordinated by Nilambar Rath, Director of Academy for Media Learning. The event was organized by the Odia Wiki Community with support from The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with Academy for Media Learning. Panelists who took part in the discussion were Prasanna Kumar Mohanty, Director of "Odia Bhasa Pratisthan", Dr. Prafulla Tripathy, Odia linguist and writer, Dr. Dhanada Mishra, Academician and Director-Academics, KMBB College of Engineering, Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Jatindra Das, Senior journalist and founder, Odisha.com and Subhransu Panda, Senior journalist, Sambad. Wikipedians, students and journalists took active part in the discussion.

To celebrate the success of Odia Wikipedia, wikipedians joined the guest to cut a “Chhenapoda” and light Deepam as an integral part of the Odia culture.

The discussion began with Nilambar Rath speaking briefly about the agenda of the meeting and about the current scenario of the use of Odia language in media especially in the web. Prasanna Kumar Mohanty spoke about how the true form of the language should be taken to public via media. He also emphasized about the need to sacrifice our conventional way of approach and adopt new technologies like Wikipedia. Many such efforts are not rewarded because of the lack of support from the government even though funding is available for such development. Odia linguist Prafulla Tripathy explained about the lack of public interest to pledge for declaring Odia as a classical language even though Odia holds the 31^st position among 6500 world languages. "The language of our personal lives, social interaction and verbal communication never gets documented. The confusion among various linguists is another obstacle to take Odia to a global level. If the script grammar is kept in focus and script and eventually the fonts are simplified then they would be easier to be used online", he expressed. Dr. Tripathy also shared his experience of his interaction with other Indian language experts at places where he worked such as on OCR (Optical character reading) software which could be a great tool to digitize many precious resources. He offered his support for helping with OCR in Odia. Few other aspects of simpler approaches of scripts discussed were glossary, Odia-English and English-Odia lexicon, spell check feature for typing and interactive e-learning which could boost the effort of the wikipedians.

Prof. Dhanada Mishra took the audience through the free and open source culture and Linux and future role of Odia Wikipedia to tackle the problems of primary education. He thanked the wikipedians for their noble effort and showed his interest in promoting it more in academics. Subhashish Panigrahi discussed about the role of Odia Wikipedia in documenting various resources in Odia Wikipedia. He brought various technical problems that common men face while typing, contributing to Wikipedia and how they could be handled. He also proposed a plan for bringing more language experts and museum curators to the community which would increase the spectrum of resource and capacity for the Odia Wikimedia community.

Jatindra Das, founder of the first online Odia newspaper Odisha.com discussed about the hurdles of using Odia Unicode and acceptance level in the society for it. Senior journalist Subhransu Panda discussed about the usage of various fonts and how adopting Unicode could bring a lot of information to the public.

Nilambar Rath, Director, Academy for Media Learning talked about the future efforts of Odia Wikipedia community. He elaborated how media could be used as an essential tool for taking Wikipedia to more people. Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the very active Wikipedians closed the ceremony with a brief talk about the achievements, education program and impact of Odia Wikipedia in the recent past and community building plans.

There was a press meet in the afternoon. Wikipedians interacted with the media about future prospects of Odia Wikipedia and its current state.


Odia wikipedians being felicitated by the guests

Few glimpses of the event Audio Podcast

Press coverage:

ଓଡ଼ିଶାନ୍: ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ.
ସମ୍ବାଦ: ଲିପି ବ୍ୟାକରଣ ଓ ମାନକ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ରୟୋଗ ଜରୁରୀ.
eindiadiary.com:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Fullorissa.com: Odia Wikipedia’s 9th anniversary. Fullorissa.com
orissadiary.com:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Indiaeducationdiary.in:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Odishaviews.com:Odia language workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia: Application of Odia language in e-media. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-odia-wikipedias-ninth-anniversary

Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 3)

ananth — 2014-02-14T05:13:36Z

In a three-part study, Ananth Padmanabhan examines the "John Doe" orders that courts have passed against ISPs, which entertainment companies have used to block dozens, if not hundreds, of websites. In this, the third and concluding part, he looks at the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act, and concludes that both those laws restrain courts and private companies from ordering an ISP to block a website for copyright infringement.

In the third part of his study, Ananth Padmanabhan looks into the fair use provisions recently introduced in respect of mere conduit intermediaries by the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, and concludes that there is no scope for any general, or specific, access blocking orders at the behest of the plaintiff in a civil suit, in India. He also argues that the Information Technology Act, 2000 read with the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011 do not in any manner permit the Government to override the provisions of the Copyright Act, 1957 (as amended) while facilitating the denial of access to websites on grounds of copyright infringement, because the Copyright Act, 1957, is a complete code by itself.

In 2010, the controversial Copyright (Amendment) Bill came up for deliberation before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development headed by Mr. Oscar Fernandes. While a major part of the discussion on this amendment revolved around the altered royalty structure and rights allocation between music composers and lyricists on the one hand and film producers on the other, it can be safely stated that this is the most significant amendment to the Copyright Act, 1957 for more than this one reason. The amendment seeks to reform the Copyright Board, bring in a scheme of statutory licenses, expand the scope of performers’ rights and introduce anti-circumvention measures to check copyright piracy. As part of its ambitious objective, the amendment also attempts a new fair use model to protect intermediaries and file-sharing websites.

The Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, which gives expression to this fair use model through Sections 52(1)(b) and (c), reads thus:

52. Certain acts not to be infringement of copyright. - (1) The following acts shall not constitute an infringement of copyright, namely:

(a) to (ad) - *****

(b) the transient or incidental storage of a work or performance purely in the technical process of electronic transmission or communication to the public;

(c) transient or incidental storage of a work or performance for the purpose of providing electronic links, access or integration, where such links, access or integration has not been expressly prohibited by the right holder, unless the person responsible is aware or has reasonable grounds for believing that such storage is of an infringing copy:

Provided that if the person responsible for the storage of the copy has received a written complaint from the owner of copyright in the work, complaining that such transient or incidental storage is an infringement, such person responsible for the storage shall refrain from facilitating such access for a period of twenty-one days or till he receives an order from the competent court refraining from facilitating access and in case no such order is received before the expiry of such period of twenty-one days, he may continue to provide the facility of such access;

From a plain reading, it is clear that two important exceptions are carved out: one, in respect of the technical process of electronic transmission and the other, in respect of providing electronic links, access or integration. The material distinction between these exceptions is the presence of a take-down proviso in respect of the latter kind of activity, ie. when providing electronic links, access or integration. This window of opportunity is not provided to the copyright owner when the third party is an ISP involved in the pure technical process of electronic transmission of data.

In R.K. Productions, the court was not informed of the introduction of these provisions vide the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, despite the hearing happening on a date subsequent to the amendment coming into force. This probably influenced the outcome as well, since the court held that ISPs were liable to block access to infringing content, once the specific webpage was brought to the notice of the concerned ISP. Newly introduced Section 52(1)(b) however makes it abundantly clear that ISPs cannot, in any manner, be held liable when they are acting as mere conduit pipes for the transmission of information. This legal position is also materially different from jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom where, the ISPs though not liable for copyright infringement, are statutorily mandated to lend all possible assistance such as take-down or blocking of access upon notice of infringement being furnished to them. This dichotomy between liability for infringement on the one hand and a general duty to assist in the prevention of infringement on the other is explained clearly by the Chancery Division in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation v. British Telecommunications Plc.[1]

In Newzbin2, the Chancery Division took note of the safe harbour provisions created by the E-Commerce Directive,[2] particularly Articles 12 to 14 that dealt with acting as a “mere conduit”, caching and hosting respectively. The interesting feature with the “mere conduit” exception, which in all other respects is akin to the exception contained in Section 52(1)(b) of the Copyright Act, 1957, is the additional presence of Article 12(3). This provision clarifies that the “mere conduit” exception shall not stand in the way of a court or administrative authority requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement. Article 18 of this Directive also casts an obligation upon Member States to ensure that court actions available under national law permit the rapid adoption of measures, including interim measures, designed to terminate any alleged infringement and to prevent any further impairment of the interests involved. Similarly, the court looked into the Information Society Directive,[3]

Article 8(3) of which provides that “Member States shall ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right.” This Directive was transposed into the domestic law in UK by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, SI 2003/2498, resulting in the insertion of Section 97A in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This provision empowers the court to grant an injunction against a service provider who has actual knowledge of another person using their service to infringe copyright, such as where the service provider is given sufficient notice of the infringement. Finally, the Chancery Division also took note of the Enforcement Directive,[4]

Article 11 of which provided that Member States shall ensure that copyright owners are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property right. This entire legislative scheme compelled the court in Newzbin2 to conclude that an order of injunction could be granted against ISPs who are “mere conduits”, restraining them from providing access to websites that indulged in mass copyright infringement. The court reasoned that the language used in Section 97A did not require knowledge of any particular infringement but only a more general kind of knowledge about certain persons using the ISPs’ services to infringe copyright. Thus, it is seen that in the United Kingdom, though a “mere conduit” activity is not infringement at all, the concerned ISP can be directed by the court to block access to a website that hosts infringing content on the basis of the above legislative scheme. The enquiry should therefore be directed towards whether India has a similar scheme for copyright enforcement.

The Information Technology Act – An Inapplicable Scheme for Website Blocking

The Information Technology Act, 2000[5]read with certain recently framed guidelines provides for a duty that could be thrust upon even “mere conduit” ISPs to disable access to copyrighted works. This is due to the presence of Section 79(2)(c) of this Act, which makes it clear that an intermediary shall be exempt from liability only where the intermediary observes due diligence as well as complies with the other guidelines framed by the Central Government in this behalf. Moreover, Section 79(3) provides that the intermediary shall not be entitled to the benefit of the exemption in Section 79(1) in a situation where the intermediary, upon receiving actual knowledge that any information, data, or communication link residing in or connected to a computer resource controlled by the intermediary is being used to commit an unlawful act, fails to expeditiously remove or disable access to that material on that resource without vitiating the evidence in any manner. In pursuance of Section 79(2)(c), the Central Government has also framed the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which came into effect on 11.04.2011. Rule 4 of these Rules, when read along with Rule 2(d), casts obligation on an intermediary on whose computer system, copyright infringing content has been stored, hosted or published, to disable such information within thirty six hours from when it is brought to actual knowledge of the existence of such content by any affected person.

One way of understanding and interpreting in harmonious fashion, the provisions of the IT Act and the Rules therein and the recent amendments to the Copyright Act, is to contend that the issue of infringement of copyright by “mere conduit” ISPs is governed by Section 52(1)(b), which completely absolves them of any liability, while that of enforcement of copyright through the medium of such ISPs is governed by the IT Act. This bifurcation suffers from the difficulty that Section 79 of the IT Act is not an enforcement provision. It is a provision meant to exempt intermediaries from certain kinds of liability, in the same way as Section 52 of the Copyright Act. This provision, read with Section 81, makes it clear that the IT Act does not speak to liability for copyright infringement. From this, it has to necessarily follow that all issues pertaining to liability for such infringement have to be decided by the provisions of the Copyright Act. Therefore, the scheme in the IT Act read with the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules cannot confer additional liability for copyright infringement on ISPs where the Copyright Act exempts them from liability. More to the point, the intermediary cannot be liable for copyright infringement in the event of non-compliance with Section 79(3) or Rule 4 of the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules read with Section 79(1)(c) of the IT Act. Rule 4 of the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules, 2011, to the extent that it renders intermediaries outside the protective ambit of Section 79(1) upon failure to disable access to copyrighted content, is of no relevance as “mere conduits” have already been exempted from liability under Section 52(1)(b). Moreover, since these provisions in the IT Act do not deal with enforcement measures such as injunction orders from the court to disable access to infringing content in particular or infringing websites in general, it would be wrong to contend that the scheme in India is similar to the one in the United Kingdom where the issue of infringement has been divorced from that of enforcement.

To conclude, Section 52(1)(b) is a blanket “mere conduit” exemption from liability for copyright infringement that stands uninfluenced by the presence of Section 79 of the IT Act or the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules. In the absence of a legislative scheme for enforcement in India akin to Section 97A of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Indian Courts cannot grant an injunction directing such “mere conduit” ISPs to block access to websites in general or infringing content in particular and any such action is not even maintainable in law post the insertion of Section 52(1)(b). The decision to the contrary in the R.K.Productions case is incorrect.

[1]. [2011] EWHC 1981 (Ch.). Hereinafter referred to as Newzbin2.

[2]. European Parliament and Council Directive 2000/31/EC on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market (8 June 2000). This Directive was transposed into the domestic law in UK by the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, SI 2002/2013.

[3]. European Parliament and Council Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (22 May 2001).

[4]. European Parliament and Council Directive 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (29 April 2004). This Directive was transposed into the UK domestic law primarily by the Intellectual Property (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2006, SI 2006/1028.

[5]. Hereinafter referred to as the IT Act.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/john-doe-orders-isp-blocking-websites-copyright-3

Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 2)

ananth — 2014-03-06T16:48:18Z

In a three-part study, Ananth Padmanabhan examines the "John Doe" orders that courts have passed against ISPs, which entertainment companies have used to block dozens, if not hundreds, of websites. In this, the second part, he looks at the law laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court on secondary and contributory copyright infringement, and finds that those wouldn't allow Indian courts to grant "John Doe" orders against ISPs.

In the second part of his study, Ananth Padmanabhan proceeds to examine applying a general theory of secondary or contributory copyright infringement against ISPs. He traces the basis for holding a third party liable as a contributory by closely examining the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court in Sony Corp. v Universal City Studios[1] and MGM Studios, Inc. v Grokster, Ltd.[2] and concludes that this basis does not hold good in the case of a mere conduit intermediary such as an ISP.

[1]. 464 U.S. 417 (1984). Hereinafter referred to as Betamax.

[2]. 545 U.S. 913 (2005). Hereinafter referred to as Grokster.

Primary and Secondary Infringement

Liability for copyright infringement can either be primary or secondary in character. In the case of ISPs, liability as primary infringers does not arise at all, and it is in their capacity as conduit pipes facilitating the transmission of information that they could be held secondarily liable. Even in such cases, the contention of copyright owners is that once the ISP is notified of infringing content, it has the primary responsibility of preventing access to such content. This contention is essentially rooted in a theory of secondary infringement based on knowledge and awareness, and the means to prevent further infringement.

The controversy around a suitable model of secondary infringement is reflected in two judicial pronouncements – separated by a gap of more than two decades – delivered by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Sony Corp. v Universal City Studios,[3] the US Supreme Court held that the manufacturers of home video recording devices known in the market as Betamax would not be liable to copyright owners for secondary infringement since the technology was capable of substantially non-infringing and legitimate purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court even observed that these time-shifting devices would actually enhance television viewership and hence find favour with majority of the copyright holders too. The majority did concede that in an appropriate situation, liability for secondary infringement of copyright could well arise. In the words of the Court, “vicarious liability is imposed in virtually all areas of the law, and the concept of contributory infringement is merely a species of the broader problem of identifying the circumstances in which it is just to hold one individual accountable for the actions of another”. However, if vicarious liability had to be imposed on the manufactures of the time-shifting devices, it had to rest on the fact that they sold equipment with constructive knowledge of the fact that their customers may use that equipment to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. In the view of the Court, there was no precedent in the law of copyright for the imposition of vicarious liability merely on the showing of such fact.

Notes of dissent were struck by Justice Blackmun, who wrote an opinion on behalf of himself and three other judges. The learned Judge noted that there was no private use exemption in favour of making of copies of a copyrighted work and hence, unauthorised time-shifting would amount to copyright infringement. He also concluded that there was no fair use in such activity that would exempt it from the purview of infringement. The dissent held the manufacturer liable as a contributory infringer and reasoned that the test for contributory infringement would only be whether the contributory infringer had reason to know or believe that infringement would take place and not whether he actually knew of the same. Off-the-air recording was not only a foreseeable use for the Betamax, but also its intended use, for which Sony would be liable for copyright infringement.

This dissent has considerably influenced the seemingly contrarian position taken by the majority in the subsequent decision, MGM Studios, Inc. v Grokster, Ltd.[4] This case called into question the liability of websites that facilitated peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. Re-formulating the test for copyright infringement, the US Supreme Court held that ‘one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties’. In re-drawing the boundaries of contributory infringement, the Court observed that contributory infringement is committed by any person who intentionally induces or encourages direct infringement, and vicarious infringement is committed by those who profit from direct infringement while declining to exercise their right to limit or stop it. When an article of commerce was good for nothing else but infringement, there was no legitimate public interest in its unlicensed availability and there would be no injustice in presuming or imputing intent to infringe in such cases. This doctrine would at the same time absolve the equivocal conduct of selling an item with substantial lawful as well as unlawful uses and would limit the liability to instances of more acute fault than the mere understanding that some of the products shall be misused, thus ensuring that innovation and commerce are not unreasonably hindered.

The Court distinguished the case at hand from Betamax, and noted that there was evidence here of active steps taken by the respondents to encourage direct copyright infringement, such as advertising an infringing use or instructing how to engage in an infringing use. This evidence revealed an affirmative intent that the product be used to infringe, and an active encouragement of infringement. Without reversing the decision in Betamax, but holding that it was misinterpreted by the lower court, the Court observed that Betamax was not an authority for the proposition that whenever a product was capable of substantial lawful use, the producer could never be held liable as a contributory for the use of such product for infringing activity by third parties. In the view of the Court, Betamax did not displace other theories of secondary liability. This other theory of secondary liability applicable to the case at hand was held to be the inducement rule, as per which any person who distributed a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as evidenced by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, would be liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties. However, the Court clarified that mere knowledge of infringing potential or of actual infringing uses would not be enough under this rule to subject a distributor to liability. Similarly, ordinary acts incident to product distribution, such as offering customers technical support or product updates, support liability etc. would not by themselves attract the operation of this rule. The inducement rule, instead, premised liability on purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, and thus did nothing to compromise legitimate commerce or discourage innovation having a lawful promise.

These seemingly divergent views on secondary infringement expressed by the U.S. Supreme Court are of significant relevance for India, due to the peculiar language used in the Indian Copyright Act, 1957.[4]

Section 51 of the Act, which defines infringement, bifurcates the two types of infringement – ie. primary and secondary infringement – without indicating so in as many words. While Section 51(a)(i) speaks to primary infringers, 51(a)(ii) and 51(b) renders certain conduct to be secondary infringement. Even here, there is an important distinction between 51(a)(ii) and 51(b). The former exempts the alleged infringer from liability if he could establish that he was not aware and had no reasonable ground for believing that the communication to the public, facilitated through the use of his “place”, would amount to copyright infringement. The latter on the other hand permits no such exception. Thus, any person, who makes for sale or hire, or by way of trade displays or offers for sale or hire, or distributes for the purpose of trade, or publicly exhibits by way of trade, or imports into India, any infringing copies of a work, shall be liable for infringement, without any specific mens rea required to attract such liability. It is in the context of the former provision, ie. 51(a)(ii) that the liability of certain file-sharing websites for copyright infringement has arisen.[5]

Mere Conduit ISPs – Secondary Infringement Absent

In MySpace, the Delhi High Court examined the liability for secondary infringement on the part of a website that provides a platform for file-sharing. While holding the website liable, the Single Judge considered material certain facts such as the revenue model of the defendant, which depended largely on advertisements displayed on the webpages, and automatically generated advertisements that would come up for a few seconds before the infringing video clips started playing. Shockingly, the Court even considered relevant the fact that the defendant did provide for safeguards such as hash block filters, take down stay down functionality, and rights management tools operational through fingerprinting technology, to prevent or curb infringing activities being carried on in their website. This, in the view of the Court, made it evident that the defendant had a reasonable apprehension or belief that the acts which were being carried on in the website could infringe someone else’s copyright including that of the plaintiff. The logic employed by the Court to attribute liability for secondary infringement on file-sharing websites is befuddling and reveals complete disregard for the degree of regulatory authority available on the internet even where the space, i.e., the website, is supposedly “under the control” of a person. However, a critical examination of this decision is not relevant in understanding the liability of mere conduit ISPs. This is for the reason that none of the factual considerations relied on by the Single Judge to justify imposition of liability on a file-sharing website under Section 51(a)(ii) arise when the defendant is an ISP that only provides the path for content-neutral transmission of data.

This was completely ignored by the Madras High Court in R.K.Productions v. B.S.N.L.,[6] where the producers of the Tamil film “3”, which enjoyed considerable pre-release buzz due to its song “Kolaveri Di”, sought an omnibus order of injunction against all websites that host torrents or links facilitating access to, or download of, this film. Though this was worded as a John Doe plaint by branding the infringers as unknown administrators of different torrent sites and so on, the real idea was to look to the resources and wherewithal of the known defendants, ie. the ISPs, to block access to the content hosted by the unknown defendants.

This prompted the ISPs to file applications under Or. VII, Rule 11 of the Civil Procedure Code, seeking rejection of the plaint on the ground that the suit against them was barred by law. The Single Judge of the Madras High Court dismissed these applications for rejection of the plaint, after accepting the contention that the ISPs are necessary parties to the suit as the act of piracy occurs through the channel or network provided by them. The High Court heavily, and incorrectly, relied on MySpace without appreciating the distinction between a mere conduit ISP and a file-sharing website such as MySpace or YouTube, as regards their respective roles and responsibilities, the differing degrees of regulatory control over content enjoyed by them, and most importantly, the recognition and formalisation of these distinctions in the Copyright Act, 1957, vide the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012.

[3]. 464 U.S. 417 (1984). Hereinafter referred to as Betamax.

[4]. 545 U.S. 913 (2005). Hereinafter referred to as Grokster.

[5]. Hereinafter the Act.

[6]. Super Cassette Industries Ltd. v MySpace Inc., MIPR 2011 (2) 303 (hereinafter referred to as MySpace). This decision of the Delhi High Court has been rightly criticised. See http://cis-india.org/a2k/blog/super-cassettes-v-my-space (last accessed on 24.03.2013).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/john-doe-orders-isp-blocking-websites-copyright-2

Centre for Internet and Society

Citizen Activism the Past Decade

Topics that contributors can explore:

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia

Highlights

Increased editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia

Increased number of articles on Konkani Wikipedia

Translated Media Wiki messages

Re-release of Konkani Vishwaksh under Creative Commons License

Initiated & Completed 30% of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

Signed an MoU with Goa University

White paper by a Linguist

14 Outreach session, over 450 participants, in 3 months

Got consensus from field experts

Wikipedians Speak

CIS-A2K Narrative Report (September 2012 – June 2013)

Background to the Access to Knowledge Programme

Section A: Introduction

Objective of the Narrative Report

Context

A2K Program Achievements (September 2012 to June 2013)

Section B: A2K Programme Impact

Intangible Impact

Tangible Impact

Section C: Learning and Challenges

Outreach

Work Plan Development and Community Communications

Community Engagement/Development

Section D: Progress Report

Outreach Sessions in September 2012

Outreach Sessions in October 2012

Outreach Sessions in November 2012

Outreach Sessions in December 2012

Outreach Session in January 2013

Outreach Session in February 2013

Outreach Sessions in March 2013

Outreach Sessions in April 2013

Outreach Sessions in May 2013

Outreach Sessions in June 2013

Education Programme Updates

Hackathons

Meetups

Celebration and Events

Events Participated In

Section E: Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project

Section F: The Access to Knowledge Work Plan (2013 – 2014)

Language Area Work Plans

Overall Community Support

Section G: Team Orientation and Development

Team’s Professional Development

Exits and New Hires

Section H: Additional Links and Data

Blog Entries

Press Coverage

Newsletters

Talk @ CIS

Section I: Budget Utilization

Footnotes

CIS's Position on Net Neutrality

CIS's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind

CIS Welcomes Standing Committee Report on IT Rules

Ambiguous and Over-reaching Language

Government Confused Whether Rules Are Mandatory or Advisory

Evidence Needed Against Foreign Websites

Cyber Cafes Rules Violate Citizens’ Privacy

Government’s Half-Truths

Lack of Representation of Stakeholders in Policy Formulation

CIS Submission to TRAI Consultation on Free Data

Question 1 Is there a need to have TSP agnostic platform to provide free data or suitable reimbursement to users, without violating the principles of Differential Pricing for Data laid down in TRAI Regulation? Please suggest the most suitable model to achieve the objective.

Is There a Need for Free Data?

Goal: Regulating Gatekeeping

Models for Free Data

Government Incentives For Non-Differentiated Free Data

ISP subsidies

Rewards model

Recharge API

“0.example” sites

OTT-agnostic free data

Unified marketplace

Question 2

Question 1
Is there a need to have TSP agnostic platform to provide free data or suitable reimbursement to users, without violating the principles of Differential Pricing for Data laid down in TRAI Regulation? Please suggest the most suitable model to achieve the objective.