Centre for Internet and Society

Reading For All

radha — 2011-04-02T14:26:41Z

Right To Read campaign has begun in India to voice the needs of the disabled to gain access to books - an article by Lubna Salim in Kolkata Mirror - Saturday, November 14, 2009

This year marks the beginning of the countrywide Right to Read campaign. As part of this campaign there will be road shows in the four metros and then these will be held in the different cities. Actors Nandita Das and Amir Khan and veteran journalist Rajdeep Sardesai are supporting the campaign.

The events of the campaign will include presentations, debates as well as demonstrations. There will be book reading sessions along with stalls whereby different accessibility tools shall be demonstrated. After the success of the first road show of this campaign in Loyola College, Chennai, the second one road was held in Kolkata. The venue for the Kolkata chapter of the Right To Read campaign was NUJS.

“As a visually impaired person I can identify with the goals of the campaign. I have suffered a lot having no access to books and other reading materials. Lack of access tends to make you so dependent on others,” says Moiz Tundawala, 5th year law student, NUJS.

Innumerable Indians are not able to read various printed materials due to their disabilities. Today there are technologies which can help such people to read print, once the materials are converted into alternate formats. These formats could be big print, audio and Braille or any sort of electronic format.

“Just try imagining life without books, without anything to read! Making reading materials available in accessible formats may go a long way in improving the life conditions of the print disabled and also help to make our society more accommodative, more inclusive. It is unfair to deprive some people of such a basic entitlement for no fault of theirs,” adds Moiz.

Our Indian Constitution guarantees its citizens “Right to read” as one fundamental right. But the copyright system does not allow us to convert books into accessible formats for the advantage of people who have print impairment. This leads to the creation of a “book famine”.

The international conventions to which India happens to be a party require it to revise its copyright laws. This will enable persons with the disabilities to avail of information plus material on the same basis as they are available to the others.

Moiz says, “People must endorse this campaign because it will give some people who have to struggle everyday for print access some hope that there are others who understand their concerns and think the same way as they do.”

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/reading-for-all

Right to Read campaign - Chennai (NDTV, Hindu)

radha — 2011-04-02T14:50:32Z

The first event was covered by NDTV Hindu and an interview with Rahul Cherian and Nirmita Narasimhan was telecast on 26th September.

Excerpts from the interview are available on the given links

Part 1

Part 2

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/right-to-read-campaign-chennai-ndtv-hindu

Shanty home

radha — 2011-04-04T06:53:08Z

A nationwide initiative is imploring that you look closely at the greyed-out areas on your GPS maps, says Jaideep Sen in an article in the Time Out Bengaluru Magazine, November 13-26 2009 [Vol 2 Issue 9]

Call up a map of Bangalore city on Google, key in the letters “HAL”, and hit the return key. When the squiggly lines demarcating the area show up, put down the end of your forefinger at the Marathahalli end of the Old Airport Road stretch, and begin tracing your way all the way up to MG Road. It’s an easy route to follow, if you’re merely looking to head from one end of the city to the other, but that isn’t the purpose of this particular exercise, which could well be tried out along all major roadways in any city across India.

As the two Bangalore-based groups Centre for Internet and Society, and Tactical Technology Collective describe it, the attempt of that lingering fingertip is to ascertain the possibilities of creating “maps from the margins and of margins”. While that wouldn’t make immediate sense to most GPS-impelled drivers, what they’re implying is that you look around that route to try and locate and identify the numerous slums, unauthorised settlements and illegal waterways that remain greyed-out along those delineated main roads and prominent residential areas. As co-hosts of a two-month-long nationwide project titled “Maps for Social Change”, the groups are also wagering that you most likely won’t find such expanses on a map. Although, if you were to explore the neighbourhoods of say, HAL, Indira Nagar and Ulsoor, you’d find at least 30 unmarked shanties along that stretch of Old Airport Road alone.

Official figures peg the city’s slum-dwelling population at roughly 10 per cent of an estimated total 5.3 million people, in a little over 200 slums as declared by the Karnataka Slum Clearance Board. While that figure would appear minor in comparison to that of a city like Mumbai, where 60 per cent of approximately 19 million people are said to live in slums, it’s precisely that kind of disparity that this project aims to pin down against latitudinal and longitudinal positions. The purpose, said a note from the groups, is to use “geographical mapping techniques to support struggles for social justice in India”. The end result, it added, could make maps as “tools to fight injustice in society”. To understand that intention, the activists and technology specialists of the two host groups are urging people, and groups involved in social projects especially, to revisit maps and identify possibilities relevant to local campaigns and movements.

“In other countries, there’s a lot of talk about social movements using technology, even in subversive ways, but in India, this hasn’t really taken off,” said Anja (pronounced Anya) Kovacs, a Belgian who has lived in India for eight years, is a member of various campaigns in New Delhi, and is a CIS member spearheading this project. While there are many reasons for Indians to be desisting from technological means, there are many practical applications where mapping techniques can benefit social causes, she insisted.

“One example is to do with people who face displacement caused due to upcoming Special Economic Zones,” explained Kovacs. “The media, at times, portrays people against such models of development as a minority. But if you count the number of people involved in these movements, you’d come up with a mad number, and there are a mad number of struggles going on.” The project, she added, could help place such information on a map, “so that different classes of people could see what the truth actually is”.

The application inviting proposals from groups, individuals and students, begins with an exhortation for people to rethink the concept of maps. “Most of us think of maps as representations of territory,” it states. “But have you wondered why poor people are rarely given prominence, or at times are absent altogether?”

The graphic representation of a map also presents a handy educational medium, added Kovacs. “People working on concerns of sexual harassment, or state repression, public health, water management issues… the possibilities are immense.” Allan Stanley, another CIS member working on the project’s technical aspects, said the aim was to facilitate training, and extend their expertise. “It’s easily doable even for people with little internet experience,” said Stanley. “Where you create mash-ups, with [online photo and video hosting services] Flickr and You Tube, and some overlaid locative work.” At advanced levels, Stanley said that open-map projects could serve to track things like education, and density of schools in areas. Kovacs also spoke of the recent “pink chaddi” campaign, against instances of violence inflicted upon women, where a simple Google map was used to mark locations that attacks were reported from, to highlight the possibility of indicating potentially unsafe urban regions.

Link to original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/shanty-home

Techies mapping change

radha — 2011-04-04T06:51:49Z

A group of 40 Bangaloreans, including techies and social activists, are creating digital maps that will be used to bring social change in India - an article in the Bangalore Mirror by Renuka Phadnis - Monday, December 07, 2009.

Here is an example of how technology can be misused and used. A year ago, following the Mumbai blasts, everyone was talking about how terrorists had misused information from Google maps. Now, a group of 40 people in Bangalore including activists and techies, are creating digital maps that will be used to bring social change in India.

Called “Maps for Making Change” the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, a social organisation that studies the connection between the Internet and society, and the NGO Tactical Tech Collective (Bangalore and UK) are creating a map of India that will show hotspots where social change can be brought about.

Individuals working with groups and organisations working for social change across India, including grassroots activists, NGO workers, artists and researchers, sent in 70 high quality and detailed additions to the digital map. These places across India highlighted issues such as: the socio-economic aspects and consequences of the construction of Bangalore’s Metro, fighting for clean rivers, people’s rights to livelihoods in the Himalayas, monitoring the national implementation of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), mobilising slum dwellers to engage with Mumbai’s new Development Plan, human rights violations in Kashmir, identifying land where internally displaced people can be resettled in the North East.

“You don’t have to be a professional cartographer. With new technologies such as GPS and the Net, anyone can easily add to digital maps,” says Dr Anja Kovacs, fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Bangalore Angle

In a city like Bangalore, the potential of using digital maps is tremendous. For instance, such maps could be used to show which Metro routes and stations Bangaloreans want. Or, it could show how BBMP’s reserved wards are delineated (example, the population profile in Bellandur or Girinagar). The maps could tell us where migrant labour (masons, carpenters, plumbers) enter the city, where they live and where they move on (information that could be useful for Unique Identification Authority of India too!). It can also show where marginalised people live in Bangalore in slums, along railway tracks, by the lakes.

Says Bangalorean techie B V Pradeep, who provided technical support to the map team, “In a map, every person draws what is important to him. One person may draw a mall, another may mark the school and hospital. This map will give visibility to invisible people.”

Bangalorean Rekha Shenoy, who has been involved in rehabilitating earthquake-affected people in Kutch for the past eight years, says, “Such digital maps are a good resource of marking places and social issues that other people know nothing of.”

Any one can access Maps for Making Change. See email list (http://groups.google.co.in/group/maps-for-making-change). The wiki will be up and running in a few days time (maps4change.cis-india.org), said Dr Kovacs. To follow on Twitter, use the hash tag #maps4change.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/techies-mapping-change

The disabled also grapple with copyright issues

radha — 2009-12-03T09:34:58Z

An article in The Hindu by Deepa Kurup - 03rd December, 2009

Go beyond Braille to include e-formats in amendment, they tell Government

MOVING AHEAD: Making books legally available in e-format will fuel technology-enabled learning among the blind.

BANGALORE: Young management executive Hari Raghavan, who is visually impaired, runs into a moral obstacle every time he wishes to read a contemporary novel or a management textbook protected under copyright. For, the Indian Copyright Act (1957) does not explicitly allow for conversion and distribution of reading material in alternative formats persons with disability can access.

While a proposed draft amendment to the Act includes a clause that allows for “specialised formats” such as Braille and sign language, it nevertheless ignores the needs of a large section of the disabled. Rights groups are currently lobbying for equal access for people like Mr. Raghavan and others with medical conditions such as cerebral palsy, dyslexia, multiple sclerosis or paralysis. The amendment is legally discriminatory as it requires these people to apply for licences to the Copyright Board, which will finalise licence terms and royalties, explains Rahul Cherian, a copyright lawyer working with Inclusive Planet, a non-governmental organisation working in this sector.

'Use technology’
Mr. Raghavan’s dilemma is precisely what drives the need to modify this clause. An IBM employee set to receive the Empowerment of People with Disability 2009 Award from President Pratibha Patil on Thursday, his blindness was a “deteriorating condition” so he never took to Braille. “Like me, a significant number of the ‘late blind’ use computers and e-formats to read. Making books legally available in e-formats is critical as it will fuel greater technology-enabled learning among the blind,” he says.

In a country where less than 0.5 per cent of printed material is available in e-format, it is imperative that the law makes it easier to access copyrighted works, Mr. Cherian explains. His Right to Read campaign, in association with Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, attempts to address these very issues. “Why should a person with cerebral palsy who cannot hold a book or a dyslexic person having trouble reading print not be treated on a par with someone who uses Braille?” he asks.

Onscreen keyboard
For instance, 26-year-old Deepa Narasimhan suffers from spinal muscular dystrophy. Her condition does not allow her to hold a book or flip through its pages. However she can read text on her computer using an onscreen keyboard. This self-taught graphic designer says in this “technological world” such legislation could change the way she looks at making copies of books. “If there was a legal and easy way for us to get a book converted, it would make a world of difference,” she says. At present she has to scan every page of a textbook for her correspondence course. “I find it difficult to make people understand why I need everything in an e-format. Recognising my condition legally and making a provision for us would really broaden our horizon.”

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-disabled-also-grapple-with-copyright-issues

The Option To Read

radha — 2011-04-02T14:42:26Z

A blog in ‘thinkopotamus’ by Mr. Shreekumar Varma, Chief Guest, Right to Read Campaign’s first road show in Loyola College, Chennai

I was inaugurating the Right to Read Campaign's first Indian "road show" in Loyola College, Chennai, a couple of weeks ago when i realised that what we always take for granted is often a luxury or even impossibility for many others. For example, 70 ml people in India cannot access the printed word. Not because of illiteracy but due to some disability or other--- like blindness, dyslexia, etc. Click on the title of this entry to know more.

When I spoke during the event I said something that's been with me for some time. Calling people mentally challenged or visually challenged-- things like that--- tends to separate them and dump them with insurmountable disadvantage. We are becoming so politically correct in so many things today that we are losing touch with human correctness. I noticed during the event that when the blind spoke, they called themselves "blind" while the sighted called them "visually challenged". I said, in that case we should have sugar-challenged (diabetics), size-challenged, etc. When we realise that we are ALL a blend of advantage and disadvantage, ability and disability, then we can see the vulnerability in others as easily as we see it in ourselves.

I remember, exactly 20 years ago, I was "scribing" for a blind student in MCC, the college where I once studied and was at that time teaching for a year. I was writing the student's exam answers as he dictated. All at once, he stopped and said, "Sir, are you Shreekumar Varma?" Puzzled, I said yes. He told me he'd heard me speak during a programme I'd put together for All India Radio three months earlier, and now he recognised my voice! It was a revelation. The world that we cannot grasp is a bigger world than we think.

20 years later. Here I was at Loyola, kicking off a campaign. Well, I also promised them I'd do everything I could to drive the message home. And I am--- on Facebook, Twitter and "word of mouth".

Soon after that day, I contacted my editor at Harper Collins and brought her and Ms. Nirmita Narasimhan of CIS (centre for internet & society) together. The Copyright Act, unchanged since it was born (two years after me!), still makes it illegal to transform printed works into convenient forms for the disabled. I hope my Maria's Room will be read by many who can't read other books. We are still exploring ways of accomplishing this. The novel will be out in November this year, and will be a source of great satisfaction to me: the cover design is my son's, and everyone would have the option to read it.

Link to the blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-option-to-read

They fight for the visually challenged

radha — 2011-04-02T12:48:45Z

Times News Network - A report on the press conference held at the Press Club, Bangalore on 15th April, 2010.

Bangalore: The National Access Alliance (NAA) on Thursday opposed the Centre’s move to amend the Copyright Act 1957, which will prevent NGOs, educational institutions and persons with disabilities from converting reading material into audio, digital and other formats.

Nirmita Narasimhan, programming manager for the Centre for Internet and Society, on Thursday said: “Roughly, one lakh books are published every year, but only 700 are available to the blind in an accessible format. And most of these are illegally converted by NGOs. But what else can these organizations do?”

Converting texts into formats involves applying for a licence, which takes about three months; still it may take many more months for actual conversion to happen. Any student would lose a year by then, she explained.

Executive director of the centre, Sunil Abraham said: “It is important to remember that everyone is only temporarily visually-enabled. The issue affects all of us. Unlike American students, print-disabled Indians cannot freely convert their study books into MP3 format.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/they-fight-for-the-visually-challenged

UID: A Debate on Fundamental rights

radha — 2011-04-02T12:33:44Z

UID: A debate on the Fundamental Rights - was jointly organized by the Citizen Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties - Karnataka, Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society on April 16th at IAT, Queens Road, Bangalore - An article in the Prajavani news paper - April 17th.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/uid-a-debate-on-fundamental-rights

UID is an invasion of privacy: Experts

radha — 2011-04-02T12:33:19Z

The Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) came in for much criricism at the first of a series of debates on the issue organised in the city on Friday - Deccan Chronicle, April 17th.

Bengaluru, April 16: Legal experts and several ordinary people find the move to give all citizens of the country an identity number an invasion of their privacy. The Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) came in for much criricism at the first of a series of debates on the issue organised in the city on Friday.

Participants found the idea of concentrating so much power in one authority frightening. One of the panelists Usha Ramanathan of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies said that in two or three years people would not be able to travel without carrying their identity numbers on them. "The logic behind this is that if you don't have a number, you don't exist. Our personal information will be fed into the systems of various agencies with a certain set of people handling that data. Allowing so much power in the guise of security is handing too much control to the State," Ms Ramanathan said.

Malavika Jayaram of the Centre for internet and Society, described the UID as “a technological solution to a problem that isn't even technological in nature.”

Gautam John of Pratham Books, however, felt that a mechanism such as the UID could help identify school dropouts and in tracking quality of education.

But most complained about a lack of clarity on the issue

Link to the original article.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/uid-is-an-invasion-of-privacy-experts

UN Official pledges support to tackle Copyright Challenges for the Visually Impaired

radha — 2011-04-02T14:34:04Z

Article on the UN News Centre - New York, Nov 11 2009 6:10PM

The head of the United Nations agency entrusted with protecting intellectual property rights has pledged support for efforts to improve access to copyright-protected works for the world’s blind or visually impaired persons.
“Let me assure you that this is a priority area for the World Intellectual Property Organization (<"http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2009/article_0048.html">WIPO),” Director General Francis Gurry told participants at a conference in New Delhi today.

According to the agency, over 314 million blind or visually impaired people worldwide stand to benefit from a more flexible copyright regime adapted to current technological realities.

Individuals with reading impairment often need to convert information into Braille, large print, audio, electronic and other formats using assistive technologies. It is estimated that only 5 per cent of published books in developed countries are converted into formats accessible to the reading impaired. In India this number is even lower, at only 0.5 per cent, impeding educational and employment opportunities for the country’s nearly 70 million reading impaired citizens.

“While, today, sighted individuals enjoy unprecedented access to copyright-protected content, in some contexts, social, economic, technological and legal factors, including the operation of copyright protection systems, can combine to seriously impede access to such works by the blind or other reading impaired persons,” WIPO stated in a news release.
The agency added that the widespread use of digital technologies, in particular, has led to discussions on how to maintain a balance between the protection available to copyright owners, and the needs of specific user groups, such as reading impaired persons.

Mr. Gurry noted that innovation and affordability are key considerations when addressing the specific requirements of the visually impaired in developing countries.

He called for joining forces with UN partners, including the World Health Organization (<"http://www.who.int/">WHO) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (<"http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=29008&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html">UNESCO), to make best use of the expertise and skills that are available and move forward on these important questions.

For more details go to UN News Centre

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/un-official-pledges-support

Want to bring social change? This map shows the way

radha — 2009-12-21T07:55:15Z

By siliconindia news bureau, Tuesday,08 December 2009, 14:13 hrs

Bangalore: A group of 40 people in Bangalore including techies and activists, are creating digital maps called 'Maps for Making Change' that will be used to bring social change in India. The Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, a social organization that studies the connection between the Internet and society, and the NGO Tactical Tech Collective (Bangalore and UK) are creating a map of India that will show hotspots where social change can be brought about.

Individuals working with groups and organizations working for social change across India, including grassroots activists, NGO workers, artists and researchers, sent in 70 high quality and detailed additions to the digital map, reports Renuka Phadnis of Bangalore Mirror. These places across India highlighted issues such as: the socio-economic aspects and consequences of the construction of Bangalore's Metro, fighting for clean rivers, people's rights to livelihoods in the Himalayas, monitoring the national implementation of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), mobilizing slum dwellers to engage with Mumbai's new Development Plan, human rights violations in Kashmir, identifying land where internally displaced people can be resettled in the North East.

"You don't have to be a professional cartographer. With new technologies such as GPS and the Net, anyone can easily add to digital maps," says Dr. Anja Kovacs, Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
In a city like Bangalore, the potential of using digital maps is tremendous. For instance, such maps could be used to show which Metro routes and stations Bangaloreans want. The maps could tell us where migrant labor enter the city, where they live and where they move on. Bangalore based techie B.V. Pradeep, who provided technical support to the map team says, "In a map, every person draws what is important to him. One person may draw a mall, another may mark the school and hospital. This map will give visibility to invisible people."

Anyone can access Maps for Making Change. See email list (http://groups.google.co.in/group/maps-for-making-change). The wiki will be up and running in a few days time (maps4change.cis-india.org), said Dr Kovacs. To follow on Twitter, use the hash tag #maps4change.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/want-to-bring-social-change-this-map-shows-the-way

Wikipedia Academy in Mangalore

radha — 2011-04-02T15:20:23Z

The one-day workshop will focus on the use of Indian languages in Wikipedia, editing and its application in academics.

Department of Mass Communications and Al Madhyam of the St. Aloysius College, Mangalore in collaboration with Centre for Internet and
Society, Bangalore are holding a State-level Wiki-Academy in Mangalore on 22nd August, 2009. The one-day workshop will focus on the use of
Indian languages in Wikipedia, editing and its application in academics.

Registration is free. Register before 21st August for the workshop.Registration is open on the day of the event, as well.

Wikipedia editors will speak about the history of Wikipedia and its role in making information freely available to people in several languages.
They will also provide hands-on training on editing and improving articles on Wikipedia.

The talks for this edition will be presented by:
Prashanth N S (editor, English Wikipedia)
Hari Prasad Nadig (sysop, Kannada Wikipedia)

More details on the program is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Prashanthns/Wikiconference

http://hpnadig.net/sites/hpnadig.net/files/WikiAcademy.pdf

(Feel free to pass this on to your friends in Mangalore)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-academy-in-mangalore

WIPO Director General Pledges Support for India’s Visually Impaired Community

radha — 2011-04-02T14:34:21Z

An article in the WIPO website on the “Right to Read of persons with print disabilities and copyright challenges” organized by the VIP community in cooperation with the Government of India in New Delhi on November 11, 2009.

WIPO Director General Francis Gurry met representatives of India’s visually impaired (VIP) community at a conference on the “Right to Read of persons with print disabilities and copyright challenges” organized by the VIP community in cooperation with the Government of India in New Delhi on November 11, 2009, and reaffirmed WIPO’s commitment to supporting international attempts to improve access to copyright protected works by visually impaired persons (VIPs). “Let me assure you that this is a priority area for the World Intellectual Property Organization,” Mr. Gurry said.

More than 314 million blind or visually impaired people around the world stand to benefit from a more flexible copyright regime adapted to current technological realities. Individuals with reading impairment often need to convert information into Braille, large print, audio, electronic and other formats using assistive technologies. It is estimated that only 5% of published books in developed countries are converted into formats accessible to the reading impaired. In India, however, only 0.5% of works are published in accessible formats. This has an adverse impact on the educational and employment opportunities of the country’s nearly 70 million reading impaired citizens.

While, today, sighted individuals enjoy unprecedented access to copyright-protected content, in some contexts, social, economic, technological and legal factors, including the operation of copyright protection systems, can combine to seriously impede access to such works by the blind or other reading impaired persons. Widespread use of digital technologies, in particular, has prompted reconsideration of the question of how to maintain a balance between the protection available to copyright owners, and the needs of specific user groups, such as reading impaired persons. During the meeting, members of the Indian VIP community endorsed WIPO’s role in steering the VIP Initiative at the international level. Mr. Gurry reaffirmed his personal commitment to the specific needs of this community, particularly in developing and least-developed countries: He said innovation and affordability are key considerations when addressing the specific requirements of the VIP in developing countries.

To move forward on these questions, Mr. Gurry noted, we will need to take join ranks with UN partners, namely the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), among others, to make best use of the expertise and skills that are available. The ITU for example, is particularly well placed to provide important technological inputs in the field of telephony and communications and to foster public-private partnerships in this area.

Mr. Gurry welcomed India’s readiness to test the prototype guidelines for trusted intermediaries recently adopted by the WIPO Stakeholders’ Platform. The Director General said that WIPO was ready to explore options to support training/capacity building activities in India for VIPs within the framework of the VIP initiative.

The New Delhi meeting reviewed a series of operational arrangements that could enable fast track access to certain copyright-protected works, particularly educational materials, in local Indian languages. It also focused on the need to incorporate the necessary flexibilities in the Indian Copyright Act 1957 for the benefit of print impaired persons.
Representatives of key organizations such as the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped (NIVH), the Regional Resource Centre of the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY), the Centre for Internet and Society and the Federation of Publishers’ & Booksellers’ Associations in India presented their views and concerns on the subject. The meeting was opened to a larger audience of authors, publishers, collective management organizations and librarians, among others. India’s former Ambassador of India to the United Nations in Geneva, Mr. Swashpawan Singh, honorary advisor on the VIP Initiative to the Director General of WIPO, also participated in the discussions.

Background

In its May 2008 session, the WIPO’s Standing Committee for Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) acknowledged the special needs of VIPs and stressed the importance of dealing, without delay and with appropriate deliberation, with the needs of the blind, visually impaired, and other reading-disabled persons, including discussions at the national and international level on possible ways and means of facilitating and enhancing access to protected works.

In this context, WIPO is currently hosting a global Stakeholders’ platform to explore the specific needs, and concerns, of both copyright owners and reading impaired persons. The aim of the platform is to explore and identify possible operational arrangements to make published works available in accessible formats to the VIP community and within a reasonable time frame. The Platform has recognized the importance of building trust among all parties and has agreed on a first set of principles to facilitate the cross border transfer of published works to print-disabled people, particularly among charities. A draft treaty on the visually impaired persons and for other people with reading disabilities was put forward by the delegations of Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay in May 2009. This, together with other possible proposals and contributions by the members of the SCCR, will be discussed at the 19th Session of the SCCR in December 2009, with a view to establishing a multilateral legal framework in the field of limitations and exceptions for the benefit of VIPs.

Link to the original article

Link to Related News

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wipo-director-general-pledges-support

Wired state of mind

radha — 2011-04-02T13:56:55Z

Information technology is the driver of society today — the basic block of innovation and growth in organisations, the mainstay of the 21st century. The decade bygone was only an indicator of the things to come. Whether its ideas or friendships, the future indubitably belongs to linking-up on the web, writes Malvika Tegta , DNA - Digital Edition, Monday - 28th December, 2009.

Did cyberscape make us cogs on a new machinery or liberate us, empower us or make us vulnerable, enrich us with cultural diversity or homogenise us? There isnt a simple answer. Not in a diverse world digitally sewn into a remarkably new pattern. Here what is certain is what is manifest — the emergence of an information society witness to changes in organisation structure, work cultures, community life, lifestyles, medicine, governance, activism, political participation, commercial business, conventional media, spaces for those on the social fringes, emergence of support systems. And a new connected state of mind.

Increased spread of the web and an exponential increase in internet platforms and applications unleashed a world of possibility for the user like never before. You could collaboratively edit a dynamic encyclopedia, collectively write a book on an idea seeded in the US and source ideas for your art project from perfect strangers from across the globe. There were endless ways of connecting with people we never knew existed — an increased consumption of global culture.

A phenomenon that enabled linking up like never before was social networking, invented in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. The Facebook culture that it spawned was drastically going to change our world as we knew it.

Consider how your life changed. A regular college evening in 2000, which was spent on chai, sutta and long walks, was invested in collecting updates about friends living on the same hostel wing on Facebook or Twitter. You were poked if you were being lazy about parting with your current mood update. When you spread out after college, these platforms kept you perpetually in the loop. You knew whod put on weight, whose relationship status had changed, that xyz was feeling crabby today. You, in turn, made sure that you posted one good picture of you in the Jaisalmer deserts for your 369 Facebook buddies to see.

And, all that upload and download of continuous information was negotiated on multiple browser windows, deftly juggled at work, while you waited for your strawberry crop on Farmville to mature.

In short, social lives of the 15% of us (Indians) with internet access were, if not fundamentally altered, certainly uploaded and impacted over the last 10 years. We became comfortable with the idea of trading identities and data about ourselves with companies like Orkut, Facebook or Google in return for the opportunity to realise the last connection on our six degrees of separation map.

Factors that made 24*7 wired lifestyle possible were miniaturisation, therefore portability computers; the smartening up of mobile phones; better broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity, and social media boom. Laptops made way for notebooks, notebooks for netbooks, and cell phone companies rolled out browser-based phones like the Blackberry and Android handsets.

To grasp the changes in the backdrop of the colossal exchange of data was to revisit Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhans line, made famous way before the Internet got big, “The medium is the message”.

Cultural evolution
The Internet grew up fast over the past 10 years, both embodying social values like connectivity, participation, creating, collaborating and self-sufficiency, and in turn affecting them. It went from read-only sites to being driven by user generated content. The user became the creative dynamo, armed with tools like blogs, review forums, and sites like WordPress, Blogspot, Flickr and YouTube.

Then came social media: Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster, Twitter. Peer-2-peer file sharing application BitTorrent and music sharing sites like Napster came to represent the new philosophy. Here, the user became an active supplier of movies or music without the need for an intermediary server, as was generally the case before.

“The three cultural turns that social networking has introduced have been peer-2-peer networking, collaborations and new processes of publication and dissemination. These have changed our notion of history, cultural production and consumption, and knowledge production,” says Nishant Shah, director, research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. “Sites like Wikipedia have dismantled the processes of knowledge production and learning and introduced new forms of knowledge-sharing, like crowd sourcing. Collaborations have managed new forms of emotional bonding, creative production and interaction which propel the blogosphere and public opinion. These have an impact on questions of consumption, lifestyle patterns, etc.”

24x7 connectivity
The Internet speeded up time and we “drew gratification from speed”. You wanted to look up a breakfast place, a word meaning or answer to the first thing off the top of your head like why are men the way they are? You wanted Google to turn up an answer, and fast.

Since free social working sites became a landmine of data on consumer behaviour, trends, likes and dislikes, they needed to attract and keep the numbers. A few sites maintained a near monopoly; search was to Google, social networking meant Facebook and realtime synonymous with Twitter. Apart from constant re-invention, the sheer potential for large-scale networking was the reason. “My friends stick to Gmail, Facebook and Twitter because we dont want to manage information on too many sites,” says Saurabh Shrivastava, an MBA student.

It was reported that Facebook users woke up to water virtual crops at 4am just to stay ahead on Farmville, or sign into Twitter to see how far the world had come. Instant feedback was the expectation. The experiences and satisfactions were on multiple windows; to be out of that pattern caused anxiety. That was also in part because people fell back upon structures of social support online, which were earlier unavailable; BlackBerry/smartphones to the rescue.

Though the network grew stronger, it essentially comprised weak ties. Technology consultant Atul Chitnis feels that wider reach… reduced real-world interactions are unnatural in the social perspective, and have made social interactions more competitive. “Its more about getting more comments and reactions.”

What writer James Harkin portrayed as the new crack cocaine, professor Clay Shirky saw as not the case of information overload but of “filter failure”.

Virtual & physical
While we became human nodes spending a large part of the day on the network, the physical fed into the virtual world and vice-versa. Shortened attention spans created an attention economy, leading conventional media to get increasingly visual and in some cases sensational.

The response to crisis speeded up and social mobilisation became easier. In Tsunami-hit South and Southeast Asia, people mobilised resources for the disaster-affected. A pub attack on women in Mangalore snowballed into the nationwide Pink Chaddi campaign.

While its constantly said that the Internet connects us virtually and isolates physically, Shah says: “Contrary to popular perception, studies have shown that interface time increases peoples face time because new friendships, alliances and interests are anchored in the physical world.” The quality of interaction, however, will go down, says Chitnis, “due to current social patterns created by loss of cultural distinctiveness, and reduced real-world interaction”. This will especially be true for young adults “who will grow up not knowing a world without social networking”.

Language blends
Shah sites the change in language as the most visible and dramatic. “Easy access to writing and publishing tools has led to the development of new forms of speech and articulation. In countries, where English is not the majority first language, new blends like Singlish (Singapore), Hinglish (India) and Chinglish (China) have emerged as Western contexts, cultural products and ideas proliferated in new vocabularies on the information superhighway. These changes are associated with other changes in terms of new linguistic identities and nationalities,” he says.

Niche goes pop
The growth of the Internet revolutionised the economics of distribution of the media and the entertainment industry, a trend Chris Anderson tracked in his book, The Long Tail. Once it would have been unthinkable to get a copy of a Skinny Puppy CD in the music store because it simply wasnt worth the stocking cost — it wasnt popular enough. And if it wasnt stocked, it was as good as non-existent for a buyer who had never heard of it. That was the era of the blockbuster: what was profitable sold. The Internet changed this: with virtually no space constraints, and the low manufacturing and distribution cost of digital content, a hit became just as good as a miss. Both constituted sales: larger the number the better. Today, Google, Rhapsody, Apple iTunes and Amazon, all operate on that business model. The result: niche worlds have become much more visible and mainstream.

So, as we slow-waltz to the buzz of information, an online etiquette evolves. We gradually learn to turn noise into substance, come to terms with the blurring of private and public, mobilise in crisis, hone the skill of swimming through information to come up with the right find, and learn to direct at least some part of leisure time spent surfing and chatting to tap into the Internets true potential.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wired-state-of-mind

Worries voiced over ID project

radha — 2011-04-02T12:33:50Z

An article in The Hindu - 17th April

The Government of India's Unique Identification (UID) Project came under flak at a workshop organised jointly by the Citizen Action Forum (CAF), the People's Union of Civil Liberties - Karnataka, the Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society.

At the workshop "UID Project: A Debate on Fundamental Rights", held on Friday, members from civil socities expressed their apprehension over the project. Dissenters said the potential dangers to privacy and other civil liberties need to be discussed also.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/worries-voiced-over-id-project