Centre for Internet and Society

The Dark Fibre Files: 'Steal This Film' and the Pirate Bay Trial

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:57Z

In this posting, the fifth blog entry on the making of the film 'Dark Fibre' by Jamie King and Peter Mann, Siddharth Chadha discusses the Swedish trial of the Pirate Bay, which brought up some of the debates on intellectual property rights and piracy that were highlighted in 'Steal This Film'.

In August 2006, Jamie King shot Part I of 'Steal This Film' in Sweden, combining found material, propoganda-like slogans and Vox Pops, along with accounts from members of the Pirate Bay, Piratbryan and the Pirate Party. The film critiques the alleged regulatory capture attempt performed by the Hollywood film lobby in order to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO. The film interviews the Pirate Bay Members Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde and Piratbryan members Rasmus Fleischer, Johan and Sara Anderson, who recount the search and seizure raid conducted by the Swedish police, with the purpose of disrupting the Pirate Bay's BitTorrent tracker. This raid, according to the Pirate Bay members, was against the Swedish law and conducted under pressure from the Motion Pictures Association of America. The documentary was officially released on filesharing networks on 28 December 2007 and, according to the filmmakers, downloaded 150,000 times in the first three days of distribution. The Pirate Bay encouraged the downloading of 'Steal This Film II', announcing the film's release on its blog. 'Steal This Film II' was also screened by the Pirate Cinema, Copenhagen, in January 2008.

In the post-Napster era of peer to peer networks, the Pirate Bay case has been the media highlight on file sharing. After the police raided 12 different premises in May 2006, confiscating 186 servers and causing the torrent tracker to shut down for three days, the Pirate Bay re-opened to double the number of visitors, as its popularity got a shot in the arm with the extensive media coverage. While the MPAA termed the raids as extremely succesful, the Pirate Bay, which restored its servers in three days, thought otherwise. After a preliminary investigation and interrogation by the police, a four thousand page report was prepared by the prosecutor, in preperation of a trial. The Swedish prosecutors filled charges in January 2008 against four individuals they associated with The Pirate Bay for 'promoting other people's infringement of copyright laws'.

The Swedish prosecution raised a furore in the world of Intellectual Property by suing The Pirate Bay. While the prosecutors contended that millions of people get access to copyrighted materials such as movies, songs, and software programs, which can be downloaded for free by going to The Pirate Bay site, the contentious issue lies in the fact that the Pirate Bay itself does not host any files. Just as Google is an index of links, The Pirate Bay is an index of where those files are located. The original files are located across millions of computers around the world, which may only have a small fragment of the original file, and which share these fragments using BitTorrent. According to CableLabs, an organisation of the North American cable industry, BitTorrent represents 18% of all Broadband traffic. Apart from suing The Pirate Bay, the major Hollywood studios have also tried pressure tactics to contain copyright infringement. HBO in 2005, for example, poisoned torrents of its 'Rome' TV show by providing bad chunks of data to clients. It also sent cease and desist letters to the Internet Service Providers of BitTorrent users. The increased pressure from the Hollywood lobby and persistent lawsuits have resulted in the shutdown of various BitTorrent indexing sites, such as the Supernova.org, Torrentspy, LokiTorrent, Demonoid, Oink.cd and EliteTorrents.org.

The Pirate Bay Trial started on 16th Feburary 2009, with defense lawer Per E. Samuelson, arguing that it is legal to offer a service that can be used both legally and illegally, under the Swedish Law. He compared the Pirate Bay services to making cars that can be driven faster than the speed limit. On the second day of the trial, the prosecution dropped half of the charges against the Pirate Bay, due to shortcomings in evidence. Prosecutor Hakan Roswall dropped all charges related to 'assisting copyright infringement', leaving 'assisting making available' as the remaining charge. The next day of the trial saw an argument by the defense attorney Per Samuelson, which was latter dubbed as the King Kong defense, popularised by the blogs, file sharing news feeds and the media. The defense stated:

EU directive 2000/31/EC says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of the Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong... According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia...

The remaining six days of the trial saw questioning of the accused, witness depositions by plaintiffs and conflicting academic research by experts, as the prosecution tried to show that the Pirate Bay was an immensely profitable business that made money by helping others infringe copyright laws. The four operators of the site, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom, were convicted by Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million SEK (approximately 3.5 million USD, 2.7 million EUR) in fines and damages. In its verdict the court stated that 'responsibility for assistance can strike someone who has only insignificantly assisted in the principal crime'.

Even while filming of 'Dark Fibre' was on here in Bangalore, Jamie and his crew were filming outside the courtroom in Stockholm, as the the subjects of 'Steal This Film' went on trial and were convicted. The convicted are now preparing to appeal against the sentence and the fine in the higher Swedish court.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-dark-fibre-files-steal-this-film-and-the-pirate-bay-trial

Letter to Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, Advocating Adoption of FOSS in State IT Academies

sachia — 2011-08-23T02:55:16Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is a signatory to a letter being sent to the Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of FOSS at state IT academies.

The state of Karnataka has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft under which three IT academies have been established in the state, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga, in 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained at these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum at these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers. This MOU will expire in the coming academic year. Therefore, Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India are sending a letter to the Education Secretary for the state of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of a FOSS-based curriculum in these IT academies, and explaining why this would be a useful move.

The Centre for Internet and Society is one of the signatories to this letter, which is reproduced below.

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The Education Secretary

Government of Karnataka

MS Building

Bangalore, Karnataka.

Sub – Microsoft IT Academies in Karnataka

Dear Sri Nadadur,

Karnataka has a MOU with Microsoft under which three 'IT Academies' have been established in the State, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga during 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained in these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum in these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers.

There are a couple of issues with this program.

Firstly Microsoft does not allow the teaching of software other than their own proprietary products. This deprives the teachers from learning alternative Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There are compelling pedagogical, economic, social and political reasons why the education system needs to adopt and promote FOSS. Free software is software which gives the users the freedom to use, study, modify and share, while in the case of proprietary software, the vendor prevents the study, modification and distribution of the software. The freedoms of FOSS provide users and the rest of society with several important advantages, which are briefly listed below:

a. With proprietary software, the teachers only learn be superficial 'users'. This is because, proprietary software companies prevent access to the “source code” that goes into the creation of software. With FOSS, students can learn not only how to use software, but also how create and modify the software applications. Hence with FOSS, students will not just be passive users but will actually construct knowledge. As we know, 'Constructivism' is a key feature of the National Curriculum Framework 2005.

b. FOSS supports the creation of local language versions of the software. For example, Kerala has locally created software in Malayalam for its IT@School program. Similarly the Kannada community Sampada has created a complete Kannada distribution by customising existing FOSS software.

Though Microsoft has provided Windows and Microsoft Office gratis at these academies, it does not provide the same software to the teachers who are trained at the centre. Hence the teachers who intend to purchase computers would need to shell out considerable amounts for the software which they have become used to in the schools. However, if the teachers are trained on FOSS alternatives to Windows and Office, at at negligible price (the cost of a CD which is around Rupees ten), each teacher can be a given a copy of the software. The training can also cover the installation of the software, if required. In this way, the teacher training can lead to the actual use of computers in the schools and teachers homes and make the training meaningful and lead to the greater dispersion of ICTs. Currently, most teachers learn to use these products but have no continuity of learning which makes the training futile.

Of course, the issue of FOSS is not only one of cost. Even if proprietary software were offered free of cost, our nation will eventually have economic losses, due to permanent dependency on software monopoly.

These are some of the reasons why Karnataka has chosen FOSS in its own ICT@Schools program. The computers in Karnataka schools run on GNU/Linux platform under this program. We would like to submit that the teacher training in the IT Academies at Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga also need to be aligned to the IT@School program, and hence teachers should be taught on the same FOSS software platforms as well.

We had a meeting with Ms Vandita Sharma last November, along with Dr Richard Stallman, the founder of the global Free Software movement, and explained these issues. She was sympathetic to these arguments on the public benefits from FOSS and mentioned that the department would take appropriate action in this regard as is consistent with the public interest and those of the teachers and children in our government schools. She mentioned that the MOU with Microsoft is expiring in the coming academic year and and requested us to formally write to her in this regard, hence this letter.

We request that the Government take a firm stance in favor of adopting and promoting FOSS and chose FOSS in its software procurement to align the department to the government schools.

A few months back, organisations that are working to promote FOSS came together to establish a 'Coalition of the FOSS Community in India' whose goal is to collaborate with governments and other organisations to promote the adoption of FOSS, specially in the public sector. Several of the member of this coalition are based in Bangalore, including the Centre for Internet and Society, Sampada, Swatantra Malayalam Computing, Deeproot Linux, IT for Change etc. Faculty from IIM-B, Bangalore University as well as other academic institutions are also members of this coalition. Members of this coalition are willing to provide any technical support or guidance that the government may require in this regard. For eg, FOSS curriculum for both schools and for teacher training is available in Kerala and can be adapted to Karnataka schools. It should be noted that FOSS is already being used in many institutions in Karnataka, including IISC, IIIT-B, IIIT-H, IITK and many engineering colleges.

We hope our submission will be considered by the education department as well as by the government and we look forward to working with you to help bring these ideals into reality. If you think it would be useful, we could plan a small workshop / interaction, or even a series of workshops for different stakeholders, to discuss the issue in more detail and look at the implications of the choice of the software platforms for the ICT programs in the department.

We look forward to your response.

Yours truly

Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India (list of signatories is provided overleaf)

May 9^th 2009.

Copy - Commissioner for Public Instruction, Sri Kumar Naik

Copy - State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Sri Selva Kumar

Copy - Principal Secretary, DPAR (Dept of Personnel and Administrative Reforms) e-Governance

Copy - Principal Secretary, Department of IT

enclosed:

Why Government of Karnataka should adopt and promote FOSS

Kerala IT@Schools project

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/letter-to-education-secretary-may-2009

Seminar on Exceptions and Limitations in Copyright

sachia — 2011-08-17T08:50:52Z

This is a report on a seminar organised by the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, and Government of India on 14 and 15 May 2009, in Kochi, Kerala, to look at exceptions and limitations in copyright. Programme Manager Nirmita Narsimhan, of the Centre for Internet and Society, attended the seminar.

CIS Programme Manager Nirmita Narsimhan attended a seminar on exceptions and limitations in copyright, organised by the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, and Government of India on 14 and 15 May 2009, in Kochi, Kerala. The seminar was intended to bring up key issues affecting access to knowledge, which are to be taken up by the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) later this month. Resource persons identified for different topics were eminent scholars, academicians and practitioners across India. The seminar covered eight topics. On each topic, a paper was presented by a resource person with commentary by an expert in the field, after which there was an open discussion.

The first day featured, amongst others, a paper presented by Lawrence Liang, Distinguished Fellow, CIS. He spoke at length on the exceptions and limitations for education.

The second day featured a paper by Mr. Madhukar Sinha, former Registrar of Copyright. Mr. Sinha presented on the topic 'Use of works by visually impaired and other miscellaneous exceptions of use of works under Indian Copyright Act: Section 52(1) (q), (r), (s), (t), (u), (v), and (x), (y), (z)'. His paper went into great length on definitions of visual disability and tried to evolve an economic model to support conversion of books into accessible formats for the visually challenged. The paper drew parallels with existing laws and best practices in different countries, made a detailed analysis of exceptions for the blind in the light of the Berne three-step test and the TRIPS agreement, and concluded by recommending that the Copyright Act should be amended to include exceptions and limitations which would permit conversion of books into formats in certain special cases. Mr. Sinha also recommended that India should look at solutions which go beyond the limits of the Copyright Act to solve such problems.

The response to this was prepared by Mr. Rahul Cherian of Indo Juris Law offices. The response paper drew attention to the fact that half of the total blind population of the world is in India and that amounts to a population of more than a crore. In the light of the economic and logistic considerations of our country, the Copyright Act should

Expressly include a limitation to permit conversion of books into accessible formats for visually challenged persons;
Permit conversion by stakeholder organizations as well as interested family members and friends of beneficiaries;
Adopt a functional definition of disability and not a medical one as is currently the case in the Persons with Disabilities Act 1995, and extend the benefit of the exception to all persons, who by reason of any disability are unable to access the work in its original format;and
Not restrict conversion only to those formats which are exclusively for the use of blind persons. Visually challenged persons should be able to make use of available mainstream formats like PDFs or Word as well.

The paper also dealt extensively with the Treaty for Improved access for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Other Reading Disabled, which was proposed by the World Blind Union in WIPO last year and is coming up again for discussion later this month.

Please click here to see the complete text of the paper.

The seminar was extremely productive because there was a strong recommendation and support for the inclusion of a limitation for conversion into accessible formats for persons with disabilities in the Indian Copyright Act. All the members present came to a consensus that the Indian Government should take a supportive stand towards the Treaty for the Blind proposed by the WBU at the SCCR this month. A representative of a leading publishing house committed himself to working towards providing books to certain organizations for the blind, if they could assure him that those books would be circulated only to blind persons and not to others.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/seminar-on-exceptions-and-limitations-in-copyright

Access India Meet-Up, 16 May 2009

sachia — 2011-08-17T08:50:46Z

We reproduce a brief report on the meeting of the Access India mailing list hosted at the office of the Centre for Internet and Society on 16 May 2009, between 2.00 pm and 5.00 pm.

The second annual meeting of the members of the Access India mailing list (Bangalore chapter) was held at the office of the Centre for Internet and Society office on 16 May 2009. The meeting was attended by 28 participants.

The agenda included a presentation by representatives from AreaPal, a Bangalore-based social networking group founded by students. AreaPal allows users to locate and connect with people on the basis of their area and neighborhood. It is a genuine neighbourhood networking service. Apart from that, they also provide user-generated news, events and marketplace based information about a user’s area. For further information, please visit www.areapal.com.

This was followed by a presentation by representatives from 3I Infotech, a company which recently launched e-Mudhra, an initiative to roll out digital signatures. The main focus of the discussion was the accessibility of their product. For additional information, please visit http://www.e-mudhra.com/

The next presentation scheduled was by representatives from iVolunteer, an organization that matches volunteers seeking volunteering opportunities with organizations and individuals looking for volunteers in Bangalore. To learn more about the organization, please visit www.ivolunteer.in

The final presentation was an introduction to Inclusive Planet. Inclusive Planet is in the process of building the largest online portal for disabled persons in India. It is intended to be a comprehensive portal containing various resources including employment resources, educational resources, a match-making channel, accessible books section, discussion boards, resources for medical facilities, sports and entertainment center, etc. Please visit http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/

One of the participants wrote a report on the meeting for the mailing list, and we reproduce this below:

The Bangalore offline Access India meeting, which took place today at the CIS (Centre for Internet and Society) campus, was a resounding success. About 30 AI members from different parts of the country were present to listen to four presentations made by IVolunteer, 3i Infotec, Area Pal and Inclusive Planet. All the presenters spoke about their services/products/organisations, and this proved to be useful for those present. For instance, the IVolunteer presentation opened the way for many to request volunteer help (as disability services is one of 12 areas for which the organisation helped with volunteers). Obviously, those present were interested in volunteers willing to read/scan books for them and other similar services.

Interestingly, the idea of digital signatures, which the 3i Infotec representative dealt with, prompted discussion on using digital signatures as a means of certifying disabled persons who wanted to buy railway tickets online. Sanjeev, the representative, was positive that this can be done.

Kavi Raj, who is from Area Pal, explained how their online platform linked people in the same neighbourhood/campus helped them exchange news and information relevant to them. Rounding up the interesting evening was Sachin from Inclusive Planet, who spoke about readable.in, an accessible online space where (visually impaired) people can upload/download books and share the books they have. He said the site already contains about 15,000 ebooks and asked for contributions. Inclusive Planet, which looks at services from the disability perspective, is poised to introduce spaces for restaurant/public place ratings (on the basis of their accessibility) and matrimonial services for the disabled where the emphasis will be on their abilities.

The evening was made more fun and interesting by our hostess Nirmita Narasimhan (attending on behalf of CIS), who introduced her organisation to the audience and gave us a chance to hear each other's voices for the first time (by letting us introduce ourselves). Thanks to Nirmita and Geetha's efforts and hard work, the event was a success. And, of course, we shouldn't forget the space and snacks provided by CIS and the wonderful support their staff provided in escorting us back and forth in the office building.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/access-india-meet-up-16-may-2009

Online Interest in Advani Rises

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:58:08Z

Article by Sruthi Krishnan in the Hindu, 15 May 2009, quoting CIS Research Director Nishant Shah

Online interest in BJP leader L.K. Advani reached its highest point in the last 12 months when a slipper was thrown at him. The data on Google Trends, an application that shows how often a search term has been sought for on Google over time, also shows that the interest in Mr. Advani’s name rose steadily as the general elections approached.

Contrary to what many consider as just another activity on the Internet, searching is the “backbone of cyberspace,” says Nishant Shah, Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. .

The search for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shows a peak in July 2008 in the last 12 months, corresponding to the UPA Government winning the trust vote. That the interest in searching for public personalities closely mirrors news interest in the outside world is undeniable, says Mr. Shah. “The Internet is not as much a broadcast media as a search-and-find media.” Hence, in this context, the Internet acts as a “reference book” rather than a “best seller,” he says.

In the last 12 months, the political event that fired up Google in India was the launch of Praja Rajyam, coinciding with a spike in the search for actor Chiranjeevi’s name. This was the highest among the search history in the last 12 months of the ten most searched politicians in India on Google – a list released by Google recently.

The list includes Mr. Advani, Mr. Singh, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi.

However, Mr. Shah cautions that in an emerging information society like India, an increase in online search for a particular name or event may not imply that it is popular across the country. “Given the limited amount of internet access and the almost homogeneous user group that has interactive access to being online, it means that within that particular class-language group, a certain event or person is gaining popularity.”

The analysis by Google Trends also shows that most of the searches for Mr. Chiranjeevi were made in Telugu, compared to English.

While Hyderabad is where the actor’s name was searched the most number of times, the top 10 cities includes San Jose and Houston in the United States.

Interestingly, Sanjay Dutt, the other actor in the list, generated the highest volume of searches in Pakistan.

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Read the article at the Hindu website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/online-interest-in-advani-rises

Metaphors and Narratives

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:47:52Z

A course designed for Christ College, Bangalore

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II

Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs.
Course Objectives

The course will serve as an introductory study of Internet technologies and the various social phenomena associated with them to investigate how the Internet becomes a catchall word for contemporary times. Students will explore the several layers of internets to look at the basic debates around questions of identity, subjectivity, gender, and governance, as they have emerged in the last four decades of cybercultures theory. The course will try and initiate new pedagogic practices of thought and research, looking at the several narratives of the internets available to us – from online communities, gaming and pornography to the wider debates around censorship, surveillance and privacy. The emphasis of the course is to de-mystify and consolidate the various narratives of the internet that are available to us from different disciplines and to provide a comprehensive and pedagogic frameworks to make meaning of the digitally inflected world that we live in.

Course Evaluation: Individual assignments from a list of topics or a topic worked out in consultation with the course instructors, depending upon the individual choice of the student.

Course Pedagogy: Contact session class room teaching, film screenings, seminars and discussion groups.

Course Content:

Module 1: Surfing the internets

The ‘Internet’ has become one of the most persuasive and prevalent metaphors of our times. As more and more sections of life and being get inflected by Information and Communication Technologies, more narratives of the ‘Internet’ are produced. These narratives often mystify the Internet – through misnomers or through frameworks from earlier technological paradigms which fail to understand or explain the ‘Internet’ – and are not in synchrony with one another. The first Module introduces the internets in their plurality and looks at the various disciplinary approaches to disentangling the internets.

A brief history of the internet technologies

· Origin and intentions

· The principles that built the internet

· The emergence of the WWW

Internet - Cyberspace

· Understanding Cyberspaces

· Convergent Histories of earlier technologies

· Bridging the virtual-real divide

Pre-Lecture Readings:

Gibson, William. Neruromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Huston, Geoff. “A Decade in the Life of the Internet”. The Internet Protocol Journal. Volume 11 No. 2. 2008.

Lyon, Katie Hafner and Matthew. Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New york: Simon and Shuster, 1996.

Robbins, Kevin. "Cyberspace and the World We Live In." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 1992.

Manovich, Lev. “The Database as a Symbolic Form” in The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.

Michael L. Benedikt, 1991, Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge: MIT Press

Module 2: The body in the digital paradigm

One of the most significant debates, across disciplines trying to engage with internet technologies, is on the site of the body. With cyberspaces providing multiple conditions within which the narratives of the body can be produced, there has been a radical revisiting of what it means to be human, to be gendered, to be sexual, and to be subject to various kinds of regulation and processes of censorship. This module looks at some of the seminal debates around these issues, by exploring various sites of cyberspatial identity and networking.

The body in the cyberspace

· The real body and the virtual body

· Spaces of regulation and bodies of surveillance

· Anthropomorphisation and the need to be human

Gender and Sexuality Online

· Obscenity, pornography and the sexual body

· The gendered being and the cyborg

· Subject to punishment: Role playing and fantasizing online

Pre-lecture readings:

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1996.

Balsamo, Anne. "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Dibbell, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitan Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." The village voice (1994).

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Social-Feminist in the Late 20th Century." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Shah, Nishant. "Material cyborgs; asserted boundaries" European Journal of English Studies 12.2 .2008.

Sengupta, Suddhabrata. Signatures of the Apocalypse”. Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net. (2003)

http://www.metamute.org/en/Signatures-of-the-Apocalypse 5th July, 2005

Module 3: Circulation, Regulation and Intellectual Property

The economics of being online is closely related to the circuits of transmission, the viral networking and the questions of ownership and possession. As the boundaries between the State and the Market blur, there is an increased public and legal discourse on Intellectual Property, the processes of piracy and the need for regulation and intervention. The third module in the paper brings to the fore, the questions of freedom, of open access and equality, and the conditions of regulation that restrict a free flow of information online.

The value of Information

· Knowledge and Copyright

· Notions of possession and value of information online

· Digital Commons and the freedom of expression

Intellectual Property and the law

· Theft and piracy online

· Ownership and usage rights

· IPR and the role of digital technologies

Pre-Lecture Readings:

Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin. 2005.

Liang, Lawrence and Mayur Suresh. “Copyright/Copyleft : Myths about Copyright”.

(2006) http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-suresh010205.htm 21st August, 2008.

Rosemary J. Coombe. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property. Duke University Press.

1998.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/metaphors-and-narratives

Gender and Technology

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:47:46Z

A course module designed by CIS for the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

Introduction:

Let us begin with three statements of facts and reflect upon them:

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.
In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.
George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.

These sound like disjointed bits of trivia, and indeed, are probably facts that are all too familiar to us. But what joins them together? What are the common implications that these three statements are suggesting to us? We need to see, that the theme that runs common in all the three statements is that they are all about women and their relationship with technology in some form. Let us look at all the three sentences in detail and see if we can work out the implications:

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.

Does this imply that women are less artistic than men? Surely, the question is no; in fact, men who take to the arts, are often perceived as feminine and that arts and culture are in the domain of the women. We, of course, can make a certain historical reading and suggest that art as a profession belonged to the realm of the public and hence women did not have access to these arenas – the choice to be a female painter, or artist, or writer. And that is indeed a valid reading of such a statement. However, deeper than that is the relationship that women had with technology. We often forget that even arts when they first were taken up institutionally, were techniques and technologies. That historically, the art of painting – which was indeed a technology that had its heyday in Renaissance Europe – was also a technology, and one that was unavailable to women for a very long time. It is only when these technologies get superseded by newer technological inventions that they become rare, private, and feminine enough to be granted to women.

However, that does not mean that women did not have any relationship with technology. What the statement draws our attention to is that women were indeed the major subject of technologised cultural productions – as mythical creatures, as objects of erotic representation, as monsters, as demons, as beasts, as goddesses and as sometimes representative of abject and frail human conditions, women have been almost obsessively at the centre of all technology imagination. Even now, when we look around us, at billboards, and advertisements, we constantly see the messages of consumption and selling, as etched on the body of a woman; even in instances when the product being sold or the body of the woman have nothing in particular.

And Virginia Woolf draws our attention to exactly that. At the Ox-bridge library that she is in, she discovers a long list of “women and…”ⁱ and then reflects, “Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently.” (Chapter 2, just before footnote 3)

Let us remain with these thoughts for a moment then: that there is, when we talk of technology and technologised production, a certain gendered relationship; that women did not always have access to acts of production and control over technology, and that they were obsessively the subjects of technology and technologised production; and as an aside, that what we today understand as ‘arts’ or ‘artistic’ was historically in the domains of technology and science and that such shifts happen due to a series of socio-political and econo-cultural events which we will think of sometime later. And now let us look at the second statement:

In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.

If you throw back your mind to some of the most iconic and cult representations of technology in almost any of your favourite sci-fi movies, you might realize, that most of these representations are women. Starting all the way from the movie Metropolis, where you have the demonized robot Maria, to Star Trek, where the mother ship is indeed, a mother; to Lara Croft Tomb Raider to the ghost in the machine – the mother board, the mother ship, the robots and the systems that need to be controlled and tamed, are always women or appropriating the female form or feminine in nature. In the slight variations from the law, you have an occasional character like Sonny in the movie I, Robot, but there too, we also have the feminine V.I.K.I. who turns out to be the actual villain of the story. We need to look into why, our imaginations of technology – and we are not looking at technologised production right now, but technology itself – are so gendered in nature. Why is it that we always have a particular idea of technology as feminine, as irrational, as demonic, as something that needs to be tamed and controlled, preferably by men?

Isn’t it a strange thing that on the one hand, we identify science as the domain of the masculine and the male, and the technologies that govern science as feminine in nature? We are going to perhaps complicate our first ideas about the gendered nature of technology now: We are going to say that it is not as if the gendered biases or construction of technology are limited to the cultural production and technologised arts but to the very imaginations of technology itself. When we talk of even our daily electrical gadgets – computers, laptops, cellphones, ipods, wiis we catch ourselves talking about them in a feminine form – objects of consumption, objects we have an eroticized relationship with, and objects which need certain control and mastery. Now keeping these in mind, let us go to the third statement that we began with:

George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.

It sounds alien to our ears, used to listening to the Arundhati Roys and Jhumpa Leharis of our time, to imagine that there was a time when women were not allowed to write; and if they were allowed to write, they were allowed to write only a particular kind of things, and that even if they were allowed to write, they were not necessarily allowed to become published authors within a publishing industry market. It seem perhaps funny, to imagine that there was a time when women tried on the names of men to write; just like it must have seemed funny, to somebody in the eighteenth century, to think that women would have to wear men’s clothes in order to enter the professional world. Once we remove the ‘funny’ quotient from this particular statement, what remains is the hard fact that technologies are a part of the culture industry – there are markets, there are audiences and consumers, there is an economics of visibility and distribution which is at work. And as with other technologies, for a very long time, the technologies of print and writing, also kept women as either the audiences to their products or the subject of their production, but very rarely at the centre, as creators and masters of those technologies. So that, when women wanted to write, not mere romances, but larger fictions, they had to take on the guise of men and write without their own names and identities.

To go back to the question of technology, then, we also need to look at the gender and technology question as not simply a question of art and expression, but also that of economic forces that shape these ideas and reinforce certain kind of images within us.

Reading 1: (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3 available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/chapter3.html )

Let us take for example, the case study that Virginia Woolf gives us, about Judith Shakespeare – William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister.

(Please refer to the text and addresses the following questions on technology and gender relationships:)

Why is technology always thought of as more easily accessible to men than women? Is it in the inherent nature of technology that it makes itself available to men or is there an entire social construct to legitimize only some kinds of usages of technology as valid? The story of Judith Shakespeare that Woolf draws, addresses these questions quite effectively. It also points out how, the question of livelihood and gender is also closely linked in with our understanding of technology.
How does this masculine imagination of technology change the very nature of the person who controls technology? For example, a man who is not very good at different technologies would be considered effeminate or not masculine enough. On the contrary, men who are more adept at certain kinds of technologies are also considered not male enough. Similarly, women who enter into certain kinds of technology oriented roles, will always be looked upon as ‘women in a man’s world’ or sometimes as ‘one of the boys’; gendered with masculinity, beyond her own control. Extending that logic, women have their own technologies and women who do not take to those are also labeled as aberrant or deviant. We are now trying to posit the idea that it is not as if being a man or a woman precedes technology; but in fact, the socio-political gendered contexts within which technologies operate, indeed create us as men and women, masculine and feminine, in our access to technologies, in our role within the technology paradigm, and our ability to control certain kinds of technologies.
The common sense understanding that technologies follow gender – in books like Why Men won’t listen and women can’t read maps; or in bio-deterministic assumptions that boys should be good at numbers and women should be good with languages – needs to be questioned. There is a small (and perhaps very clever) claptrap that comes into being when we try and dismantle these notions. When we question, as Woolf does, any of the tenets of technology, at the level of the imaginary, the arguments that are posited against it are at the level of material technologies. Let’s take that example of the very popular book title, ‘Why Men won’t listen and Women Can’t read maps”. If we were to suggest, keeping the technology and gender relationship in mind, that the maps reading exercise, requires a certain kind of masculine identity, which women are not encouraged to perform and hence, even though they might have the capacity to read maps, they are never trained or indeed discriminated against if they can read maps, the argument that is given to us is that in a given sample, certain percentage of female participants responded in an identifiable pattern which is their inability to read map. The evidence presented is at the level of majority acts, of biological and neural research – research that presumes that technology is a neutral tool to which the brain responds without any kind of external influence; research that further presumes that the brain is an autonomous independent entity that innately responds to certain kinds of technologised stimuli. We need to avoid this kind of oppositional dialectic between the scientific and the cultural, and perhaps learn to understand that science is indeed a social construct and arises out of different cultural practices, and that culture is not merely in the realms of the imaginary but also has very material and significant consequences.

We have so far deduced a few things:

That technology and gender are not mutually exclusive domains of understanding but that technology, in its very conception, is gendered.
That different technologies are made accessible to certain kinds of gendered behaviours through complex socio-cultural and economic processes.
That technologies are not neutral, and indeed, in their imaginary (and sometimes material) construct, demand a masculine or a feminine identity on the part of the person they are interacting with.
That technologised productions are indeed about representation and their politics but they are also about the politics of access and livelihood and create a relationship between genders; where one is produced and the other is the producer.
That the relationship between gender and technology is one of transactions, where, technology is often treated as the feminine, which would then need to be tamed, domesticated or exorcised of its excesses, and brought under the control of Man with a capital M.

It is with these ideas in the back of our mind that we need to now look at a new relationship between technology and gender. Let us look at how technologies indeed become feminized – not only in their representations and access, but in their economic development and proliferation.

Reading 2 (Jennifer Light. When Computers Were Women. Available at http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/Light%20J%201999%20T&C.pdf)

As with the earlier part of the module, let us again begin with looking at three examples, but this time in the very specific realms of digital technologies and computers. We shall go through three exercises and then see if we can bind them together to talk about a different dimension to explore the gendered nature and the gendering role of technologies.

Starting with the Father: If you paid attention to the history of computing in your school days, you will remember that the father of the Computer is Charles Babbage. One is not particularly sure what Fatherly function Mr. Babbage performed, but it must be something unmentionable with a circuit board and some vacuum tubes. In the history of technology – even as it is unfolding right now - there are a few names that emerge as the architects, the creators, the fathers, the grandfathers, the builders and the miracle workers of technology.

Especially in the very accelerated world of computers and internet, we always hear of new names cropping up as THE people who made the internet, the www, and now the web 2.0, what it is now. Let us do a quick exercise and try to list down ten names that we think are influential in our contemporary understanding of technology. Let me give you a few of the more obvious ones – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sabeer Bhatia, Jimmy Wales… you can continue with this list till you have exhausted the most famous of your internet icons – the people who made the internet. And now let us pause and review the list. Chances are, that your list doesn’t have any women in them. If there are women, they might be less than one third of your list.

Why does this discrepancy happen? When you look at the IT city of Bangalore, you realize that there are as many women as men employed in the IT sector. Indeed, if we expand the scope of IT to include mobile and networked economies like the BPO and the Outsourcing industry, we know for a fact that the number of women employed and involved by these new economies is significantly higher than the number of men employees. Why then, is the IT still treated as a.) an essentially male domain created and dominated by men b.) as the play ground of the alpha male nerd who controls technology c.) as dangerous or not conducive to women?

Let’s stay with those questions and see if we can tie them up with the next thing we need to do. Here is a small news-paper clipping from not so very long ago in Bangalore - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1098752.cms Let’s discuss what are the issues that the article is raising up. Can we see a certain kind of connection between gender and technology being created here, even if it is not clearly spelled out for us? While violence against working women who enter the public sphere, is indeed a concern, the specific nature of the call centre and its technologised economy and related lifestyle is actually more a concern than the women who are working and the violence that affects them. The article, and indeed, much of the discourse that followed this particular case of a call centre employee raped and murdered by the cab driver, very vocally suggested that technology creates conditions of terror for women. Perils and dangers seem to attach themselves to women in the IT industry. There is an underlined sense of danger and fear that is etched whenever it comes to talking about gender and technology and this is one such instance.

The third exercise we want to do is to do a bit of profiling. We will look at a list of words and try and imagine what kind of gendered images we produce out of our popular understanding of them:
1. Nerd
2. Geek
3. IT engineer
4. Call Centre employee
5. Systems Administrator

How are these terms gendered and how does our perception of these terms reflect the biases of technology and the material bodies that are made to bear the burden of technologies? How are we conditioned to think of our bodies in relation to technology? How, lastly, do economic factors determine what kind of bodies inhabit what kind of activities, and which, activities, indeed, become more visible, public and masculine.

The reading for this module deals especially with these questions. Light, shows us, in her history of computing, that there was a time when there was a reversal of roles and a reversal in recognizing the most important parts of computing. The system administrator, the Man who created the entire mainframe where the computing took place, was the obviously most important person(s) in the system. The system administrators were able to control the operating system, fix the bugs, and direct women, fresh mathematics graduates, who did the actually computing, to carry the data from one source to another so that results could be aggregated. In those times, when computers were so large that people were actually able to walk through the machines, the women, were actually called computers!

However, as mainframes started shrinking, and as we entered the era of personal computing, the system admin guy was a fast disappearing category. His job was taken over by a reliable assembly line and automated programme aggregators that ensured that assembled machines with pre-installed operating systems were being delivered to the individual users. The women, on the other hand, were the first programmers as we understand them. They had intricate knowledge of the ways in which computing worked and were the only people who actually knew how to write programmes in different languages and lead them to a fruitful execution.

With the change in the nature of programming, the systems admin men slowly took over the role of the programmers and through various figures, like the nerd, and the geek, and the maths wiz, reinforced an older idea that women were not good at numbers, that the new computers were technologised demons which needed to be mastered, and that it is a man’s job to work with the machines and so women should not be considered an integral part of it. So quick and invisible was this transition, that they literally re-wrote history, so that we never really understand the role women played in the history of computing and we don’t remember any mothers of computers or the female architects of the internets. How does such a shift happen? What are the kind of forces that allow for such a radical re-writing of the history? How do economic and market forces, feminize and masculinise technologies, so that the role and the contributions of women in those areas become obliterated and certain prototypical stereotypes get reinforced in a loop?

Light’s essay brings into question the gendered relationship between technology and human beings, but it also draws our attention to questions of livelihood, which we need to ask, following our earlier questions of access. Technologies get gendered, not only through questions of access or historical constructs, but often through figuring out its public reach and market worth. It would be a worthwhile experiment to see, for instance, how, if it is a feminine trait to keep in touch and network, the credit for inventing the first social networking systems, goes to men? What are the institutional processes that keep women’s contribution, labour and efforts within a technology domain as invisible?

And following these, are the concerns of how, even though we see women in the fields of technology, participating and evolving these new technologies, why do we buy so easily into the idea that the relationship between women and technology is always one of danger or terror? Why do we often reinforce the idea that digital technologies is necessarily a domain of the masculine, when it comes to the production of the spaces, but again, the domain more of the feminine, when it comes to consumption of these technologies? Light’s essay demonstrates to us that apart from the imaginary role of technology and its feminization/demonization, there are also material forces and processes by which these technologies get defined as not only available to male or female performers but also marked as feminine or masculine in the kind of roles that it demands from the participants. The material history of technology, from a gender perspective, makes us aware of the fact that the imaginary biases of technology have very real consequences in the lived practices around us and often are subject to the forces of market economies and emerging cultural practices.

i The list that Woolf makes in the second chapter and her immediate reflections after that: “Condition in Middle Ages of,
Habits in the Fiji Islands of,
Worshipped as goddesses by,
Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
Small size of brain of,
Profounder sub–consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children of,
Greater length of life of,
Weaker muscles of,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity of,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare’s opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,
Dean Inge’s opinion of,
La Bruyere’s opinion of,
Dr Johnson’s opinion of,
Mr Oscar Browning’s opinion of, . . .

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:

Most women have no character at all.

And here is La Bruyère:

Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les
hommes——

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/gender-and-technology

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Cable TV Technology for Dummies

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:52Z

In the fourth entry documenting the making of 'Dark Fibre', a film by Jamie King and Peter Mann, Siddharth Chadha simplifies cable TV technology for the uninitiated.

Confused about the difference between an MSO and a COAX? Well, this will simplify cable TV for you.

The system of providing television to consumers using radio frequency signals transmitted to televisions using fixed optical fibers or co-axial cables is called cable television. This is different from the over-the-air method used in traditional television broadcasting (via radio waves) for which a television antenna is required. FM radio programming, high-speed internet, telephony, and similar non-television services may also be provided.

Still confused? It's simple.

Your local cablewallah is a Private Cable Operator, a private small cable company dealing/competing with the Multi System Operators (MSO), who is an operator of multiple cable systems. For example, Hathway, Siti Cable, In TV are MSOs who operate either directly or via small cablewallahs. When cable TV was first introduced in India, small entrepreneurs set up their private cable companies, providing anywhere between seven to twenty channels to their local neighborhoods. They put up their own cable dish to down-link the broadcast signals from the satellite. Up until 1997, this was the only way one could access cable television; but this changed with the entry of the Multi Service Operators, who used better technology to provide clearer pictures, better sound and up to a 100 channels.

The broadcaster up-links the signal to their channel via satellite. The MSO down-links this signal, using a control room or a rear end. Inside the control room would be a set of RF signal modulators. Scientific Atalanta is an industry standard in India that provides control room equipment to various MSOs. The MSOs, which started off with analog technology to transmit their signals, are now moving to digital cable, delivering cable television as digital data instead of an analog frequency.

Because many MSOs continue to use analog transmission for low-numbered channels, and digital transmission for higher channels, a typical digital cable box is also able to convert traditional analog cable signals. Despite the advance of cable-ready television sets, most users need a cable box to receive digital channels. However, customers who do not subscribe to any digital channels can go without; MSOs provide "basic cable" service within the analog range, avoiding the need for distributing a box. However, advanced carrier services such as pay per view and video on demand will require a box.

Digital television allows for a higher quality and quantity of cable TV signals. Digital transmission is compressed and allows a much greater capacity than analog signals it almost completely eliminates interference. Digital converters have the same purpose as analog ones but are able to receive digital cable signals. With more data than analog in the same bandwidth, the system delivers superior picture and sound quality.

The MSO further re-transmits the RF signal from to the cablewallah, via coaxial optical cables or simply known as COAX that in turn boosts this signal using amplifiers and provide it to various homes using a common type of optical cable called RG6. The term RG was initially used by the US Military as an abbreviation for Radio Guide, but the term is now obsolete. RG6, in common practice, refers to coaxial cables with an 18 AWG center conductor and 75 ohm characteristic impedance. It typically has a copper-coated steel center conductor and a combination aluminum foil/aluminum braid shield. They are usually fitted with F connector style, in each end.

Once the signal reaches a cablewallah, the responsibility of the MSO ends, and it is up to the Cable Operator to maintain and distribute cable television from there onwards. Once the signal reaches the consumer's home, it is processed by a television converter box, popularly known as a set top box. A set top box is an electronic tunning device that transposes or converts any of the available channels from a cable television service to an analog RF signal on a single channel. The device enables televisions which are not cable ready to receive cable channels.

Modern set top boxes have a descrambling ability. The past three years have seen the entry of Direct to Home Pay TV operators, such as Tata Sky or Dish TV in the market, taking the technology to a new levels of sophistication, where the customers use a small cable dish to down-link the broadcasters signals which are processed with a set top box. In case of premium television, or paid channels, the broadcaster up-links an encrypted or a scrambled signal. When the signal reaches the home of the end user, it is reprocessed using a set top box, thus descrambling it and making it available for viewing on Television. A descrambler must be used with a cable converter box to be able to unencrypt all the premium and pay-per-view channels of a cable television system.

Now, put on that television, forget the tech and get back to the latest IPL match!

With inputs from MSOs, Local Cable Operators and Wikipedia for definitions of terms.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-dark-fibre-files-cable-tv-technology-for-dummies

Access India Meet-Up, May 2009

sachia — 2011-08-31T10:50:37Z

Meet-up of members of Access India mailing list (open to invitees only)

Access India is an informal mailing list for the visually impaired community in India, in which subscribers primarily discuss technology and various aspects of its accessibility. Although the Access India mailing list, originally started in 2002, was intended to be a forum for discussing technology-related issues for the blind, it has over the years expanded to cover a whole range of social, educational, cultural, political and other issues of significance to the visually impaired community in India. It is one of the largest mailing lists of blind persons in India and has roughly 500 members from all over the country. Members of the Access India community in various cities hold informal gatherings from time to time. An annual national meeting of Access India members is also held, where various issues affecting the community are discussed in detail.

Agenda

2 PM: Welcome address by CIS, hosts of the meet.

2:05 PM: A round of introduction by participants.

2:30 PM: Presentation by representatives from AreaPal, a Bangalore-based social networking group founded by students. areapal allows users to locate and connect with people on the basis of their area and neighborhood. It is a genuine neighbourhood networking service. Apart from that, they also provide user-generated news, events and marketplace based information about a user’s area. For further information, please visit www.areapal.com.

2:40 PM: Question time.

2:50 PM: Presentation by representatives from 3I Infotech, a company which recently launched e-Mudhra, an initiative to roll out digital signatures. The main focus of the discussion will be the accessibility of their product. For additional information, please visit http://www.e-mudhra.com/

3:00 PM: Question time.

5. 3:10 PM: Presentation by representatives from iVolunteer, an organization that matches volunteers seeking volunteering opportunities
with organizations and individuals looking for volunteers in Bangalore. To learn more about the organization, please visit www.ivolunteer.in

3:20 PM: Question time.

6. 3:30 PM: Introduction to Inclusive planet. Inclusive Planet is in the process of building the largest online portal for disabled persons in India. It is intended to be a comprehensive portal containing various resources including employment resources, educational resources, a match-making
channel, accessible books section, discussion boards, resources for medical facilities, sports and entertainment center, etc. We hope to have a
representative from Inclusive Planet demonstrate the site for us, inform us about its scope and expansion plans, and tell us about how we can contribute toward making the site totally accessible. Please visit http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/

3:50 PM: Question time.

4:00 PM: Tea followed by open discussion on technology.

4:45 PM: Vote of thanks and conclusion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/access-india-meet-up-may-2009

Report from DigiActive’s Bangalore Meet-up

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:28:34Z

A blog entry by Mary Joyce on the meet-up hosted at CIS, Bangalore

We had a great meet-up yesterday at the offices of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore (thanks so much to Sunil, Pranesh, Sanchia, and Deepika for making it possible!) It was a very diverse group, with participants from Indian and international NGOs, techies from Yahoo!, and even a radio producer and film-maker.

We started out by dissecting this Pink Chaddis campaign, a very popular women’s rights campaign organized through Facebook that had just organized a big action on Valentines’ Day. (I’ll be posting on the campaign a little later - it’s a great one.)

However, when we went about creating a definition for digital activism, the discussion became more theoretical. Although DigiActive is optimistic about the possibility of digital tools to empower those fighting injustice, this meet-up group decided that digital activism was value neutral and that it simply mapped onto the existing goals and motives within a society. It is a technique that can be used for constructive or destructive ends.

At the end of the event, some participants came up to me to make sure my feelings weren’t hurt by the disagreement, but I assured them I was really happy with the result. Only if digital activism is debated and dissected will we be able to understand and use it well.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/report-from-digiactive2019s-bangalore-meet-up

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: The Grey Market Deficit

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:47Z

In this, the third entry in his series discussing the making of 'Dark Fibre' by Jamie King and Peter Mann, Siddharth Chadha gives an overview of piracy in the pay TV industry.

Television emerged as one of the biggest gainers in a post-liberalisation India during the '90s. From 41 television sets and one channel in 1962, the country has come a long way, with over 130 million homes with televison. Cable TV has spurred an unprecedented revolution for the entertainment and advertising industry. As a country where more than half the population lives on a daily income of less than USD 1 but swears by its Indian Premier League, India has also emerged as the Asian giant in pay TV piracy. The Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia, in a pan-Asia survey, pegged the net loss of revenue to the television industry due to pay TV piracy at USD 1.1 Billion in 2008. In its annual report published last year, it estimates that over 21.64 million cable TV homes went unreported, either on account of theft or leakage by local cable operators. This is almost one-fouth of the 8.5 million existing cable TV connections across the country. The report also suggests that 65 percent of the total loss of USD 1.76 Billion due to cable TV piracy in Asia comes from India alone, followed by Thailand at USD 180 Million.

According to Shashi Kumar, the General Manager of Hathway Cable TV Private Limited, a Multi Service Operator, 'All cable operators report only 10-15 percent of their total subscriber base. Obviously, the piracy figures in this industry will be very high.' A cable operator in Bangalore, on the condition of being anonymous, discloses, 'We are providing cable TV connections to over 800 homes. But we declare only 250, because that is the minimum number of connections that the MSO wants. There are not enough margins in the business to sustain accurate reporting.' The average cost of setting up a cable operation now runs into crores of rupees and the business is not lucrative if it is entirely clean. The average price for a digital cable connection charged by an MSO to the local cablewallah is between Rs. 180-200, the charge to the end consumer is Rs. 250 per connection per month. This does not seem to spell profit for the cable operators. 'An amplifier alone costs Rs. 3500 per unit and serves about 20 homes. The cost of the RJ6 cable is Rs. 4300 a bundle. How can we be expected to do business on a profit margin of Rs. 50 per month? If the margins were higher, perhaps operators would not leak connections,' adds the cable operator.

While Multi Service Operators seem to be fed up of the situation, there is not much they can do about it. 'There are already 5-6 national level MSOs. And then there are new entrants into the market every month. Despite knowing that the cable operators are under-reporting connections, we continue to work on minimum level subscriptions because the market is extremely competitive. If we take action against a cable operator, we would lose out on whatever business we have to a new player,' adds Shashi, while describing the operations of their company.

The industry is now looking at growth in the number of Direct To Home subscribers as a deterrent to piracy. Estimates suggest that by 2015, over 40 percent of subscribers in the pay TV universe is likely to comprise DTH owners, up from the current five percent. Frightened of repeated instances of signal piracy on their networks, broadcasters are now investing in signal encryption technology, to ward of the pirates. However, till DTH television becomes the norm rather than the exception, one can expect more tussles between the broadcasters, Multi Service Operators, regulators and cablewallahs, in the world of pay TV piracy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-dark-fibre-files-the-grey-market-deficit

Does India need its own Bayh-Dole?

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:58:46Z

Article by Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager at Centre for Internet and Society in the Indian Express, 24 April 2009

Across the world battlelines are being drawn in the normally quiet areas of academia and research. The opposing sides: those in favour of open and collaborative research and development as a means to promote innovation, and those in favour of perpetuating the profits of big pharma companies and academic publishers. Currently before a Select Parliamentary Committee is a controversial law that will deny basic healthcare to millions by making medicines much more expensive, lock up academic knowledge, and help privatise publicly-funded research. The law titled the Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill 2008 (“PUPFIP Bill”, http://bit.ly/pupfip-bill) was tabled last December in the Rajya Sabha by the Minister for Science and Technology. It was created in utmost secrecy by the Department of Science and Technology, without so much as a draft version having been shared with the public for comments.

The PUPFIP Bill is an Indian version of a 1980 US legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act, and as per its statement of objects and reasons, it seeks to promote creativity and innovation to enable India “to compete globally and for the public good”. It aims to do so by ensuring the protection of all intellectual property (meaning copyright, patent, trade mark, design, plant variety, etc.) that is the outcome of government-funded research. The IP rights will be held by the grant recipient, or by the government if the recipient does not choose to protect the IP. This might seem like a good way to enable technology transfer from research institutes to the industry, but that would be a very myopic view, disregarding all evidence related to the failure of the Bayh-Dole Act. Last year Prof. Anthony So of Duke University co-authored an extensive analysis of the Bayh-Dole Act, and warned of the consequences of such legislation in developing countries.

First, such a law will shift the focus of research. Researchers will be inclined to to concentrate their efforts on issues of interest to industry, and which can have immediate benefit. This would force vital fundamental research into neglect since it cannot be commercialised with ease. Research by Saul Lach and Mark Schankerman shows that scientists are influenced by royalty rates, and will thus tend to work on industrial research rather than fundamental research. This creates, or at least exacerbates, what is popularly known as the “90/10 gap”: the fact that ninety per cent of medical research money goes into problems affecting ten per cent of the world’s population, since that ten per cent is richer.

Secondly, this law will have chilling effects on scholarly communications and promote secrecy. The Bill has requirements of non-disclosure by the grantee and the researcher to enable the commercialisation of the research, and requires researchers and institutions to inform the government before all publication of research. Such bureaucratisation of research publications will stultify intellectual pursuits. Such secrecy and permission-raj culture is anathema to intellectual and academic pursuits, where knowledge is sought to be freely disseminated, to be criticised and further revised by others. In South Africa, academics affected by the recent passage of a PUPFIP-type legislation there are questioning its constitutionality as it restrains freedom of speech.

Thirdly, this will lead to our pillars of learning and research becoming like businesses. US universities like Columbia and Duke have found themselves at the receiving end of criticism for their brazen commercialism, encouraged by the Bayh-Dole Act. Instead of promoting greater access to health for the poor, and spending money on research, the universities were spending money on patent litigation in court. The outcome of one of these cases was the rejection of Duke University’s research exemption defence (universities are generally not bound to observe patents when they wished to conduct research). The court held that the university had “business interests” which the research unmistakably furthered. This points at a fundamental divide between universities as places of learning and as places of profiteering. The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSSD) project that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is currently pursuing is a good attempt at promoting a culture of openness and transparency and collaboration, and thus ensuring cheaper and more efficient drug discovery. Even the US government is currently seeking to clear the way for generic versions of biotech drugs. In such an environment, it is counter-intuitive to bring in a regressive law, and goes against innovative efforts such as the OSSD, and will harm the generics industry.

Fourthly, the Bill assumes — erroneously, as an ever-growing amount of research demonstrates (Boldrin & Levine, Bessen & Meurer, etc.) — that intellectual property is the best and only way to promote creativity and innovation. All forms of intellectual property are state-granted monopolistic rights. At a basic level, competition promotes innovations while monopoly retards it. Much of modern science developed without the privilege of patents. Surely, Darwin and Newton were not encouraged by patents. And even whole industries — like the software industry — flourish without patent protection in most of the world.

The commendable aim of ensuring knowledge transfer can be accomplished much better if we refrain from giving away to private corporations (whether pharmaceutical manufacturers or publishers) exclusive rights to the product of publicly-funded research. Scientists and researchers can be encouraged to be consultants to various industrial projects, thereby ensuring that their expertise is tapped. Importantly, open access publishing which helps to ensure wide distribution and dissemination of knowledge is surely more desirable. That is the trend being followed the world over currently. The US president recently signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Bill which makes permanent the National Institutes of Health’s open access policy. By doing so, he symbolically rejected calls (such as the much-criticised Conyers Bill) to privatise publicly funded research outputs. Thus, there are many ways by which the government can encourage innovation and creativity, and further public interest. The PUPFIP Bill, which will have deleterious unintended consequences if it is passed, is not one of them.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/does-india-need-its-own-bayh-dole

An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:53Z

In an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Dutch open source activist Arjen Kamphuis discussed his experience of successfully working with the government for a policy mandating open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands.

In 2002 Arjen Kamphuis co-authored a parliament motion to mandate open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands. The motion was unanimously accepted and, in 2007, became policy. The Netherlands thus became the first western country to make the use of open standards in public sector IT mandatory. Arjen is now working to e xport this set of policies to other European countries with the help of local political parties and business partners.

Arjen discussed his experience of lobbying for this policy change and some other questions related to his work as a consultant on IT strategy and the implications of nanotechnology and biotechnology in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society.

The Centre for Internet and Society: What is the Dutch government's policy on FOSS and Open Standards specifically and intellectual property rights in general? Provide some history, name the main lobbying factions in the Netherlands and their policy positions. What was your role in the formulation of these policies?

Arjen Kamphuis: The national action plan 'The Netherlands in Open Connection' is the government's answer to a unanimous vote in parliament in November 2002. The parliament stated that the market for desktop software was not functioning as it should and that significant vendor lock-in effects were harming both individual citizens and society as a whole. It requested maximum efforts from the government to change this situation. The suggested method for changing was mandating open standards in all public sector IT and actively supporting the adoption of open source software wherever functionally and technically feasible.

I was one of the people who got this process started by contacting a member of parliament from the Green Party. This was triggered by my inability to access the website of the national railway on 1 January 2002. The website had been redesigned and only allowed access to visiters with Internet Explorer. As a Linux user, I had previously had comparable problems with local government websites and electronic tax forms (usage of which was mandatory for small businesses like my consulting start-up).

After the unanimous vote in parliament, several people in the Dutch open source community, including me, kept the pressure on the government by monitoring major procurements and writing questions for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ask the government. In 2004 this led to a breakthrough when the Justice Ministry ran a project to procure 147 million euros' worth of desktop software without going through a proper multi-vendor selection process. They only talked to one vendor, and that is against European Union regulations. Since some of the civil servants working on this project were gagged, we can conclude that some people were aware they were breaking the law, yet went ahead anyway.

When the news broke we made sure the MEPs were armed with the proper questions the next day, and the contract was dropped. In reply to questions asked to the government by the MEPs, the responsible ministers admitted that the government was very dependent on Microsoft for basic functioning of its office environments; that this was a problem; and that the government would take active steps to remedy this situation by moving forward with the requests made in 2002 by parliament.

Two-and-a-half years and an election later, a new under-Minister for Economic Affairs, Frank Heemskerk, took up the challenge and promised a comprehensive policy. I gave input for this plan in mid-2007 and it was formally published and adopted later that year as a national policy for all government and public-sector (i.e. tax funded) organisations.

The policy has three objectives:

improving interoperability between public sector organisations;
lowering the vendor-dependence of the public sector;
improving the functioning of the software market and supporting the Dutch knowledge economy

Some of the practical measures are the mandating of the use of open standards in all public sector organisations. Whenever software is procured, open source should be considered and preferred whenever functionally adequate. These two very basic rules change the entire market for IT in the Dutch public sector (40% of the entire market) and is having a profound effect on the way software vendors offer their products as well as the negotiating power of the client organisations.

I continue to advise both the decision makers and the civil servants overseeing the implementation of the policy.

CIS: What is the current status on the implementation of these policies?

AK: After a slow start the government organisation that is responsable for overseeing the implementation is now up and running. The basic problem is lack of awareness about both the practical value that open standards and open source software can contribute and the underlying political reasons for making it the preferred option for government information processing.

Thus a lot of the work for the next few years will be communicating these ideas to civil servants (be they IT professionals or managers who have other jobs). The policy helps a lot because it puts some serious weight behind the whole process. The fact that government organisations have to support Open Document Format for instance significantly heightens their interest in the technical subject matter!

So the policy gives the drive needed to get things moving and now it is up to us to communicate the how and the why in a way that is understandable for people who are new to these concepts. I have no doubt it will be a long process, we have over 20 years of proprietary legacy built up in our public institutions. Replacing those systems with open alternatives will take many years. All the greater a reason to proceed with some urgency.

The complete policy document has been translated into English and released under Creative Commons Licence:
http://appz.ez.nl/publicaties/pdfs/07ET15.pdf

In December 2007 I gave a talk in Berlin. Here a summary, slides and video are available:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2387.en.html

CIS: What can a country like India learn from the Dutch government's experience in eGovernance and ICT in Education?

AK: I am not familiar with the Indian political process but these are some of my lessons learned:

- The government will not do anything unless constant and significant pressure is applied by citizens. Politicians and civil servants only act if the pain of acting is less than the pain of not acting. Change is achieved by citizens standing up and working on these problems without guarantee of any reward or even achieving any results (it took us five years to get from a unanimous vote in parliament to an actual policy).

- Big IT companies may be your friend or your enemy. But even if they are your friends they generally will not be at the forefront of political action that could be seen as controversial. Once policies are pushed beyond the controversial stage and have been adopted as official policy some of them will support it. Others, with much to lose, will fight you and the policy every step of the way. The more money or loss of market share is involved the more radical the methods that are employed. Massive lobbying, applying political pressure through foreign governments, bribery and all kinds of other activities are well-funded, well organised and very common.

- In moving forward with these policies it's the lack of knowledge and vision with the the management of institutions that is by far the biggest bottleneck. Without a clear policy from the top it is impossible to get things moving in most organisations.

- Another big problem in switching over local governments and other smaller organisations is the fact that many of the advantages of such a switch is national and/or macro-economic in nature while the initial cost and risk is micro-economic in nature. Hence again the need for a national policy.

- The funding required to make significant improvements is often not that large compared to the existing operational budgets. Investing in the smart use of IT in education for instance is something that can pay for itself very quickly. This is generally also true for adoption of open source and open standards in general. By just reducing the yearly spend on software licences by 1% the entire government program can be funded.

- Simply stopping the procurement of new licences (while continuing the use of those already paid for) can often free up enough money to finance a migration process. This has been the case in the city of Amsterdam and the French Gendarmes.

- The actual value of better government services or education is hard to quantify in monetary terms. How do we value improved responsiveness, transparency, national sovereignty in information processing and supporting local service companies instead of foreign software companies?

- IT education should focus on understanding methods and principles, not products. The product life-cycle is 18-36 months, the educational process takes many years and the length of a career is decades. Any education with a focus on products leads to knowledge that is irrelevant by the time the degree is finished. Teach people to drive a car, not just a Volkswagen or Tata.

- The cost of physical books per student per year in the Netherlands is now greater that the cost of a laptop. This is insane since the content of those books is generally written by teachers who get paid very little for it. Using the funds to pay those teachers instad of the publishers and releasing the content under a free licence will free up resources to develop better educational programs and provide all students with computational tools to use them. All without increasing the total cost compared to our current situation. The financial numbers will be different for India but the basic principle is the same and works even better given the larger scale of India. The cost of producing and distributing electronic educational content will drop practically to zero when compared to physical on a per-student basis. Using funds to support teachers in the use of e-learning with open content is the way forward.

CIS: How can a local support environment for open technologies be created? Can local SMEs ever substitute for the transnational proprietary giants?

AK: Whether SMEs can supplant multinationals depends on the product being replaced. CPU manufacturing requires a very high upfront investment in R&D and manufacturing capability. This is usually far beyond any but a handful of companies. With software development and services things are very different. Software development only requires a human with programming skills, a good idea and a computer. The Free Software Movement has shown clearly that distributed methods of software development can lead to high quality products with excellent local support systems. Local organisations (or communities that are not even organisations) can often understand local needs and respond to local changes much better, faster and cheaper than large, lumbering corporations. If local organisations work together globally to share knowledge (and code) for those parts they all need they can beat any centralised system.

What many senior business and government leaders are struggling with is the realisation that many of the 'truths' they have learned while studying economics or business management or some such subject turn out to be empirically incorrect. For example: it has become clear there is no causal relationship between the cost of software and its quality or utility. This must be a fact that is difficult to truly understand and accept if you have been brought up believing the gospel of the Anglo-Saxon economic worldview. The current economic crisis is a great help in questioning some of those beliefs and opens up room for new ideas about economic vs. societal value of technology and its relationship to businesses trying to earn a living.

CIS: Could you tell us about the Dutch government's rollback on electronic voting machines? What is your opinion on the use of electronic voting machines in the upcoming elections in India?

AK: From the mid '80s onward, voting computers were introduced in the Netherlands. By 2006, the vast majority of all elections were being performed by proprietary computer systems. Citizens would press a button and then go home to watch TV. Some software that no-one could control, monitor or properly audit would spit out a result and that would be it -- new government. Only a handful of engineers (all working for the companies that made the voting computers) actually knew what the software did and could make the computer system say anything they wanted.

When the city of Amsterdam (the last holdout using paper ballots) announced in 2006 that it was moving to voting computers, a group of activists organised a campaign to ban voting computers. We felt that the very nature of democracy was under attack by running the election process in a way that makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to check the validity of the election. It also makes fraud a lot harder to detect. Detectability of fraud is the one of the primary properties any election process should have. We all know election fraud is also possible with non-electronic means but keeping it a secret is much harder in such cases (as we saw in the US and Zimbabwean election over the last years). There was a actual case of suspected voter fraud in a Dutch municipal election and the judge concluded that while the fraud seemed likely it could not be proven. Regrettably for the suspected council member the fraud could also not be disproven. This shows very clearly that such a method is wholly unsuitable for application in real democratic processes.

Through lots of media attention, a few spectacular hacks showing the technical insecurity of the systems, and legal pressure, we forced the government in 2007 to reverse the approval of the voting computers and go back to an all-paper balloting system. This reversal is part of a global backlash against electronic voting systems. Comparable changes have been going on in many US states and all over Europe.

I think India should have voting process that can be understood and monitored by its citizens. This understanding and monitoring should be possible without requiring advanced degrees in computer science, software engineering and electronics. The only way to have such a process is when there is a paper ballot involved. Such a ballot could be printed by a computer to increase the ease of use but all-electronic solutions are ruled out by the basic demands of what a democracy is.

India should move to either all paper systems or voting computer backed-up by a voter-verified paper trail.

Are more extensive telling of the tale can be found here: http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

This is a link to the Berlin CCC conference of Rop Gongrijp's 2007 presentation (with video): http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2342.en.html

http://www.blackboxvoting.org has a wealth of information on this subject.

CIS: What are the services provided by Gendo? Could you describe some of the projects that you have undertaken?

AK: My company (gendo.nl) also provides consulting services in the area of IT strategy, development of open IT architectures and implementing those in mixed open source/proprietary environments. We are currently advising both national and local government organisations in the implementation of policies and plans to move to open standards and open source software. We are also involved in projects where we do the actual development and implementation of new systems to enable innovation and lessen the dependance of our client on proprietary systems. Currently we are involved with a healthcare organisation where we are assisting in re-architecting their entire IT environment to allow service innovation, lower cost and increase information security.

We have also been involved in information security work and other auditing in the financial services and government sector. Here our activities focus on the grey area between technology and process.

Outside the field of IT we also do other consulting work such as scenario planning and strategic future studies, mostly for large corporate clients. Most of the big Anglo-Dutch multinationals such as Shell or Unilever are on our client list. We also have a large number of clients in the financial services and insurance sector.

For all of these clients we organise presentations and brainstorming sessions, often preceded by research. This helps the leaders in those organisations think about the nature of rapid, technology-driven changes in their markets and the world in general. These insights are then translated into new products, services and ways of delivering them.

Forgive me if this all sounds a bit vague but with many of these clients there is some confidentiality agreement involved.

CIS: Could you tell us more about yourself? Maybe you would like to share some formative experiences.

AK: Writing my first paper on black holes at age 11 showed me that grown-ups usually also don't know what is going on in the universe either. Despite rumours to the contrary parents, teachers, senior managers and politicians are not all-knowing and are stumbling about just like most two-year-olds where complex issues are concerned.

Over the last quarter century I've had this intuition reconfirmed again and again. In a world that is changing faster and faster experience becomes obsolete rather quickly and wisdom is no longer the sole purview of older, more senior, people. We need young smart-asses who have not yet learned what is impossible, so they go out there and do it.

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Arjen Kamphuis (born 1972) studied Science & Policy at Utrecht University and worked for IBM as Unix specialist, Tivoli consultant and software instructor. As IT-strategy consultant at Twynstra Gudde he was involved in starting up Kennisnet, the Dutch educational network. Since 2001 he is operating as an independent adviser of companies and governments. He co-authored, in 2002, a motion in parliament that ultimately turned, in 2007, into a full-fledged policy of the Dutch government mandating the use of open source software in all government and public sector IT operations.

Arjen at present divides his attention between IT-policy and the convergence of IT, biotechnology and nanotechnology and its social and economic implications. His customers include: Shell, Unilever, Pfizer, Stork, and various hospitals, governmental institutions and insurance companies. Arjen guest lectures on technology policy at various universities and colleges.

When not consulting Arjen is actively involved in (digital) civil liberties, the open source movement and criticizing the war on terror.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-arjen-kamphuis

arjen kamphuis

sachia — 2009-04-28T12:15:03Z

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

The Project Vidya Story: 'Study Locally, Learn Globally'

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:42Z

This is first of a series of blog entries by Ajay Narendran, the architect of Vidya and former Content Manager and Webmaster, Amrita University, guest blogging on the CIS website. His blog series will attempt to capture the experience of building an intranet archive at Amrita University, Coimbatore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/study-locally-learn-globally-the-project-vidya-story

Centre for Internet and Society

The Dark Fibre Files: 'Steal This Film' and the Pirate Bay Trial

Letter to Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, Advocating Adoption of FOSS in State IT Academies

Seminar on Exceptions and Limitations in Copyright

Access India Meet-Up, 16 May 2009

Online Interest in Advani Rises

Metaphors and Narratives

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs. Course Objectives

Gender and Technology

Introduction:

Reading 1: (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3 available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/chapter3.html )

Reading 2 (Jennifer Light. When Computers Were Women. Available at http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/Light%20J%201999%20T&C.pdf)

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Cable TV Technology for Dummies

Access India Meet-Up, May 2009

Agenda

Report from DigiActive’s Bangalore Meet-up

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: The Grey Market Deficit

Does India need its own Bayh-Dole?

An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis

arjen kamphuis

The Project Vidya Story: 'Study Locally, Learn Globally'

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II

Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs.
Course Objectives