Centre for Internet and Society

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Opportunities for advocacy in intellectual property rights - The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:40:50Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-opportunities-for-advocacy-in-intellectual-property-rights-the-traditional-knowledge-digital-library

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Opportunities for advocacy in intellectual property rights

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:36:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-opportunities-for-advocacy-in-intellectual-property-rights

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Opportunities for advocacy in intellectual property rights: Access to mobile technology

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:32:57Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-opportunities-for-advocacy-in-intellectual-property-rights-access-to-mobile-technology

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Synthesis Overview

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:26:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india

Sunil Abraham: Honorary steward September 2017

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T13:30:23Z

Shuttleworth Foundation has announced Sunil Abraham as Honorary Steward for its September 2017 fellowship round.

Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director of Bangalore based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society.

“I have admired the stewardship of the Shuttleworth Foundation towards the access to knowledge and free culture movements ever since I interviewed Mark Shuttleworth at WSIS 2005. Many of my personal heroes have become Fellows over the years and it is therefore my privilege to contribute a southern perspective to this fellowship round.” – Sunil Abraham

Applications close 15 May 2017 for a 1 September 2017 fellowship start date. Read the original post on Shuttleworth Foundation website here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/shuttleworth-foundation-april-19-2017-sunil-abraham-honorary-steward-september-2017

Sunil

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T13:27:10Z

Sunil Abraham

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/copy7_of_Sunil.png

CIS TRAI Submission on Net Neutrality

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T03:08:30Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/cis-trai-submission-on-net-neutrality

11th Meeting of Information Systems Security Sectional Committee (LITD 17)

praskrishna — 2017-04-19T02:57:03Z

Udbhav Tiwari represented CIS at this meeting organized by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) at Manak Bhavan, New Delhi on April 13, 2017.

The meeting was the national mirror meeting for the 28th ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 Plenary and Working Group Meetings being held at Hamilton, New Zealand between the April 18 and 25, 2017. The meeting provided a fascinating insight into the government and industry viewpoints on key cyber security and privacy issues, especially on the Aadhaar.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/11th-meeting-of-information-systems-security-sectional-committee-litd-17

An Open Digital Global South: Risks and Rewards

praskrishna — 2017-04-12T14:25:39Z

Pranesh Prakash will be speaking at a conference to be organized by UC Davis Law School on May 25 and 26, 2017, in California, USA.

The event is open to the public. Please register here.

This conference explores the promises and risks of openness in scholarship in relationship to the Global South. Scholars increasingly are under pressure to make their work “open” through sharing their research as reusable open data and open source software, and making their publications open access. Scholarly “openness”—for example, open data, open access, open source—is intended to facilitate the free flow of information, to address barriers to access, and to foster global intellectual conversations. Do attempts at promoting openness in scholarship create new forms of exclusion or hierarchy? How are Southern scholars and publishers’ experiences with open access and open data taken into account within conversations on developing standards and models for open access and open data in the Global North? What are the unanticipated risks created through the implementation of models for open data or open access?

For more info click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/an-open-digital-global-south-risks-and-rewards

Opposition questions govt move to make Aadhaar must

praskrishna — 2017-04-12T14:19:20Z

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh claimed that the Aadhaar system was becoming an instrument of social exclusion rather than one of identity.

The article by Komal Gupta was published in Livemint on April 11, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The Rajya Sabha on Monday witnessed a lively debate on Aadhaar, with the opposition questioning the government’s move to make the 12-digit unique identification number mandatory for a host of welfare benefits.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh claimed that the Aadhaar system was becoming an instrument of social exclusion rather than one of identity.

“My major concern is implementation, how Aadhaar is being used to exclude people to avail benefits of the schemes which have been designed for them…If you need to apply to avail benefits, it’s as good as mandatory,” said Ramesh.

The former cabinet minister argued that over 25% of the population will stand excluded.

“The Rs50,000 crore savings due to Aadhaar linkage as given by the government is highly questionable,” he said, adding that according to Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) reports, 92% of the savings on domestic gas subsidies is not on account of Aadhaar implementation or direct benefit transfer. “Instead, it is because of the fall in international oil prices,” Ramesh argued.

Trinamool Congress member Derek O’Brien said that for manual labourers, biometric identification does not always match and that can deprive them of welfare.

He gave the example of Andhra Pradesh, where almost half the 85,000 ration card holders in 2014 were unable to get subsidized foodgrains due to faulty point of sale machines and biometrics not matching.

K.T.S Tulsi, member of Parliament and senior Supreme Court advocate, said, “Not in my whole career have I come across a greater mutilation of a statutory provision than what has taken place in the case of Aadhaar.” He said Section 29 of the Aadhaar Act doesn’t permit data stored with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to be shared with anyone but a provision was later made for voluntary agreement to allow the sharing of data.

IT and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “No religion, income, medical history, ethnicity or education is asked in Aadhaar. Even email ID and phone number is optional.”

“The right of privacy of individuals must be respected. The privacy of the data cannot be breached by us except in the case of national security,” Prasad added.

He claimed that the government has been blacklisting operators that share data from the Aadhaar system. It has blacklisted 34,000 operators, and has taken action against 1,000 of them.

Prasad also said that UIDAI will be accountable to the Parliament.

Expressing concern on mandating the use of Aadhaar for different services, Pranesh Prakash, Policy director of the Centre for Internet and Society, said, “As an enabler, people would want to have Aadhaar. But when it is made mandatory, it becomes more of a disenabler instead of an enabler.”

“With the move towards a digital economy, setting up of a data protection authority as recommended by the Shah committee is important along with mass surveillance and greater accountability from the government,” he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-april-12-2017-komal-gupta-opposition-questions-govt-move-to-make-aadhaar-must

National Conference on Intellectual Property Rights and Public Interest

praskrishna — 2017-04-12T14:01:27Z

Indian Law Institute organized a conference on intellectual property rights on April 7 and 8 in New Delhi. Maggie Huang took part in the conference.

The Intellectual Property Rights regime was developed to protect the interest of producers of knowledge. It was aimed at rewarding creativity and inventiveness. It was also claimed by many that the nature of intellectual property was that of a ‘social contract’, one in which the state agrees to secure and protect the rights of individuals in consideration that the individual will reveal his/her creations. The regime of IPR provides access to important creations or source of knowledge to the public along with incentivising the creator by providing monopoly or more aptly ‘limited monopoly’ rights to commercially exploit their creations. The ‘limited monopoly’ right is for a temporary period and after the expiration of the temporary period, it falls into the public domain. The interesting part of the IPR regime is that the creator in exchange of the exclusive rights shares the knowledge or know how behind the creation of the work which the public could freely use to develop further innovations after the ‘limited monopoly’ term is over. The ‘limited’ prefixed to the monopoly word triggers the controversy, with many claiming public interest predominance over private rights and vice-versa. The Novartis v. Union of India case and the more recent The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of Oxford University v. Rameswari Photocopy Services case has brought this controversy to the fore in India. The new national IP Policy in India in 2016 also touched upon the area by declaring that the main aim of the policy is to push IPRs as a marketable financial asset, promote innovation and entrepreneurship while protecting public interest. In this light, this conference seeks to address the question whether IPR is based on public interest leading to public rights predominance over private rights or knowledge as a form of private property to be protected under IPR regime ergo public rights are nothing but exceptions. The conference aims to realize the IPR model apposite for countries like India.

For conference topics, see here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/national-conference-on-intellectual-property-rights-and-public-interest

Identities Research

praskrishna — 2017-04-12T13:54:53Z

Caribou Digital organized an identity research event in Bengaluru at TERI on April 6, 2017. A total of 16 participants attended the event. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash represented CIS at the event.

The Identities research project explores user experiences of identity technology, brought to you by Caribou Digital, Omidyar Network and the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIITB). The need for user-centered research in “digital identity” arose out of concerns around top-down identity systems and lack of insights on how these are being understood and used, particularly amongst lower income populations. For more information on the event and viewing the episode videos click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/identities-research

Mobile Accessibility Practices

praskrishna — 2017-04-11T14:50:48Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/files/mobile-accessibility-practices.pdf

Pune Editathon

praskrishna — 2017-04-10T16:00:31Z

Pune Editathon

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/PuneEditathon.jpg

Privacy, what? Bengaluru police leaks 46,000 phone numbers on Twitter

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:57:49Z

Bengaluru police made the biggest goof up of all time by releasing private information of people who called 100 to complain since April 2015 and was seemingly unapologetic about the breach of privacy.

The article by Neha Vashishth was published by India Today on April 6, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

We all love our privacy, don't we?

We put various locking apps and hide our private pictures on Facebook, Twitter etc and only share what we want the world to see. But sometimes even after our countless efforts, we end up losing our information on the internet. After all, a breach of privacy is the greatest nightmare one can have.

Bengaluru police goofed up too when it came to handling privacy concerns of Bengaluru citizens. The police department posted phone numbers of thousands of citizens on their Twitter handle (@BCPCR) who called 100 and complained against harassment, quarrels, and gambling etc.

The police posted over 46,000 tweets online since April 2015 sharing information of people who called on 100 along with the app known as 'Suraksha' to lodge complaints. The account was made private as soon as the matter escalated.

The police was unapologetic regarding the matter and said that the tweets were auto-generated from their twitter handle @BCPCR.

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society said the "police officer who ordered to create such an account should be held responsible if any harm comes to a complainant."

This not only created a major breach of privacy of complainants but also risked their lives. This incident only proves that privacy and sensitivity of the matter has vanished in today's time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-neha-vashishth-april-6-2017-privacy-what-bengaluru-police-leaks-phone-numbers-on-twitter