Centre for Internet and Society

Negative of porn

namita — 2011-08-02T08:35:34Z

The post deals with what has been written about Savita Bhabhi in an attempt to make sense of her peccadiloes and with the seeming futility of Porn studies located in America to our different reality. I take the liberty of exploring my own experiential account of pornography since I feel that in that account (mine and others) when done seriously, certain aspects of pornography emerge that address questions that are about cinema, images, sex, philosophy and how desire works. The title is mischeviously inspired from Dr. Pek Van Andel's recent video of MRI images of people having sex.

Jonathan James McCreadie Lillie in his article “Cyberporn, Sexuality and the Net Apparatus” while talking about academic engagement with pornography (by Kipnis, Hunt, Waugh, Kendrick) points to how they share “a common concern with analysing pornography within the various cultural constructs and social spaces in which it appears, and in which people encounter it”. He says that a new agenda for cyberporn research has to acknowledge that “people have produced pornography in many different forms for many different purposes, and the reasons why people use it or do not use it, and what meanings they make of it, are equally diverse”. (1)

Lillie points towards cyberporn reception studies – the home/office terminal as a site of cyberporn reception – as a possible starting point of further work on cyberporn. My interest is located in how does one understand your own consumption of internet porn, located as it is in the context that is not the global North and more specifically not male and not heterosexual. Attempting to do that through the readings in porn studies (Porn studies, edited by Linda Williams) (2), or specifically net porn studies (C’lick me – Net Porn Reader) (3), has not been entirely fruitful though what is talked about is highly interesting. One of the problems perhaps lies in what Lillie says about the need for analyzing pornography within the various cultural constructs and social spaces in which it appears, rather than separate or floating above them. The Internet does not entirely make protean beings (cyborgs?) of us after all, and the relevance of porn studies elsewhere can only be partially relevant to a study here.

[Curiously though the debates within feminism and the women’s movement around pornography in the global North – the familiar rhetoric of the causal links between pornography and violence, do have a resonance in similar debates in the women’s movement here. At a roundtable discussion on the role of media at the recent Courts of Women organized by Vimochana (4), many of the sentiments expressed by activists and organizations see a causal link between explicit sexual material, violence and its direct negative impact on morals, attitudes and behaviour of people.]

Linda Williams begins the volume on Porn Studies by stating that there has been a movement from the deadlock of pro-censorship and sex positive feminist discourse on pornography, to a stage where there is a veritable explosion of sexual material that is crying out for analysis, and that sexually explicit imagery is a fixture in popular culture today (obviously referring to America but to some extent true for other contexts as well). In some ways there is an attempt amongst academics, intellectuals, journalists and other writers here to make sense of the pornographic material that has crept into our media saturated cities. Many recent articles spawned by the ban on Savita Bhabhi attempt to understand the unleashing of desire around Savita Bhabhi (from a rock song to unashamed fandom) and to analyse the reasons for the ban or rather what makes Savita Bhabhi threatening.

Savita Bhabhi, the [porn] [toon] [star]

Itty Abraham undertakes a fairly detailed analysis of what is happening in twelve episodes of Savita Bhabhi and perhaps unconvincingly places the crux of the story of Savita Bhabhi on her cuckolded husband, Ashok (5). He says “Their family life is relentless modern, nuclear, bourgeois, if also gendered in familiar ways. The couple eats together (and at the same time), they watch TV together in the evenings, and sleep in the same bed.” For Abraham, the comic is about “these new sexual possibilities.. that begin from a new kind of freedom to which the modern urban woman has access”. The article suggests that we seem to be faced with a choice between the free untrammeled Savita and her easy occupation of urban spaces protected by an aura of class and her husband Ashok who is the hard worker earning enough to keep alive her/our illusion of abundant urban neoliberal existence. Interestingly the article is not attempting to make a point about pornography in relation to ideas of culture, tradition, vulgarity or other familiar motifs in the debate on obscenity.

Shohini Ghosh’s article takes on the task to find out what precisely is so transgressive about Savita Bhabhi (6). Savita Bhabhi is poised between the family and husband and illegitimate desires (similar to themes in Charulata, Hum aapke hain kaun). She points that the pleasure of the comic is not just that there are hard core sexual scenes as much as that the husband or a similar character cannot look at what you look at. The Indian erotica (or pornographic text) scene too is replete with tales of incest and transgressions with domestic workers or servants|maids as they are called in the stories. Ghosh while acknowledging the harm-violence debate within feminism on pornography, states that she is anti-censorship – that although it is obvious that media, images have an impact (otherwise why would they be cause of study) there is no neat causal link between porn and sexual violence. She ends by saying that “pornography then is a phantasmatic arena. It does not reflect people’s ‘real’ sex lives so much as it articulates the desires and aspirations for imagined ones.”

Both articles make important linkages to other and pre-existing debates on neo-liberal agendas, occupation of urban spaces, feminism and obscenity. Ghosh seems to also be referring to a broader category of Indian porn and the problems posed by it. She also gestures towards the problems that might be posed if Savita Bhabhi were a real person and not a comic, but by and large most journalistic writing/analysis of Savita Bhabhi flattens out the field – asking questions as if comic characters were real persons, and not taking into account aesthetics, technology (mode of delivery) or where and how it is viewed (reception) by people. There is a difference in the way I respond to a comic about sex than to an MMS or hidden camera porn where I am aware of the ‘realness’ of atleast some aspects of the image I’m looking at.

The ‘realness’ raises certain dilemmas – the anxiety is not as severe and troubled as in the case of Mysore Mallige which is haunted by urban legends of the couples or only the woman committing suicide, forced marriage at a police station etc. Nonetheless to encounter the MMS video, when the woman is looking directly at the camera often so it does not seem like a hidden camera or non-consensual video, is to acknowledge the taking of pleasure at the expense of someone else which may or may not bother you, but does render the activity far more illicit and scary. My feeling of fear|anxiety|secrecy|aloneness when surfing pornography, whether in the office, home or anywhere where I can be discovered, is an added layer to the experience even if the various aspects of violation of privacy, vulnerability of the woman in the video or the existence of a pornography industry are not uppermost in the mind when actually viewing the clips. One of the few works done that do address this complicated set of affects that circulate and attach themselves to pornography is Bharath Murthy’s film on Mysore Mallige ( the next post will be on this film and interview with Bharath Murthy). (7)

This is why I would insist that the comic is a different space for a viewer – some things such as anxieties about who this person I’m looking at is and what happened to her do disappear, while others such as a comic is bright, colourful and highly visible on my computer screen (for instance) become more important. It is harder to hide surfing Savita Bhabhi in an office than reading erotica or even downloading and discreetly watching a small video. The aspect of how Savita Bhabhi being a comic/drawn character changes how a viewer relates to the material is an area of study that needs to be looked at more closely, perhaps with the help of existing work that looks at the manga, anime, hentaii phenomenon in Japan and parts of South East Asia.

The makers of Savita Bhabhi were anonymous till the ban and after what seemed like a rather brief struggle with authority (SaveSavita campaign on twitter and a blog) they vacated the public scene. As a consequence of no real contest, the ban persists. But perhaps what is admirable is that many people have learnt to use tools that allow them to still view Savita (and to expose them here would be just foolhardy). In an interview online the makers of Savita Bhabhi state .. “For one, it (comic) is a unique medium in the context of Indian porn. We’ve had MMS’s, videos, stories, etc, but no porn comics. Also a comic allows us to explore the fantasy in a much more vivid way than any other medium.” This fantasy life however cannot be dismissed, as it is indeed very real, or as they say – “based on real life fantasies of our authors and fans. They are all something that a normal full blooded Indian male or female would be fantasizing about on their commute to work or a lazy evening at home.” In a short interview with the makers of the comic more recently and subsequent to the ban they said that probably it was Savita Bhabhi’s popularity that led to her downfall and that they set out to explore Indian sexuality, which “obviously is a big No”.

To return to Lillie’s call for a cyberporn reception studies perhaps it is time in relation to looking at such material that we step away, even if briefly, from these debates on feminism, vulgarity and obscenity in Indian culture and others. In an interview dated 5th September, 2009, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan says that what needs to be looked at when studying pornography, is not the questions of Indian culture, religion, roles of women and gender (as for questions related to obscenity) but the aesthetics of pornography. In his own work Radhakrishnan deals precisely with this question in relation to the category of ‘soft porn’ and how Shakeela becomes a star through soft porn cinema – a star not entirely governed by the narrative of the film but seemingly existing beyond the limit of the film itself. (8) By doing this, his work deals with the question of how desire works in such films, which perhaps is one of the more important question to ask about pornography. In the same interview, he states that there is “something that takes place between the text and the person watching” and that is what he is interested in.

Anti-porn

Radhakrishnan’s position is interesting in relation to this project as it opens up questions that are beyond the feminist deadlock on pornography and also goes beyond rhetoric of the liberating potential of the explosion of the polymorphous perverse online. The latter is where a lot of porn studies undertaken in the global North seems to get lost. The breathless recounting of the pornographic in the everyday, does not help since it becomes very obvious that any analysis would not be relevant to a vastly different context in India. (9)

Walter Metz in his article on Open Water (10) challenges the ethics of porn studies – though he acknowledges that pornography is more a symptom rather than a cause of anti-social behaviours that it is often linked to (violent rape, aggressive behaviour, sexism etc.), but still raises the question as to whether there are significant reasons to put the brakes on a rabid, radical celebration of the liberating potential of pornography. Metz talks about the need, within porn studies, to look at the positive and negative impact of pornography (possibly he would extend that to looking at violent martial arts film and other strands of cinema/new media).

Metz’s paper as such deals with Open Water as an anti-pornographic film (here referring to the generic practice of pornography rather than political positions) and this might be an interesting productive mode to understand the affect produced by pornography. Though Metz qualifies that he’s not using pornography as a genre, but rather “as a reading frame. If one keeps thinking about pornography while watching a non-pornographic film, what is the resulting interpretation?” Since I haven’t seen the film Open Water perhaps my interest in such an analysis is misfounded. Metz describes the frustration depicted in the film Open Water between the audience expectations for a reasonably good looking, tanned, blonde couple to get-it-on and what happens to their bodies instead in the open water of the sea and prey to sharks, is similar to the disjuncture that takes place in one of the films part of the Destricted project. (11)

Destricted is an interesting artistic|intellectual|new media|film experiments in the global North around pornography. It is a series of short films that resulted from an invitation to seven well known artists and filmmakers to try to respond to sex and especially the phenomenon of pornography in the contemporary. One of the films Death Valley by Sam Taylor-Wood borrows from the Biblical tale of Onan and places a man masturbating in the heaving, throbbing landscape of the Death Valley (the hottest place in the Western hemisphere where the earth’s crust is constantly changing and shifting). For precisely 7 minutes and 58 seconds, the protagonist of the film masturbates uncomfortably without reaching ejaculation and/or release. The painful un-release of this film, perhaps is meant to be juxtaposed with the assumed ease of pornography’s answer to desire. However peculiarly it actually is probably an accurate description of the experiential account of pornography – of looking, searching, finding, downloading on painfully low speeds, watching short clips that are blurred, shot only from one angle, badly drawn comics or looking at largely uninspiring material which is not acquired or found easily.

In some ways the experience of watching either of these films sounds similar to watching certain kinds of MMS video porn. For instance, one video was of a couple doing oral sex in a toilet cubicle. The angle of the camera was from the top and perhaps the intention behind this was to obscure the faces of the two persons, since only the top of their heads are visible. It did not seem like the couple were unaware of the video camera, as much as performing for it almost unwillingly and only if the anonymity was preserved. The video was low quality and highly blurred, to the point of any features being indistinct beyond blackness of hair (maybe) and generic skin tone which could be Indian, Iranian or generic South Asian. The resemblance to the Destricted video is because again of the time it takes to reach ejaculation – there is a painfully long uninspiring blowjob sequence. The video remains scary and leaves one with a feeling of claustrophobia, discomfort and peculiarly boredom or distance from what is happening. Yet perhaps it is here that the question of realness and the affect it produces enters again. The question that intrigues me is whether the affect produced by the video is because there are certain gestures of the woman that seem recognizable, because she seems like you (ethnically, racially ofcourse but also in sexual spaces she occupies and behaviour). After having accomplished the task of coaxing semen out of the uninspiring penis she is faced with, she folds her legs and speaks indistinctly. In that moment she seems uncomfortably familiar, like watching a friend having sex or maybe an aspect of yourself.

It is perhaps interesting that it is amateur pornography these days that seems to inspire the most complicated set of affects (unlike the schooled|disciplined and predictable response to cinema) – shocked recognition of yourself and desire to see it again, titillation, boredom but yet unwilling to look away, love for celebrities, pleasure of viewing a body like yours and even sometimes a recognition that this is what you look like during sex, fear about your own privacy, disgust for what seems unacceptable and provokes the moral|visual|auditory sensibilities and contempt for the material and the people who possibly are genuinely engaged with it. The article on Pam and Tommy’s video in Porn Studies infact displays these varied affects and underlines William’s assertion that this bracket of material, behaviour and practices that get termed pornography/pornographic does indeed deserve analysis, otherwise a potentially unique and interesting way of understanding the contemporary would be lost for squeamishness.

There are many aspects of the Minette Hillyer’s analysis (12) that are specifically relevant only to the American contexts – the notoriety of both the stars, the pre-existence and glorification of home videos in most families and the acknowledgement of amateur couple porn as even a healthy practice, perhaps suggested for couples with dull sex lives. In India, it was infact unknown people who were catapulted into the public eye with the circulation of their video, online and offline that was later titled Mysore Mallige ; not just the private spaces, holidays and fucking habits of already-celebrities like Pam and Tommy.

What might be relevant here from Hillyer’s analysis is the pre occupation with the realness of amateur pornography. The article follows the travels of the Pam and Tommy home video between different categories/genres, depending on different aspects of its realness. The video as such, contains scenes from the normal domestic lives of the stars and a eight minute sequence of sex in an almost fifty minute length video. So the questions of realness are answered not by the sex in the video, but the mundane recording of their lives, holidays, house and other details. This question of what exactly it is – home video or pornography (domestic/private or pornographic/public) is relevant to questions of legality (for damages upto 90 million dollars), how it circulates (a pornographic video of Pam and Tommy without the domestic padding perhaps would not be considered real and saleable) and genre which relates to some aspects of how people respond to the work. Ever since the advent of (cheap) video technology, pornography is rendered less cinematic and more concerned with the presentational act (of sex) than its representation (ibid). With MMS videos and hidden camera porn, though questions may no longer be about representation, they are still complicated questions about the aesthetics, reception of pornography and our relation to the technology that delivers it and for me viewing pornography today as only presentational does not help to understand the affects that surround and attach to it. Perhaps many strands of what is explored in this article can be explored in relation to Mysore Mallige in the next blog post.

Just as I finish this piece, after an interview with Nishant Shah at Center for Internet and Society, another question enters the frame in relation to pleasure, moving it beyond those raised above. Is pleasure now a question that is less about finding the corporeal thrill through pornography online, as much as pleasure that comes from simulation and the added rush of simulating cities, lives, personalities online. And is that pleasure, pornographic?

End notes:

1. Jonathan James McCreadie Lillie, “Cyberporn, Sexuality, and the Net Apparatus”, Convergence 2004; 10; 43

2. Williams Linda (ed), Porn Studies, Duke University Press, London and Durham, 2004.

3. Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli (eds), C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2007.

4. Courts of Women, Vimochana Bangalore, 27-29 July, 2009.

5. Itty Abraham, Sex in the Neo-liberal City: On Savita Bhabhi, Available at The Fish Pond at http://thefishpond.in/itty/2009/on-savita-bhabhi/#comments

6. Shohini Ghosh, The politics of porn, Himal South Asian Magazine, September 2009, Vol 22, No. 9.

7. Bharath Murthy (director), Mysore Mallige, 2007.

8. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, “‘The Mis-en-scene of desire’: Stardom and the case of soft porn cinema in Kerala!” Unpublished work. Contact author for copy.

9. Bloomingdale's now sells Tom of Finland shirts and trousers, housewives celebrate their birthdays by piercing their geni- tals, college students dance naked instead of waiting tables to pay their tuition, and middle-level managers schedule a session with a dominatrix in their favorite dungeon after a game of racquetball at their regular health club. From Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.

10. Walter Metz, “Shark Porn: Film Genre, Reception Studies, and Chris Kentis' Open Water” Film Criticism, March 22, 2007

11 Destricted: explicit films, Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor Wood (directors), 2006.

12 Minnette Hillyer, “Sex in the suburban: Porn, Home movies and the Live Action Perofmance of Love in Pam and Tommy: Hardcore and uncensored”, Porn Studies, Duke University Press, London and Durham, 2004, p.50.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/looking-closer-at-porn-with-x-ray-spectacles-savita-bhabhi-mms-video-and-others

Deconstructing ‘Internet addiction’

radha — 2011-04-02T15:09:28Z

An article by Sruthi Krishnan and Shyam Ranganathan in The Hindu on August 30th,'09

CHENNAI: Earlier this week, the first rehabilitation centre for ‘Internet addicts’ was opened in the United States. De-addiction camps in China were in the news recently for the death of a teenager because of the brutal methods used there to cure ‘Internet addiction.’

‘Internet addiction’ for now is a catch-all term that not only stands for addiction to specific activities such as gambling or gaming but also refers to longer hours devoted to the computer network at the expense of other activities.

Though the Internet is only a medium of communication and information transmission like the printed book or television, ‘addiction’ is being used in this case with concern because of a fundamental dialectic: ‘quantity becomes quality.’

“A whole new world is just a click away with the Internet. It is a medium just like books and TV, but the amount of interaction it makes possible with others, sometimes replacing the need for real world interaction, makes it vastly different,” says E.S. Krishnamoorthy, consultant neuropsychiatrist, Voluntary Health Services, Chennai.

Though chemical changes may not be induced by the broadly repetitive action involved in gaming and general ‘Internet addiction,’ social behavioural modifications do take place, including sleep deprivation and aggression towards the depriver of access to the Internet, he says.

“It is somewhat between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and addiction due to substance abuse. Substance abuse-led addiction focusses on gratification which this form of attachment provides, though there is no chemical ingestion. At the same time, the behavioural modifications are similar to those with OCD. It is almost like the ‘rush’ gamblers get out of a purely gratification-oriented repetitive action,” Dr. Krishnamoorthy adds.

Generational gap

Sunil Abraham, director-policy, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, says what constitutes ‘Internet addiction’ is sometimes misunderstood because of a generational gap between those who grew up immersed in technology and those who adopted technology later in their lives.

Can a teenager’s extensive use of social networking be categorised as ‘addiction’? Not necessarily. Social networking could lead to forging new relationships which could be beneficial.

For now, such activities may not be the norm, but it could be the way our society is configured in the future, says Mr. Abraham.

The Internet itself offers solutions to balance your real and virtual activities. For instance, ‘Freedom’ is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. In the settings of Google mail, you can enable ‘Email addict’ (a Google Labs feature) that disables your screen and makes you invisible on chat for 15 minutes. There are many such timer software that let you set a period for which a certain activity would be banned.

Dr. Krishnamoorthy advocates counselling and concerted effort to increase real world social interactions for “treating” Internet addiction. He warns that the problem is larger in that we are creating an “inward-looking society.”

“There is a big problem on hand if many people replace the real world with the Internet instead of using it as a device to enhance interactions,” he says.

Mr. Abraham says controls should come from a more open and informed discussion, of which even children are a part. Dubbing an activity not fully understood an “addiction” and imposing old-fashioned controls are not the right approach, he adds.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/deconstructing-2018internet-addiction2019

Fallacies, Lies, and Video Pirates

pranesh — 2011-08-04T04:43:08Z

At a recent conference on counterfeiting and piracy, industry representatives variously pushed for stiffer laws for IP violation, more stringent enforcement of existing IP laws, and championed IP as the most important thing for businesses today. This blog post tries to show how their arguments are flawed.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) organized its third annual conference on counterfeiting and piracy, with support from the United States Embassy and the Quality Brands Protection Committee of China (a body comprising more than 80 multinational companies). Last week we criticised the conference in an open letter. This week, we examine a few of the recurring themes that came up at the conference.

Something being substandard is not the same as something being counterfeit.

This was a mistake made by many whenever they invoked 'counterfeit' in the sense of something that is violative of one's patent and trademark rights. The Indian Drugs and Cosmetics Act itself distinguishes between 'misbranded', 'adulterated', and 'spurious' drugs, thus recognizing that something that is made without proper authorization from rights owners isn't necessarily of a bad quality. Indeed, this was substantiated by an audience member, a lawyer from Dr. Reddy's Lab. She spoke of a mandi in Agra where they seized medicines being sold under the Dr. Reddy's name, but produced by local manufacturers. Upon lab testing, it turned out, much to their surprise, that the medicines were of the highest quality and were not substandard. Similarly, many large companies including trusted FMCG companies like Hindustan Unilever and ITC are upbraided by authorities for violations of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act (for the cosmetics they produce) as well as the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act. Thus, even legitimate businesses can produce substandard products. Thus, a product can be unauthorized but not substandard, just as a product can be substandard but not counterfeit.

This distinction becomes very important when we talk about patents, and especially drug patents. A generic drug is by definition identical or within an acceptable bio-equivalent range to the brand name counterpart with respect to pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties. Thus, this entire category of high-quality drugs is often sought to be made illegal or counterfeit by large pharma companies. Some countries like Kenya have capitulated. But so far the World Health Assembly has been forced by developing countries to keep the issue of substandard medicines separate from patent-bypassing medicines.

The industry, for all their talk about "out of the box" thinking on the issue, still only consider metrics such the number of piracy raids conducted as measures of success. A question was put forth by Manisha Shridhar of the Intellectual Property & Trade Unit of the World Health Organization upon learning of the quality of the drugs seized at the Agra mandi: Why not cut a licensing deal with those manufacturers, who obviously have excellent production facilities? That kind of thinking, which helped HMV in India in the 1980s, and copying innovative features from video pirates and pricing their products competitively has helped an Indian company, Moserbaer, do extremely well.

Counterfeiters and pirates are not always seeking to fool consumers.

Only lawyers hired by the industry would think that a consumer aspiring towards a Rolex watch would actually think that the one he purchased off the streets for one-hundredth the original's price was in fact original. Street-side DVD hawkers are not thought by the general public to be selling original wares. Still, despite knowing the difference between the original and the fake, consumers many times opt for the latter.

Having said that, counterfeiting, by using someone else's trademark and trying to pass off fake goods as real ones, is quite obviously wrong. It harms customers, and it harms the manufacturers. Thus, a distinction deserves to be made here between the counterfeiters who try to deceive consumers (for instance by copying authenticity marks, like holograms, etc.) and those who are just providing them with highly cheaper alternatives (pirated DVDs, etc.). In this light, it is also important here to distinguish between counterfeiting, traditionally taken to be trademark violation, and piracy, traditionally taken to be a violation of international law, but now generally meaning a large-scale violation of copyright law. While the former can lead to consumer confusion, the latter scarcely ever does. This is ignored by industry people who evoke the image of the consumer quite often, but only when it helps them, and not in any meaningful manner. They negate consumer choice when it comes to consciously purchasing pirated goods, and consumer freedoms when it comes to usage of copyrighted materials.

While commercial film piracy funds terrorists, so does pretty much every business activity.

A favourite of the MPAA (and by association, the MPA) is the RAND report on Film Piracy and its Connection to Organized Crime and Terrorism. This report, which was funded by the MPAA, predictably concludes that film piracy funds organized crime and terrorism. Even if we are to believe its findings wholesale, it leaves us wondering whether all business activities from which terrorists derive funds should be banned.

In India, there is a substantiated link between organized crime and film and music production, and terrorists have been said to make money off the stock market. If the MPA's arguments are taken to their logical conclusions, then film production and equity trading should also be prosecuted. Furthermore, while the mafia and terrorists are the ostensible targets, the laws that are brought about to tackle it affect poor roadside vendors and non-commercial online file sharers. To tackle the funding of terrorists, roadside piracy shouldn't become the target just as film production per se shouldn't. The invocation of the RAND report is thus only meant for rhetorical effect, as it is hard to find logic in there.

"To copy without authorization is to steal", the death penalty, and drug peddling.

At the conference, Dominic Keating of the US Embassy pointed out that "to copy without authorization is to steal" and David Brener of US Customs and Border Protection kept emphasising, on at least two occasions, that "drug peddling merits an automatic death sentence in many countries". There are numerous arguments one can make to show the lack of thought in the former. One could point out that 'stealing' and 'theft' are things that happen to tangible property, and that not only is copyright not tangible, but it is barely property. Copying without authorization creates one more of what existed, without depriving the authorizer (usually a corporation) of its original. This goes against our notion of 'stealing'. If the argument is to be shifted to the terrain of control over one's property/copyright, Mark Lemley in an illuminative article shows how the economic theories behind externalities in property and copyright are vastly different, and that complete control over either has never been, nor should it ever be, an aim of the law. Simply put, someone free riding on your property leaves you worse off than earlier, while someone free riding on your copyright usually doesn't.

One could also point out that 'stealing' is endemic in activities involving human creativity. T.S. Eliot notes that "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different". He does not even consider the possibility that artistic borrowing, whether by imitation or by 'stealing' does not happen. Even Y.S. Rajan, Principal Adviser to CII recognized this when during the conference he noted that "imitation and innovation have an interesting and intertwining philosophical history". If we are to take Mr. Keating's admonishment seriously, we would indeed have a very illustrious list of thieves on our hands, including the Walt Disney Corporation, William Shakespeare, Vladamir Nabokov, Public Enemy, and pretty much every creative person who has ever lived. Books can be written about this (and indeed, numerous books have been), so we shall not dwell on this issue.

Mr. Brener's repeatedly spoke of how drug peddling attracts death penalty in many countries (though in neither the US nor in India has anyone ever received capital punishment for drug peddling), but he also clarified that he is not advocating for the death penalty for copyright violations. That made one wonder why he was bringing up the death penalty at all. He also made the dubious, non-substantiated claim (noting it as "true fact") that pirating movies is more profitable than selling heroin. This claim appears in an article about a report produced by the Australian Federation Against Counterfeit Theft (AFACT), but the original report is nowhere to be found. The article about the AFACT report also claims that the pirates are using their illicit profits promote drug smuggling. The seeming contradiction of film pirates investing in something that is riskier and less profitable doesn't seem to have caught the eye of the writers. One version of the 'drugs are less profitable than pirated DVDs' claim (with marijuana taking heroin's place) was debunked on the Commons Law mailing list. Pirated DVDs are sold for a fraction of the cost of the original. It would be obvious to anyone that DVDs that are typically sold for Rs.30-50, where the cost of manufacture alone may be estimable to be around Rs. 10, cannot be more profitable than heroin peddling. That apart, most online file sharing (deemed to be "piracy") is non-commercial. Thus the question of profit does not really arise. Still, for the industry, absence of a profit is equal to a loss.

Thus, the rhetoric of crime, and that too heinous crime, is continually used, despite its being completely inapposite. Why does used to try to make IP enforcement a matter of state concern, rather than a matter of private, and civil, interest. This way, illegitimate statistics and factoids are used to make individual file-sharers who earn no money get lengthy prison sentences. This and other ways in which IP enforcement has expanded are carefully documented in this paper by Susan Sell.

Repeating false 'statistics' does not make them true.

Again, we were subjected to a number of dubious claims during the conference: If only counterfeiting and piracy were eliminated, India's fiscal deficit would disappear; the Indian entertainment industry loses 16000 crore (USD 4 billion) yearly to piracy; 820,000 direct jobs are lost due to film piracy; software piracy costs the industry USD 2.7 billion annually, etc. These reports' methodologies have been thorougly discredited. Even The Economist, a very conservative and pro-industry newspaper, believes that the BSA-IDC annual reports on software piracy are utterly distorted. Similarly, in the U.S., the figure of 750,000 jobs (around 8% of the U.S. unemployed in 2008) being lost due to piracy were touted by everyone from the Department of Commerce, the Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Border and Customs Protection, and the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA. The amount of money lost each year in the U.S. due to IP infringement has been estimated to be between USD 200-250 billion (that's more than the combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries). In a lengthy piece in Ars Technica, Julian Sanchez traces back the history of both these figures, and shows how they are just large numbers used for lobbying, and are not based on actual studies. The industry-commissioned Ernst & Young report ("The Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy on India's Entertainment Industry") was never made available to the public at large, thereby making it impossible to judge the methodological soundness of the survey and the veracity of the figures.

IP expansion and more stringent enforcement is counter-productive.

Chander Mohan Lall, copyright lawyer to various film studios (including Warner Bros.) in India, used a number of short film clips in presentation during the conference. Upon being questioned about it, he admitted that he did not have permissions of the copyright holders, but claimed that his use fell under "the education exception" in Indian copyright law. While I wish he were correct (because what he was doing was indeed educational use), as per the law he is wrong. Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act only exempts educational usage of cinematograph film recordings when "audience is limited to such staff and students [of an educational institution], the parents and guardians of the students and persons directly connected with the activities of the institution". While there are other arguments he could seek to use to make his usage of the film clilps non-infringing, being excepted by the educational fair dealings clauses isn't one of them. Thus, more stringent enforcement of IP rights actually engenders such unauthorized, but perfectly legitimate copying and communication to the public such as that done by Mr. Lall.

Another way in which IP enforcement is being sought to be increased is by way of the so-called Goonda Acts. These are generally statutes aimed at criminals and lumpen elements in society. The Maharastra version, the Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Slumlords, Bootleggers, Drug-Offenders and Dangerous Persons Act, 1981, just became the Maharashtra Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Slumlords, Bootleggers, Drug-Offenders, Dangerous Persons and Video Pirates Act. The term "video pirate" is very widely defined, to include any copyright infringement-chargesheeter who is "engaged or is making preparations for engaging in any of his activities as a video pirates, which affect adversely or likely to affect adversely, the maintenance of public order". Public order is deemed to be disturbed by "producing and distributing pirated copies of music or film products, thereby resulting in a loss of confidence in administration". Thus video pirates can possibly be interpreted to include individual sitting at home and using P2P networks to share films. The only requirement is that they should have had a chargesheet lodged against them previously -- they needn't even have been convicted; being chargesheeted suffices. Thus, non-commercial activities of file-sharing are equated to bootleggers and drug smugglers, and preventive detention (an anti-civil rights relic of India's colonial past) is applicable to them.

IP expansion is happening without the ostensible justifications for IP being kept in mind. That Tirupathi ladoos are going to get GI (geographical indicator) protection was announced at the conference with great pride. Geographical indicators are used to protect consumer interests, to ensure that no one outside a particular region (Champagne) can lay claim to be producing that product (Champagne) if the production of that product is intrinsically linked to special features found in that region (climate, etc.). However, no devout person would want to purchase anything advertised as "Tirupathi ladoo" if it were produced outside the Venkateswara temple at Tirupathi, thus the question of consumer confusion does not arise. What if someone malignantly advertises something as Tirupathi ladoo and claims it was made in Tirupathi (and not just that it tastes like the ladoo made there)? Such a person can be taken to task for deceptive advertising, and there is no need for something to have IP protection to do so. This represents a senseless expansionism of IP. It is now IP for IP's sake.

One of the speakers, Mr. V.N. Deshmukh, who though pro-stringent IP enforcement, astutely noted that, "When local demand is not met, they [consumers] turn to counterfeiters and pirates." Local demand can be unsatisfied because of lack of supply, or because the supply is overpriced, or because the supply is not easy to access, or because what is supplied is inferior to what is demanded. At the end of the day, as William Patry, Google's lead counsel, has noted, what companies sell to the public are products and services, and not IP. It would thus be wise for businesses to be innovative and compete rather than trying to extend their monopolies and engaging in rent-seeking behaviour that is economical harmful to consumers. They would also do well to remember that IP is not only a product but an input as well, so they are ultimately consumers themselves. All the harsher laws and enforcement mechanisms that they push for right now will have unintended consequences, and come to affect them adversely.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/fallacies-lies-and-video-pirates

Civil Society Letter Against TRIPS-Plus IP Enforcement

pranesh — 2011-09-22T12:48:51Z

This open letter was sent to the president of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and high-level government officials on the eve of the Third International Conference on Counterfeiting & Piracy organized by CII. This conference aims to strengthen the enforcement of intellectual property rights and thus creating an imbalance in the protection that intellectual property offers to both those who own it as well as those who don't.

An Open Letter to the President of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on the Third International Conference on Counterfeiting & Piracy

To
Mr. Venu Srinivasan
The President
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)
The Mantosh Sondhi Centre, 23,
Institutional Area, Lodi Road
New Delhi - 110 003

Dear Mr. Srinivasan,

We understand that Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is hosting the Third International Conference on Counterfeiting and Piracy from 19-20th August 2009 in partnership with the Embassy of the United States and the Quality Brand Protection Committee (QBPC), China. As stated in the invitation letter the primary objectives of the conference are: 1) to initiate coordinated action for cross border enforcement; 2) to highlight the importance of protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs); 3) to combat the growing threat of piracy and counterfeiting; 4) to facilitate a global meeting of customs officials across the globe; 5) to recommend the creation and setting up of a governmental “National Brand Protection” group; 6) to serve as a forum to discuss legal guidelines related to the prosecution of IPR infringement and to eliminate ‘loopholes’ within the existing laws; and 7) to strengthen cooperation between enforcement agencies and chalk out strategies for enforcement agencies a industry action both at national & international level. We also understand that this international conference is part of CII Intellectual Property Division’s special initiative on enforcement of IPRs. As part of this special initiative CII aims at “engaging government to create conducive legislative measures, policy levels reform and impressing [upon them] to adopt stringent enforcement initiatives and exemplary punitive and monetary measures to further safeguard and secure the interest of industry”. CII also wants to “create a global partnership to synergise efforts of international community and to support and participate in India's efforts in combating counterfeiting both at domestic and international levels”. We, the undersigned, representing various civil society organizations in India, write this letter to express our strong reservation on the conference as well as on CII’s special initiative on IP enforcement. Without raising any question on CII’s right to organize events we would like to convey the following concerns with regard to the conference and CII’s initiative on IP enforcement.

Many of the above mentioned objectives of the conference and the special initiative are directed towards the enhancement of intellectual property (IP) standards like coordinated action on border measures, common guidelines for prosecution of IP infringement, exemplary punitive and monetary measures, etc. In other words, enhancement of IP standards means using more public money to protect private rights; very often protecting the monopoly over intangible property rights of multi-national corporations (MNCs).

As you may be aware, MNCs and their developed country hosts are currently engaged in the implementation of a multi-pronged strategy to enhance IP enforcement standards.[1] This is similar to the MNC’s initiatives in the mid 80s to enhance international IP protection, which resulted in the Agreement on Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Unlike the 80s, now MNCs and developed countries use multiple forums to pursue the objective of enhancement of IP enforcement standards. Some developed countries have unilaterally enhanced their IP enforcement strategy to force other countries, especially developing countries, to accept the same through various multilateral organizations, namely the World Customs Organization (WCO), World Health Organization (WHO), Universal Postal Union (UPU), Interpol, WIPO and WTO. Developed countries are also using Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), Bilateral Agreements on IP Enforcements as well as financing lobbyist studies, conferences and policy recommendations to impose higher IP enforcement standards. These efforts for the enhancement of IP enforcement standards are a matter of grave concern for the people of developing countries and their governments. By partnering with the US Embassy and Quality Brand Protection Committee of China (QBPC)[2] in the organization of this conference, CII is allowing itself to play in the hands of MNCs and some developed countries, whose interests do not match with that of India industries and that of the Indian people.

As you are aware, the Government of India is taking a very strong position in resisting enhancement of IP enforcement standards in all the multilateral forums. India along with like-minded developing countries successfully pushed back TRIPS-plus[3] IP enforcement agenda at WCO and WHO. India is also trying its level best to convince other developing countries the need to stick to TRIPS-compliant standards rather than adopting TRIPS-plus enforcement standards. In the wake of the controversial generic drug seizures by EU customs authorities, India has also raised the issue of TRIPS-plus IP enforcement standards contained in the EU IP Enforcement Directive at least two times at the TRIPS Council.[4] The Indian political leadership has unequivocally raised its concern over the enhancement of IP enforcement standards at other forums also.[5] In adopting this stance, the Government of India has cited public interest as well as the operating freedom of Indian industry as its justifications.[6] By partnering at this vital stage with an MNC lobby group and a heeding to developed country governments, CII is not acting in furtherance of the legitimate public interests of Indian domestic industry and the Indian people.

It is a well-evidenced fact that TRIPS-plus enforcement standards adversely impact not only legitimate trade between nations (as shown by the EU seizures) but also the day-to-day life of millions of people especially in India and other developing countries.[7] Unfounded IP enforcement measures would adversely impact access to life saving medicines and educational materials. Thus the IP enforcement measures also have the potential to deny right to development to people in the global South. Hence an organization like CII should not view IP as only a business tool but should look at the larger scheme of things especially in the social and economic realities of India. In fact, by promoting enhancement of IP enforcement standards CII is advocating a policy, which would violate the right to health, the right to knowledge, as also the right to development.

We would also like to point out that Indian pharmaceutical industry is one of the victims of TRIPS-plus IP enforcement standards. In 2008 alone, 17 consignments[8] were seized in transit at Europe using the EU Directive on IP Enforcement, which allows seizure of goods in transit.[9] These consignments were being exported from developing countries (such as India and Brazil) to other developing countries, and the contents of the consignments are perfectly legal in both the exporting as well as the importing nations. These highly questionable seizures resulted in the crisis of health programmes as it resulted in delays in and prohibitive costs of access to life-saving medicines in developing countries of Africa and Latin America. CII can barely claim to be representative of the interests of Indian industry if it ignores such episodes and partners with self-promoting MNCs and developed countries’ governments to advocate for the enhancement of IP enforcement standards.

In the light of above-mentioned issues, we request you to consider the following:

Rejecting the TRIPS-plus enforcement agenda in toto. We demand CII, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry(ASSOCHAM) and other Indian business associations to reject any and all attempts of bringing in a TRIPS-plus enforcement agenda in India, in the interests of Indian industry and the Indian people.
Completely disengaging from any collaborative efforts with foreign institutions to further TRIPS-plus standards of IP protection in India and also abstaining from any engagements on the anti-counterfeiting efforts with foreign agencies. CII should attempt to engage with domestic institutions and build national consensus before engaging with foreign institutions with the claim of representatives of Indian industry.
Taking necessary proactive steps to safeguard the interests of access to medicine and access to knowledge along with interest of the Indian domestic industry.
Participating in a more creative discussion on IP and development rather than simply accepting the simplistic and largely discredited view that stronger IP regime leads to more innovation and is a necessary condition for socio-economic development.

CC:
Shri Anjan Das
Senior Director & Head
Technology, Innovation, IPR & Life Sciences
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)
Plot No. 249-F, Sector-18; Udyog Vihar, Phase-IV,
Gurgaon-122015, Haryana

Shri. P. Chidambaram
Minister
Ministry of Home Affairs
Government of India
North Block, Central Secretariat
New Delhi 110001

Shri G. K. Pillai
Secretary Justice
Department of Justice
Ministry of Home Affairs
Government of India
North Block, Central Secretariat
New Delhi 110001

Shri Naresh Dayal,
Secretary, Dept. of Health and Family Welfare
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
Government of India
149-A, Nirman Bhawan, New Delhi – 110 011

Shri Ajay Shankar
Secretary
Department Of Industrial Policy & Promotion
Ministry of Commerce and Industry
Room 153, Udyog Bhavan,
New Delhi – 110 011

Signatories to this letter

Centre for Trade and Development (Centad), New Delhi
Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
National Working Group on Patent Laws, New Delhi
Lawyers Collective (HIV/AIDS Unit)
All India Drug Action Network (AIDAN)
International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), India
Consumers Association of India, Chennai
IndoJuris Law Offices, Chennai
All Indian People’s Science Network, New Delhi
Delhi Science Forum
Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Knowledge Commons
Moving Republic
IT for Change
Centre for Health and Social Justice(CHSJ), New Delhi
Navdanya, New Delhi
Support for Advocacy and Training to Health Initiatives (SATHI)
Centre for Enquiry Into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT)
Initiative for Health Equity & Society
International Peoples Health Council (South Asia)
Drug Action Forum – Dharwad, Karnataka
Dr. Mira Shiva, New Delhi
Tina Kuriakose, PhD Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Dr Gopal Dabade, Dharwad
Dinesh Abrol, Scientist NISTADS, CSIR, New Delhi
Madhavi Rahirkar, Lawyer/Consultant, Pune
Gautam John, Bangalore
Achal Prabhala, Bangalore

Endnotes

[1] See Susan K Sell, The Global IP Upward Ratchet, Anti-counterfeiting and Piracy Enforcement Efforts: The State of Play.
[2] QBPC barely qualifies as a representative of Chinese interest, as it comprises more than 180 multinational member companies.
[3] ‘TRIPS-plus’ refers to any protection of IPRs that surpasses the standards and requirements spelt out in WTO-TRIPS provisions.
[4] See Jonathan Lyn, India Brazil raise EU drug Seizures issue at WTO, available at http://www.livemint.com/2009/02/04232721/India-Brazil-raise-EU-drug-se.html
[5] Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Broaches Seizures of Generics at ECOSOC, available at http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/07/08/india-ecosoc-seizures/#more-2404
[6] Indian Commerce Secretary’s Speech to the African Community Ambassadors. available at http://www.centad.org/focus_77.asp.
[7] For two very recent examples, see Intellectual Property Enforcement: International Perspectives, Xuan Li & Carlos Correa (eds.) (2009); Anand Grover, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health, A/HRC/11/12 (2009).
[8] Jyoti Datta, 16 out of 17 drug consignment seizures in the Dutch were from India available at http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2009/06/08/stories/2009060851700300.htm
[9] The EC Regulation No 1383/2003 allows for seizure of goods in transit.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/civil-society-letter-against-trips-plus-ip-enforcement

Letter from Civil Society Organizations to CII

pranesh — 2011-04-02T15:15:44Z

A total of 29 groups and individuals expressed their concern about the drive by CII to introduce TRIPS-plus enforcement standards in India.

Original report in Business Standard

Govt accepts panel report against narrowing of Indian patent law

BS Reporter / New Delhi August 18, 2009, 1:14 IST

The central government has accepted the recommendations of an expert committee headed by former Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) chief R A Mashelkar on patent laws. The committee had concluded that limiting the grant of patents for pharmaceutical substances to new chemical entities will be a violation of the TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

In effect, the committee endorsed the current position taken by India, in allowing patenting of known medicines if they have substantial new therapeutic uses.

The Mashelkar committee was formed after the government got passed the Patent Bill in 2005. It was assigned to see if the demand for narrowing the patent laws would breach India’s obligations under the WTO agreement. Mashelkar had presented the committee report in 2007, only for it to be withdrawn due to complaints of “technical errors”. The revised copy, submitted to the government few months ago, was accepted recently.

The move has come as a setback to many civic groups who were hoping to see a a constriction of Indian patent laws. The domestic lobby groups were heartened after a committee of Parliamentarians recently recommended changes in the existing rules to limit patenting of medicines to just “new chemical entities”.

In a letter to commerce minister Anand Sharma, the National Working Group on Patent Laws asked for the “recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee to take precedence over those of the Mashelkar committee.” It wanted the Mashelkar committee recommendations to be disregarded and appropriate amendments introduced in the Patents Act, 1970.

The civil society groups are stepping up protest against the “alleged” move to link “counterfeit” issues with intellectual property protection. In an open letter to Confederation of Indian Industry today, 21 groups have protested against the intellectual property enforcement initiatives of the CII.

“It is disheartening to note that the CII, being an Indian industry organization, is hosting the Third International Conference on Counterfeiting and Piracy from 19-20th August 2009 in partnership with American Embassy and the Quality Brand Protection Committee (QBPC), China, a body that comprises over 80 multinational corporations”, Linu Mathew Phillip, acting director of the Delhi-based Centre for Trade and Development said. “It is of immense concern to all of us, since higher norms of intellectual property enforcement necessarily undermine various other rights of the people at large, including the right to access to medicines and access to knowledge,” he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/letter-from-civil-society-organizations-to-cii

Presentation at TIFR: 'Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Commons'

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:42:49Z

CIS Distinguished Fellow Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam will give a talk titled 'Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Commons' at TIFR, Mumbai, on Friday, 24 July 2009.

Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, Scholarly communication in the age of the commons, 24/07/09, 1600Hrs, AG-66

Abstract

Scholarly communication plays a central role in the creation and assimilation of new knowledge, especially in the sciences. In its turn scholarly communication depends on developments in technology. Unfortunately, scientists who do cutting edge science often follow communication practices of a bygone era and are therefore holding back the development of knowledge. In this talk we will look at state-of-the-art developments in scholarly communication and literature-based evaluation of science and see how we in India can benefit by adopting them.

About Dr.Subbiah Arunachalam

Subbiah Arunachalam is an information scientist. He has been an editor of scientific journals, teacher of information science, librarian, and a science writer. As Secretary and Editor of publications of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, during 1973-75, he reorganised the publications of the Academy and helped enlarge its Fellowship. Currently he is actively promoting open access to science and scholarship. His interests include scientometrics, science journalism and ICT-enabled rural development.

-----

See the original posting at the TIFR website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/presentation-at-tifr-scholarly-communication-in-the-age-of-the-commons

CPOV: Critical Point of View

nishant — 2009-07-13T09:07:42Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) seek to bring together ideas, experiences and scholarship about Wikipedia in a reader that charts out detailed user stories as well as empirical and analytical work to produce.. The organisations will jointly host two separate conferences aimed at building a Wikipedia Knowledge Network and charting scholarship and stories about The Wikipedia from around the world.

CPOV: Critical Point of View

Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge

Proposal for a research network, two conferences and a reader

Organized by Centre for Internet & Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Introduction: It would be no exaggeration to state that Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The highly visible clashes amongst opinion leaders, university professors, Web 2.0 ‘evangelists’ and publishers over accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. In this respect, what does it mean to now say that Wikipedia has become “mainstream”?

The accelerated growth and scope of Wikipedia as a knowledge reference of universal ambition is unheard of. The Google search engine gives preferential treatment to Wikipedia in an attempt to beat search engine optimizers and to provide a more fruitful experience to its users. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty's Wen-hsien ta-ch' eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie.

Wikipedia owns a whole set of characteristics – including number and automation (bots) of contributors, regularity of updates, fluidity, ease of search, number of languages, and growing user base. In doing so, this online encyclopedia might be cited as the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. Those of us who believe in pluralism, and the possibility of another world have reason to celebrate and defend Wikipedia from intellectual- property-right-maximalists and promoters of proprietary models of knowledge production and dissemination. However, such celebration and defense should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The Wikimedia Foundation has recently employed its first research analyst and provides spaces for “Wikipediology”, including projects such as the Wiki Project on vandalism studies. Nonetheless, critical Wikipedia research should also be done outside the self-reflexivity of the Wikimedia Foundation and its community. There is an urgent need for quantitative and qualitative research from an Humanities and Arts perspective that could benefit both the wider user base and the active Wikipedia community itself.

More than this though, as one of the largest if not the largest self-contained general knowledge reference of our time, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. New strategic and tactical operations of knowledge/power are clearly at work. The concept of the open remains ambiguous in this formation, serving as both a rallying concept and masking new agonistic encounters.

By permanently (re)formulating the open and inclusive as the guiding Wikipedia principle being formulated by the community itself, one might also look at this norm as a narrative or even call it a founding myth. For example, the demographic profile of the Wikipedia editor as a white male geek with a limited mono-cultural worldview based on Western rationality remains a concern. However, the question of (non)diversity being formulated in Wikipedia discussions needs also to be posed beyond existing stereotypes and at the general level of discourse. The question of (post)identity and representation is not necessarily resolved via the discursive construction of 'inclusion', if such inclusion may require leaving competing knowledge histories and practices at the door and if it puts a culture of editing not next to a culture of listening/hearing.

In the most material and perceptional way, every new technology modifies conditions of possibility for knowledge. The logic of technologies bleeds into the very structures and organizing principles of knowledge and today, both medium and message may reflect the ideas of the (organized) network, multitude or the Deleuzian machine. It is through a selected mix of technological and normative conditions – the distributed architecture of the net, the Wiki software platform, commons-based property licenses and the FLOSS zeitgeist – that Wikipedia as the encyclopedia of the information age emerges, both continuing and transforming the Enlightenment encyclopedic impulse or will to know.

The authors of these proposal are aware of the seemingly conflicting overarching research agenda: At one level is a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts and social, culture construction in terms of , authority and politics. At the other level the research agenda is an empirical, anecdotal, sociological investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia. This has been done on purpose so that the learnings from theoretical research activities can inform practice oriented research and vice-versa.

Overall the conferences and reader may include the following areas inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based contributions:

WikiTheory (opening session)
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production
Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century
Wiki Art
Designing Debate
Critique of Free and Open
Global Politics of Exclusion
The Place of Resistance
Wikipedia and Education
Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies
Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production

Descriptions of the Sessions/Fields of Interest

1. WikiTheory – Mining for Concepts (opening session)

Besides providing a general overview of the topics to come, and with an emphasis on diverse global approaches, the aim here is develop concepts that could be used in further research and that could fit into larger projects on Internet culture and the critique of the free and open. Is it possible to develop a counter-hegemony of critical practices that situates itself in the midst of technological cultures? What kind of critical lessons does Wikipedia provide in the face of overwhelming Web 2.0 hype and P2P utopianism? How can a radical Wikipedia critique be developed that does not present itself as the cynical ‘I told you so’ outsider or mimic the neo-conservatist position of Andrew Keen? What kind of insight can Wikipedia offer regarding the continuing tension between knowledge and information?

2. Wikipedia and Critical Histories of Western Knowledge Production

This session may include topics like: western vs. non/post-western knowledge production, textual vs. oral tradition, visual vs. textual knowledge, Wikipedia and language diversity, and indigenous knowledge.

The persistence of almost buried master-narratives: The Western tradition of Enlightenment tends to permeate both common and official understandings of knowledge on Wikipedia. Mirroring the Enlightenment itself, Wikipedia both offers a very particular type of knowledge and simultaneously makes claims upon the universal - e.g. in the formulation of visionary goals, structure of articles, author positions, writing style, categorization of entries, conflict resolution models and so on. The ways in which such ideals persist and continue to bear their mark on the present in often subtle ways requires further attention. Indeed, the 'grand narratives' of the Enlightenment that Jean-Francis Lyotard claimed had retreated with the emergence of 'computerized societies' continue to inform the popular imaginary in ways largely untouched by the deconstructive moment. Frederic Jameson once referred to this as the 'persistence of buried master-narratives', a 'political unconscious' that guides decisions irrespective of philosophical status. Likewise, this resonates with Foucault's urge 'to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge' as that which performs the task of subjugation but operates beyond contention. What matters here is not truth or belief, but operation.

The predominance of textual or even linguistical cultures: The current system of Wikipedia citation prejudices textual systems of knowledge over oral and visual systems of knowledge. This under-values the knowledge systems of cultural memory and related technique such as mnemo techniques or oral poetry on the one hand, and illiterate populations on the other hand.

3. Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century

The word made durable: In this session we want to give an overview of various attempts to create a collection of global knowledge. In order to get a better understanding of the cultural specificity of the underlying code on which Wikipedia is built, this topic seeks to dig further into the histories of the encyclopedia. D' Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie is often described as the most succinct statement of European Enlightenment, and the Encyclopedie itself as the material project of Enlightenment. It is through the Encyclopedie that the Enlightenment becomes durable, tangible and disseminated. What can be learned by examining such historical precedents?

Encyclopedias have been said to be sources of national images and stereotypes of the self and the other within Europe. In Wikipedia image construction tends to be both disembogue and masked in favor of a cosmopolitan, global self-understanding. This session might interrogate to what extent knowledge production’s construction of national images is shifted from a discursive to an automatic georeferencing system of construction.

As machines think (or maybe Knowing Machines or The Machinic Intellect): This session may also look to historical attempts to revolutionize knowledge through the creation of new technologies and to what extent these alternate histories resonate with Wikipedia specifically and the technologies of the Net as driven by knowledge imperatives more generally. Examples include the Mundaneum, the Memex, the Galactic Network and project Xanadu.

4. Wikipedia Art

Art at the gates: Wikipedia Art is understood both as artwork and intervention. Taking place largely on Wikipedia itself, the project Wikipedia Art was considered controversial and was quickly removed (see recent debate on nettime-l). What does this project reveal about this type of knowledge production? What is the threshold of legitimacy for this type of knowledge and how are the boundaries policed? What is at stake in the rejection of art?

5. Models of Disambiguation and Designing Debate

May include topics like: Dissent made visible, After Talk / Alerts / Mailing Lists, the role of forum software, technical opportunities for discontent, barnstars/award culture.

The paradox of neutrality: The Neutral Point of View policy of Wikipedia does not always accurately depict the state of debate on topics: The view held by a corporate lobby, using funded research, will find equal space as the opinions of thousands of disadvantaged persons who might be impacted by the actions of the corporate lobby. Would it make sense to replace the NPoV policy and think about Wikipedia as a space of open political agonality; as a battle for meaning underpinned by the desire for reason?

New crises of authenticity: As Wikipedia gains the status of default reference for other printed textual knowledge artifacts – there are emerging challenges of representation; longevity born digital references; digital manipulation of sources; and circular referencing. Shuddhabrata Sengupta of CSDS/Sarai says “Wikipedia encouraged in its community the active exercise of a critical and skeptical attitude towards any received form of knowledge”. In this context the evolving notions of authenticity has to be further interrogated given the rise of peer-produced knowledge and the diminishing cult of the expert.

6. Critique of Free and Open

May include topics like: the parasite model of free culture (“You work for free, others will make the money from your free labour.”), governance, the role of developers, economy of Wikipedia, the beliefs of the founders as the political foundation of Wikipedia, critical interrogation of knowledge in relation to 'the open'.

Vacuous collaboration: Master concepts like freedom and openness are at constant risk of remaining empty or constituting an ‘empty signifier’. The failure to fill such concepts has lead to many descriptions of Wikipedia as 'collaborations' or even 'ad hoc meritocracies' (Alex Bruns). Both these second-tier notions also tend to mask the reconfiguration of the political and new forms of closure.

Paid and voluntary community manipulation: Many Wikipedians hold strong opinions on range of sensitive areas including identity, religion, science, politics, culture, and use sophisticated techniques such as astro-turfing on Wikipedia. Additionally, some states, corporations and organized religious groups sometimes pay specialists to engage in astro-turfing in order to remove critical opinions and rewrite information from Wikipedia.

7. Global Politics of Exclusion

May include topics like: non-western, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks.

Tyranny of the connected: In societies which are compounded by digital and participation divides, the connected usually always win over those who don't have access and time to spare.

Gendered Knowledge: While women are strongly represented among readers, globally, they are hardly represented among contributors. In offlist chats, women express that they do not feel comfortable when contributing to Wikipedia conversations. They even felt silenced by the perception of Wikipedia as a masculine tech culture. Some women have already created an alternative space of discussion at wikichix.org. Does the separation of discussion spaces and the marginalization of domestic issues and social impacts on Wikipedia turn back time?

Morality laundering: Moral standards that exist in one country are being exported to other countries via Wikipedia. For example, photo-realistic images of human bodies on pages dealing with sexuality and anatomy are being replaced with drawings. Does this type of common denominator approach undermine the pluralism of global sexuality? The call and eventual refusal of image censorship for the entry on Mohammad represents a similar scenario.

Language diversity: Despite the self-imposed normative claim of language diversity and the self-description of Wikipedia as a truly multi-lingual project, English is the Lingua Franca in translingual meta projects and policy discussions. Also, on the level of content, is the English Wikipedia the 'Leitmedium' in terms of (content) synchronization. In what other ways does the language divide operate on Wikipedia?

Global governance: Governance of Wikipedia has evolved and become increasingly sophisticated to match its phenomenal growth and the attention it has garnered. While these changes in governance have managed to sustain the growth of Wikipedia and prevent its credibility from being undermined, there is a need to understand the impact that various governance mechanisms have on the different incarnations of Wikipedia throughout the world. Such analysis should consider separately (and compare) different national chapters, plus extend beyond Wikipedia projects to the governance of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Form and format: As the Wikipedia becomes a standard of documentation and knowledge archive, it becomes important to focus on traditional, oral and ephemeral knowledges which might die because of the limitations of technologised platforms to capture them. Oral histories, community knowledges, incipient systems of documenting personal and collective memories, etc. start getting lost as the logo-centric, ‘objectively verifiable’ structures of knowledge production come into being. Rather than a critique of Wikipedia, analysis needs to concentrate on ways by which such knowledge systems are not lost and further tools which need to be developed in order to make them accessible and visible.

8. The Place of Resistance

Why do people resign from Wikipedia? Are critical voices silenced by the majority of the mass? Does the exclusion of the Wikipedia Art project reveal that within Wikipedia is no place for contesting forms, repertoires, styles that go beyond linguistic approaches? Rituals and mechanisms of exclusion offers critical insights into the contemporary status of resistance formation in an paradigmatic age of diversity and inclusion. Going beyond and extending the thinking of social movement scholars such as Touraine or Melucci the study of Wikipedia might inform culture and identity approaches of social movement studies and vice versa.

Can Wikipedia said to be a social movement and/or how do social movement actors appropriate the Wikipedia to built alternatives?

9. Media Literacy and Education

Knowing about knowing: While technologies like newspapers, television, radio and cinema have given birth to educational institutions that engage in media studies, thereby providing tools for the discerning citizen-consumer and future professional, there is still much work required to develop similar critical models for emerging projects like Wikipedia. The common institutional (non)response to warn against the ‘dangers’ of Wikipedia-like projects and discourage or ban their use seems grossly inadequate. The rise of 'prosumers' suggests a need for new 'production literacies' in addition to the traditional 'consumption literacy'. Furthermore, there is also a growing number of meta projects on Wikipedia that seek cooperation with schools and academia. But is the Wikimedia foundation and select national bodies the legitimate actors to teach media literacy or is this rather a public relations effort? What would Wikipedia literacy entail?

10. Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies

Possible Topics: Protocological Knowledge, Knowledge vs. Information, Cultural Analytics, Cybernetics in the present, (Un)dead labour and the posthuman bot.

Knowledge in the neighborhood of software: Can we start thinking of Wikipedia as an interplay of editors and technology, since software and notification systems are such an important part of the Wikipedia project? Indeed, whilst humans argue over knowledge statements, 'bots' do much of the dirty work and general knowledge housekeeping – a kind of (un)dead labour. The presumption here, of code as politics, is that the wiki principles themselves need to be debated from a perspective of software studies. To what extent has bot politics triumphed over vernacular expertise or lead to an empowerment of the e-tech geeks in knowledge projects? Related to this is the question of the cultural history of Wikipedia as a platform. What is the relation between policy formation and technical protocols? Is Wikipedia knowledge Cybernetic?

Wikipedia as a data set: Besides the automation participation in the form of the bot, Wikipedia is an information artifact through and through. What kind of data analysis techniques can contribute to a radical critique or illuminate network regularities beyond human interpretation? What additional anonymised data sets of edit and use history should be released by the Wikimedia Foundation to promote media literacy and education.

11. Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production

Possible Topics: Politics of knowledge production, question of authority, The fallacy of objectivity, Wikipedia and the Public Sphere.

The alarm that traditional bastions of knowledge production and consumption (like universities and publishing houses) raise against Wikipedia, brings into sharp relief, the fact that the Wikipedia is a part of a much larger knowledge production industry. With the Wikipedia’s integration into more ‘mainstream’ usage, it becomes necessary to focus on how the emergence of such a space (and the principles it embodies) also affects the much larger and global politics, aesthetics and mechanics of knowledge production. Wikipedia has substantially changed academic trends of publication, citation, classroom pedagogy and research. It has also been central to many debates about who produces knowledge and who has the ‘right’ to be an Authority on the knowledge thus produced.

Moving beyond the class-room and questions of plagiarism or teaching, there is need to investigate the pre-conditions and the contexts within which Wikipedia emerges, and the kind of questions it poses to processes of knowledge production, consumption and verification.

Production Details

Besides setting up a network for critical Wikipedia research with its own mailing list and organizing two events early 2010 in Bangalore and Amsterdam (to start with), the aim is to gather materials for a Wikipedia Research Reader that will be published in the INC Reader series around September-October 2010.

Research and editorial group: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

Contact info:

Sunil Abraham: sunil@cis-india.org

Nishant Shah: Nishant@cis-india.org

For more information on how to apply to the Bangalore WikiWars conference, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Second Response to Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance

pranesh — 2009-07-07T16:49:37Z

Another draft (labelled "version 2", dated May 26, 2009) of the draft national policy on open standards for e-governance was made available to Fosscomm, while many software companies were speaking out against NASSCOM's position on the policy. CIS drafted a second response addressing both the allegations against NASSCOM as well as the few shortcomings we perceive in the draft policy.

To
Shri Shankar Aggrawal
Joint Secretary (e-Governance)
Department of Information Technology
Ministry of Communications and Information Technology

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Dear Sir,

Sub: Comments on Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance (version 2)

I am writing on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, which is a Bangalore-based civil society organization involved both in research and policy advocacy. Public accountability and digital pluralism are two of our core concerns, and it is for this that we are writing to you today. As a natural corollary of our mission, we aim at representing the concerns of citizens and consumers. You would recall that we had submitted comments to the call for comments you had put out for the draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance last year (archived at <http://cis-india.org/advocacy/os/iosp/the-response/>).

We have recently received what appears to be a newer draft (version 2) of the National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, dated May 26, 2009. We are yet again very pleased to note the progressive nature of this document and wish to congratulate the government on its decision to promote the interests of the citizens of India over the narrow partisan interests of a few companies which wish to promote proprietary standards.

It has brought to our notice by some in the software industry that the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has argued for the dilution of the definition of open standards by including standards licensed under “reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms to be considered “open”, and has also called for multiple standards in the same domain to be considered valid as a rule under the policy. We believe both these demands go against the interest of consumers of standards — which in this case is the Indian government — and are thus against the interest of citizens as well, since the Indian government handles data on behalf of its citizens.

Even “reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms of licensing of standards are in fact discriminatory as they prevent the development of free/libre/open source software based on those standards. And while having multiple implementations of a standard is beneficial as it increases consumer (i.e., governmental) choice, having multiple incompatible standards is detrimental to the government's interest as the policy itself recognizes in paragraph 4.2, and the very purpose (as enumerated in paragraphs 1, 3, and 4) of having standards is defeated. Even if the multiple standards are bi-directionally interoperable, additional costs are incurred in having concurrent multiple standards.

Thus, one hopes that the the threshold of “national interest” mentioned in paragraph 6.4.1 is set to a high level. Lastly, the views put forth by NASSCOM seem not to be truly legitimate as it has been the complaint of some that NASSCOM did not hold an open consultation with its own members before formulating its views. There are software giants, including IBM, Sun, and Red Hat, that have openly criticized the NASSCOMM position on open standards. More importantly, NASSCOM's position does not concur with what we believe is in the best interest of small and medium software enterprises, which constitute the bulk of the Indian software industry. We pray that you shall keep this in mind while considering NASSCOM's views.

We believe that apart from the technical reasons to favour open standards, there are many public interest reasons as well. We believe that the adoption of open standards is a step towards the promotion of equitable access to knowledge to all the people of our country. We further believe that public accountability will be served greatly by adoption of an open standards policy by the Central and State governments. While even developed countries (such as those of the EU) are mandating open standards in all governmental departments, processes, and interactions, it is developing countries that stand to gain most from open standards. Proprietary standards place a larger burden on developing economies than developed as developing economies have a greater need to participate in the global network by using standards, but do have lesser capabilities than developed economies in terms of paying for royalties.

On the document itself, while there are many reasons to hail it, we believe there are still a few shortcomings which we wish to bring to your notice.

Issue 1: Possibility of following letter of policy while violating its spirit

Explanation
Sometimes private companies can interfere with the standardisation process by exerting undue influence on the members of the standard setting body. That such undue influence have been sought to be applied even in India recently shows that this is not mere conjecture or idle speculation. Given this background, the document should note this as a problem and note that remedial measures could be undertaken in the event such undue influence comes to light.

Resolution
Introduce language, such as that used in the EU EIF, stating:
“Practices distorting the definition and evolution of open standards must be addressed immediately to protect the integrity of the standardisation process.”

Issue 2: Patenting and licensing of government-developed standards

Explanation
Paragraph 6.3 of the draft policy allows the government to opt for the development of a new standard by a Government of India-identified agency in case no standard is found to meet the government's functional requirements. However, it is not clear under what terms this standard will be available.

Resolution
Introduce a paragraph 6.3.1 stating:
“Any standard developed by or on behalf of the government shall be patent-free and the specifications of such a standard will be published online and will be available to all for no cost. Along with the standard, the government shall also provide, or shall cause to be provided, a free/libre/open source reference implementation of that standard.”

Issue 3: No framework provided for review or phasing out interim standards

Explanation
Paragraph 6.2 permits the government to adopt a non-open “interim” standard (one which does not fulfil all the mandatory requirements of open standards as laid out in 5.1) if no open standard exists in the specific domain for which the standard is required. This however does not have a clause necessitating the phasing out of such an interim standard.

Resolution
A review mechanism should be provided for periodic evaluation of all standards selected by the government, especially those designated as interim standards. A new paragraph 7.1.1 could be added:
“All standards selected through the processes outlined in this policy shall undergo an annual review by the Apex Body on e-Governance Standards, and all those designated as interim standards shall be reviewed biannually.”

Issue 4: Problematic definition in the glossary

Explanation
In Appendix A, the definition of “patents” (A.12) states: “The additional qualification 'utility patents' is used in countries such as the United States to distinguish them from other types of patents but should not be confused with utility models granted by other countries. Examples of particular species of patents for inventions include biological patents, business method patents, chemical patents and software patents.” Many of these references are U.S.-specific and are not valid forms of patents in India (e.g. biological patents, business method patents, and software patents).

Resolution
Delete the last two sentences in A.12

We once again wish to compliment the government on developing such a strong policy on open standards, and hope that our suggestions are incorporated into the text of the final version. We further hope that the policy will be notified at the earliest, as there has already been considerable opportunity for the public and industry to comment on the draft versions of the policy.

Yours sincerely,

Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/second-response

Open Access

admin — 2009-07-07T09:49:12Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/homepage/access

Subject To Technology

nishant — 2009-07-06T12:06:10Z

This paper is an attempt to examine the production of illegalities with reference to cyberspace, to make a symptomatic reading of new conditions within which citizenships are enacted, in the specific context of contemporary India. Looking at one incident each, of cyber-pornography and cyber-terrorism, the paper sets out to look at the State’s imagination of the digital domain, the positing of the ‘good’ cyber citizen, and the production of new relationships between the state and the subject. This essay explores the ambiguities, the dilemmas and the questions that arise when Citizens become Subjects, not only to the State but also to the technologies of the State. The paper first appeared in the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/iacs%20article.pdf

Presentation at IDRC: ‘Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Commons -- A Southern Perspective’

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:59:03Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, CIS Distinguished Fellow, will give a talk titled 'Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Commons -- A Southern Perspective' at IDRC, Ottawa, Canada, on 13 July 2009.

Brown Bag Presentation: ‘Scholarly communication in the age of the commons - A southern perspective’ by Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India

Date: July 13, 2009

Time: 1400 hr

Location: IDRC

150 Kent Street

Ottawa, ON, Canada

Room 950

RSVP: Nicole Leguerrier nleguerrier@idrc.ca

The toll-access journal system that was set up some 350 years ago and which has served well till a few decades ago evolved, for historical reasons, largely to serve the needs of North-North knowledge exchange and has failed to take cognizance of the aspirations of the South. The need for science to be performed everywhere and take roots in all countries is now well recognized. If OA is so very important to the South, why is the progress slow? While computers, internet access and bandwidths continue to pose problems in a number of southern countries, in general the situation is improving. The more important factor is scientists' apathy. Scientists in the South, by and large, do not exercise their rights to the full; often they give away on a platter copyright to their research papers to journal publishers. The publishers themselves indulge in practices that would entice publishing scientists and librarians to act in ways that would benefit the publishers. Funding agencies and governments of southern countries are not as proactive as they should be.

Focused advocacy on the advantages of the public commons approach can bring about some revolutionary changes. Such advocacy should be aimed at all levels of stakeholders. Some examples of what is being done in India will be presented.

Biography

Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) is a Distinguished Fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, a research and advocacy organization that was founded in August 2008. Before then, he was a volunteer for 12 years with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, a Chennai-based NGO, promoting the use of information and communication technologies to empower the poor and the marginalized and bring about holistic rural development.

Arun is an advocate of open access to scientific and scholarly literature and has conducted several workshops on knowledge management, electronic publishing, open access archiving, science communication, and South-South Exchange for sharing knowledge among development workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Arun has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, University of Calcutta, Annamalai University, National Institute of Advanced Study, Bangalore, and Asian Collegeof Journalism, Chennai. Immediately after returning to India Arun will join the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, as a visiting scientist. Arun has been a member of the Executive Committee of Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) for two terms, and is currently a member of the International Advisory Board of IICD, The Hague, and a Trustee of both the Voicing the Voiceless Foundation, New Delhi, and the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Causerie-midi: La communication scientifique à l’ère des biens communs – perspectives du Sud, par Subbiah Arunachalam, chercheur associé de marque au Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (Inde)

Date: le 13 juillet 2009

Heure: 14 h

Lieu: CRDI

150, rue Kent

Ottawa (Ont.) Canada

pièce 950

RSVP: Nicole Leguerrier (nleguerrier@idrc.ca)

Pour des raisons historiques, le système des publications scientifiques payantes mis en place il y a trois siècles et demi et qui a produit des résultats satisfaisants jusqu’aux dernières décennies sert maintenant, en grande partie, l’échange de connaissances Nord-Nord et ne prend pas en compte les aspirations du Sud. La nécessité de favoriser partout l’activité scientifique et de conforter son enracinement dans tous les pays est aujourd’hui généralement admise. Si le libre accès revêt une telle importance pour le Sud, pourquoi les progrès sont-ils si lents ? Bien que les ordinateurs, l’accès Internet et la bande passante continuent de poser problème dans un grand nombre de pays du Sud, la situation a somme toute tendance à s’améliorer. Le facteur qui joue le plus est dès lors l’apathie des chercheurs. De façon générale, les scientifiques du Sud n’exercent pas pleinement leurs droits : ils cèdent les droits d’auteur sur leur article à l’éditeur de la revue. Et les éditeurs se livrent à des pratiques qui incitent les auteurs et les bibliothécaires à agir à leur avantage. Les bailleurs de fonds et les gouvernements des pays du Sud, quant à eux, ne sont pas aussi proactifs qu’ils le devraient.

Un plaidoyer axé sur les avantages des biens communs pourrait produire des changements révolutionnaires. Ce plaidoyer doit viser toutes les parties prenantes. M. Subbiah Arunachalam livrera des exemples d’initiatives en cours en Inde.

Notice biographique

Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) est chercheur associé de marque au Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) de Bangalore, un organisme de recherche et de plaidoyer fondé en août 2008. Il a été auparavant bénévole, pendant 12 ans, à la Fondation de recherche M.S.Swaminathan, une ONG de Chennai ayant pour vocation d’encourager le recours aux technologies de l’information et de la communication afin de rendre les populations pauvres et marginalisées plus autonomes et de favoriser un développement rural global.

Arun est partisan du libre accès aux publications scientifiques et savantes et a animé plusieurs ateliers sur la gestion des connaissances, l’édition électronique, l’auto-archivage, les communications scientifiques et les échanges Sud-Sud afin de favoriser la mise en commun des connaissances parmi les professionnels du développement d’Asie, d’Afrique et d’Amérique latine. Il a été professeur invité à l’Institut indien de technologie de Chennai, à l’Université de Calcutta, à l’Université Annamalai et au National Institute of Advanced Studies de Bangalore. Il a siégé au comité exécutif de l’Alliance mondiale pour le savoir (GKP) pendant deux mandats et siège actuellement au comité consultatif international de l’Institut international pour la communication et le développement (IICD), à La Haye, ainsi qu’aux conseils d’administration de la fondation Voicing the Voiceless de New Delhi et de l’Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, au Royaume-Uni.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/idrc-scholarly-communication

Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Public Initiatives: A Report

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:28:55Z

Zainab Bawa reports on the Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies for Public Initiatives, hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, on 17 June 2009, in collaboration with the Liberty Institute, New Delhi.

In recent times, there has been an upsurge in the use of ICTs to provide information to people and to elicit participation. Individuals, corporate organisations, NGOs, civil society organisations, collectives, municipalities, political parties and politicians have been using the internet and other mediums to communicate with people. The round table was organised primarily to discuss two issues:

What is the effectiveness of the initiatives introduced in recent times?
How do we move forward in terms of partnerships/collaborations in the areas of data gathering, sharing, dissemination and architecture of information?

Given the constraints of time, however, we were only able to discuss a few issues with respect to efficacy of initiatives, rather than come up with a concrete action plan on how to measure effectiveness of many of the existing initiatives. This remains an agenda for subsequent meetings.

This round table was the first meeting of its kind. It brought together participants from diverse backgrounds to discuss key issues involved in leveraging ICTs towards various ends, and to collaborate with each other on ongoing initiatives. Participants included researchers, persons who have developed information platforms and databases, individuals working in the area of leveraging technology for streamlining processes in society and people who have been studying usage patterns of social media tools. Most of the participants were using ICTs to improve information access related to health issues, education, budgets, development of rural areas and recently, elections and governance. In the subsequent sections, I will briefly elaborate on some of the key themes around which discussions took place during the round table.

Building on Ideas: In the morning and pre-lunch sessions, one issue that featured prominently was the importance of developing ideas rather than trying to work out a perfect model that we believe will solve what we perceive to be people’s problems. Two of the participants explained that they started implementing ideas as they came to them, rather than trying to come up with a framework that they thought would work for the masses. They worked towards evolving their ideas, exploring what works and what does not. One of them further pointed out that such evolution cannot be observed as it happens; it only becomes apparent in hindsight. Hence, discussions such as the current round table are useful.

It is also important to note that we are still in a nascent stage of understanding how ICTs can impact people’s lives and deploying them accordingly. As a result, many efforts are likely to be in the stage of trial and error.

Key areas of interest and concern: Based on the input from participants in the morning session, we arrived at a list of areas that require more understanding and discussion.

Information gathering, dissemination, access – including information architecture, technology design: Here, three issues were discussed:

Who are we talking about when we refer to information access? It was pointed out that information is crucial particularly for people who do not have computers and for whom internet is not a priority. The intensity with which they seek information is remarkable. One of the participants argued that we undervalue the potential of information to make a difference to people’s lives.
How do we deliver information? Providing information is not enough.
Representativeness of the information for those who it is provided for.

Another issue that was referred to was whether language is a problem, i.e., most information is available only in English. One of the participants suggested that this is not the case because Google has found that a very small percentage of the population actually refers to material on the web in languages other than English.

Community mobilization: During the deliberations, we referred to the problem of replication of initiatives. Two observers of social media pointed out that replication happens because people are trying to create their own unique communities around their initiatives. This is an important insight for future efforts and also indicates the need to share databases and information that individuals and organisations have compiled. They also suggested that it is important to discover existing communities and spaces where conversations around issues of governance, education, health and development are taking place. This helps to plug into existing resource pools and to extend outreach.

Citizens’ participation: Initiatives that work and why they succeed - We briefly discussed the Jaagore campaign and India Vote Report, which were launched before the 2009 national elections in India to enable people to register on the electoral rolls and to report irregularities during elections respectively. Some people found it difficult to register themselves on the Jaagore website and some had difficulties in finding the local offices where they needed to follow-up with the process. It was also pointed out that Vote Report did not connect with the end user because it would have been easier to report irregularities and anomalies via SMS rather than trying to report them by logging on to the site. If one looks at the case of the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS) developed by Praja, the availability of the telephone hotline service through which citizens could register their complaints helped in widening usage. Thus, it appears that two issues are pertinent:

Whether the initiative connects with the people who are likely to use it;
Simplicity of design/system that enables more users.

Target Audience: One of the participants pointed out that some initiatives do not work because they are targeted towards the wrong audiences. For example, when it comes to voting and elections, poor groups are the ones who go out and vote in large numbers. Hence, information systems need to be tailored to provide them with the data that they need most. Access also has to be configured accordingly. In some instances, the target is too broad to reach out effectively.

It appears that there is a need to develop strategies on how platforms and databases that have been created to enhance access to information can be made known among the masses and how people can be made aware to use them. It is equally important to understand what constitutes ‘information’ and for whom. Here, the other issue to explore is how information links back to the people for who it is provided.

Technology: In this area, a key concern was the high costs involved in developing technologies and whether we could learn from each other’s experience of developing technologies instead of reinventing the wheel. We also discussed whether open source software helps to reduce costs of development. The other issue with respect to open source is whether there is enough assistance and support available to resolve problems that may crop up during use of technology from time to time.

Sharing of Data: Discussions also veered around the issue of whether appropriate technology and applications could be created to help with sharing existing databases and information pools. We did not discuss this issue in depth, but it remains relevant for subsequent meetings.

Back end integration: According to some of the participants, one of major problems is the interface between government and citizens, which remains weak. Technology can be used to enhance the interactions. Participants also pointed out the difficulty in obtaining data from government bodies that is important to create the interface between government and citizens. A participant involved with the Jaagore campaign referred to the problem of back-end integration during their efforts to help citizens register themselves with the election commission (EC) offices. A participant from Google similarly reported that they faced problems in obtaining election results from the EC’s offices as a result of which, they had to rely on their partners for this information. Here too, we could not deliberate on how to resolve this problem, but this could be a major theme for a subsequent meeting.

Performance (monitoring, evaluation): One of the themes that participants zeroed in on was the evaluation of the performance of elected representatives and making this evaluation available for people to see. Here, the debate was around the problem of evaluation being carried out according to the criteria we set which may not seem relevant to other sections of society. One of the suggestions that came up was to develop a matrix for evaluation and put out information accordingly. People can then use it to make their own judgments.

In the post-lunch session, some of the participants shared their experiences with implementation and also the work they and their organisations are currently engaged with. Towards the end of the round table, each one of the participants explained their respective projects and how they may wish to collaborate with other participants (who were present) in their initiatives. An e-group called “CIS-Info-Access” has been created to take these conversations and collaborations further.

Evaluation of the Round Table and Way Forward:

When invitations were sent out to people to participate in the round table, many of the invitees expressed a genuine and enthusiastic interest in being part of this effort. As mentioned above, one of the reasons for this enthusiasm was because this was the first meeting of its kind, bringing together individuals from the fields of technology, research and implementation. We invited a total of 35 people out of which 27 finally attended the meeting. The diversity of the participants was an asset in that a variety of issues were brought to the table. The drawback was that there was not enough time to discuss some of the pertinent issues in depth. Future meetings can be tailored to discuss one or two specific themes such as back-end integration and sharing of information, technology issues, ideas for mobilising citizens and communities, etc.

The possibilities of collaboration between participants in this meeting are immense and we hope that some of the synergies will materialise into concrete outcomes. Further, a few participants have expressed an interest in organising similar meetings in their cities/towns, perhaps focusing on a few issues instead of bringing people together under a broad theme. Of some of the issues discussed, participants have indicated that back-end integration with government and ideating on different ways of disseminating data can be further deliberated on in future. One of the participants also suggested that there is a need to make ‘data’ more relevant to people’s lives.

While the meeting was fruitful in many respects, one issue needs to be underlined. This concerns the imagination of internet and ICTs as mediums that can resolve all existing problems with respect to citizen-government interface, streamlining of processes and provision of information. Such an overarching imagination of technology overlooks the cultural, economic, social and political specificities of communities and contexts. Technology can also have negative implications in some circumstances. It also needs to be reinforced that technology is embedded in society and culture. Therefore we need to view technology as one of the avenues among others available which will facilitate interactions between people and their governments and the state. Democratisation is more likely to be realised through such a perspective.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy

Letter on South Africa's IPRs from Publicly Financed R&D Regulations

pranesh — 2011-08-04T04:42:15Z

Being interested in legislations in developing nations styled after the United States' Bayh-Dole Act, CIS responded to the call issued by the South African Department of Science and Technology for comments to the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Regulations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations

WIPO Broadcast Treaty and Webcasting

pranesh — 2011-08-04T04:42:10Z

On Friday, 8 May 2009, at Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting held a stakeholders' briefing meeting on the Broadcast Treaty that has been on the table at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The purpose of that meeting was to inform the relevant stakeholders of the developments in Geneva, as well as to garner input from them regarding the stance to be adopted by India at the WIPO. Pranesh Prakash from the Centre for Internet and Society participated and made a presentation on webcasting, highlighting the differences between webcasting and broadcasting, and arguing that webcasting should not be part of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty.

First, we wish to applaud the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for holding this stakeholders' meeting, which is a definite step towards greater transparency, and are grateful for having been invited to provide our input. The meeting was attended by representatives from various government offices and ministries, including the Ministry of Human Resource Development (which administers the Indian Copyright Act), broadcasters, broadcast associations, law firms, and civil society organisations. The Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting inaugurated the session by talking of how the Broadcast Treaty involved the assessment and balancing of various interests while keeping 'public interest' foremost. This was followed by Mr. N. P. Nawani, Secretary General of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), presenting on the concerns of the broadcasting industry. After this Prof. N. S. Gopalakrishnan, head of the School of Law, Cochin University of Science and Technology, spoke.

Prof. Gopalakrishnan covered many areas of relevance: the concept of broadcasting and the legal rights involved; the scheme of legal protection over broadcast signals and over the content of the signals, and the difference between the two; gaps in the international law covering broadcasting; details of the proposed broadcast treaty; the implications of the broadcast treaty and concerns of the Indian government; and unresolved issues.

Amongst the unresolved issues mentioned by Prof. Gopalakrishnan was that of webcasting and the problems related to that. The discussion below aims to shed some light on some of the problems created by the inclusion of webcasting in the broadcast treaty.

Legal regimes for broadcasting

At the national level, the law governing broadcasting is the Indian Copyright Act, 1957. Broadcasting is covered by many sections of the Indian Copyright Act, including: ss. 2(dd) (definition of "broadcast"), 2(ff) (definition of "communication to the public"), 37 (the section granting a special "broadcast reproduction right"), and 39A (containing exceptions to s.37). At the international level, broadcasting is covered by the Rome Convention, 1960 (which India has signed, but hasn't ratified); the Brussels Convention, 1974 (only pre-broadcast satellite signals); the TRIPS Agreement, 1994 per Article 14 (which doesn't mandate that broadcasting rights be granted directly to the broadcasters); the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, 1996 (WPPT) in Articles 2(f) and 15; and the proposed WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations ("Broadcast Treaty"). In May 2006, provisions for webcasting were brought back into the Broadcast Treaty as part of the non-mandatory Appendix after having been excised in 2004 owing to protests by many countries on their inclusion. The current draft (SCCR/15/2 rev.) was prepared in September 2006 as an attempt to put together an all-inclusive document (with alternative versions of proposed provisions present in the document), and a diplomatic conference was planned to push the treaty through. In August 2007, WIPO released a 'non-paper' (SCCR/S2/Paper1) and dropped plans for the diplomatic conference, as there was still significant disagreement about the treaty. In November 2008, the WIPO chair released an informal paper (SCCR/17/INF/1), which advocated technological neutrality, and hence, presumably, that webcasting to be covered by the treaty.

Meaning of broadcasting and netcasting

Broadcasting is generally taken to be a point-to-multipoint transmission of audio-visual content. Hence, cable transmissions and Internet/Web transmissions (which are point-to-point) are usually not included when one uses the term "broadcasting". But there is no one common definition of "broadcasting". As things stand in the WIPO Broadcast Treaty, the definition of broadcasting (Art. 5(a)) does not cover cablecasting, which is separately defined in Art. 5(b), neither does it cover webcasting. However, the definition of "retransmission" as provided in the draft treaty is broad enough to cover Internet-based transmission, and hence could provide a backdoor via which webcasting is included. The rights covered by the all-inclusive draft WIPO Broadcast Treaty include the rights of and over: retransmission; communication to the public; fixation; reproduction; distribution; transmission following fixation; making available of fixed broadcasts; and pre-broadcast signals. The treaty also mandates legislative protection to systems of digital rights management (DRM) and technological protection measures (TPMs). This, coupled with post-fixation rights, grants broadcasters the rights to dictate what one can and cannot do with a broadcast, thus negating all fair dealing rights and possibly restricting the public domain as well. It may be noted that even content creators are not provided such rights in the vast majority of the world, and that fair dealing rights are much better safeguarded by copyright law. The latest proposal by the U.S. on the term "netcasting" is to be found in an informal paper presented at SCCR 15 [MS Word document], and has been criticised as overly expansive by civil society organisations such as Consumer Project on Technology (now Knowledge Ecology International).

Non-justifications for webcasting's inclusion

Webcasting is sought to be included within the Broadcast Treaty for a number of reasons, all of which are problematic. Firstly, there is the argument of technology neutrality, which advocates say is to ensure that the treaty is relevant into the future as well. However, adopting technology neutrality as the basis for doing so amounts to wilful blindness to technological advancements, and the benefits that such advancement provides, including lowered costs of infrastructure. Secondly, advocates argue that thanks to media convergence, the same content (which is usually digital) can be delivered through various communication networks. This disregards the need to establish the requirement for a new right to be created, and simply assumes that just because the function that the two (broadcasters and webcasters) perform are similar means that they operate in similar economic and social environments. In fact, webcasters work in a very different environment from broadcasters.

This is an environment where intense innovation and competition already exist, and don't need to be artificially created by means of a new property right in an international treaty. Furthermore, the United States, a country with extremely large and hugely profitable broadcasting networks, does not have a specific statute to protect broadcasters’ rights. Even it only has laws protecting the conditional-access regime. Second, much less investment is required to reach a set number of people through webcasting than through broadcasting -- and these people can be spread throughout the globe. Typically, a computer with a fast internet connection is all that is required. Given this, anyone can become a 'broadcasting organisation'. Additionally, IP addresses (in IPv6) are not limited, unless one considers 340 undecillion addresses to be 'limited'. This is a big difference from terrestrial broadcasting, where Hertzian frequencies are limited, and hence one has to pay a premium for them. Lastly, signal appropriation does not happen for sake of the signal, but for the content. Protection, thus has to be given to the content (and already is given, in the form of copyright law). Copyright owners who object to such appropriation, and who are often large multinational corporations, have proven more than willing to pursue those who appropriate their works – broadcasters are not necessarily in a better position to do so. This situation is aggravated with webcasting. Indeed, on the Web, something akin signal appropriation is not only not frowned upon, but often encouraged: embedding of audio and video from other servers on your own website is prevalent.

Problems if webcasting is included

Apart from the lack of justifications for going ahead with the treaty, especially when it seeks to create a separate property right over signals instead of merely providing for signal protection and includes webcasting (at least upon 'retransmission'), there are many problems that the treaty creates. Firstly, transaction costs will increase vastly, leading to a tragedy of the anticommons where no one ends up using the content because clearing all the surrounding rights is too difficult. On top of clearing and making payment for rights from the copyright holders, a person wishing to use parts of any content that has been broadcast/webcast would have to get the rights cleared from the first broadcaster/webcaster as well. This is inevitable if property-like rights are bestowed upon the act of distributing signal in the form of a broadcast or hosting audio and visual content for webcasting.

Secondly, materials in the public domain and openly-licensed content will become more difficult to gain access to, and the exercise of fair dealings with copyrighted content will be hampered. Since rights over signal are independent of rights over content, a copy of the public-domain work will have to be procured from an archive, which negates the very purpose of broadcasting and webcasting, which is to make content more easily accessible to a large number of people located over great distances. Additionally, limitations and exceptions are extremely difficult to negotiate and are of the 'ceiling' kind, limiting the limitations and exceptions that national legislatures can prescribe. Thus, the fair dealing rights over the signal will probably end up being more limited than the fair dealing rights over content. This makes the situation akin to anti-circumvention measures, which (in countries where they are legally recognised) have fewer limitations and exceptions than the content they protect.

Thirdly, public benefit and access will seriously be harmed. It is conceivable that this treaty might hamper the Indian legislature's ability to pass statutes such as the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act, 2007, which mandate sharing of certain kinds of signals. Lawyers will claim that such statutes go against India's international obligations.

Differences between webcasting and broadcasting

To sum up, there are a large number of differences between broadcasting and webcasting.
Infrastructure: The expenditure required to establish the infrastructure for a webcasting unit is much less than that required for an equivalent (in terms of reach in terms of listeners). Even traditional broadcasting is not that expensive: fixed-frequency radio transmission kits have been known to cost as little as Rs. 50 (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4735642.stm>. Thus, one of the biggest arguments for protection ('to recover investment') is taken away. The content producers' 'investment' is protected by copyright law.
Competition: Providing incentives to increase competition and hence public benefit is often a reason cited as a reason for introduction of a new property-like right. However, such incentives seem utterly redundant in the online market where becoming a webcasting organisation is trivial, and immense competition already exists.
Broadcasting vs. Uni- and Multicasting: The notion of 'broadcasting' does not exist in IPv6. The closest that a webcaster can come to broadcasting is 'multicasting' to a specific range of IP addresses. What one sees on the Web today is "unicasting", which is initiated by a request from the recipient and not by the webcaster.
Temporal limitations: Unlike traditional broadcasting (which does not include cable), content on demand is possible over the Web. By this, the temporal limitations faced by traditional broadcasting, which is ephemeral, are overcome. This opens up many possibilities that should not be hampered by creating an excessive legal regime (and that too a property regime) over webcasting.
Geographic limitations: While terrestrial broadcasting is limited in geographic scope (which satellite and cable-casting are less susceptible to), webcasting knows no geographic limitations. As long as an Internet connection is present, the content can be viewed anywhere. Additionally, granting a separate webcasting right will open up a jurisdicational can of worms.
Marginal costs of subscribers: While in terrestrial broadcasting, adding an additional receiver does not cost the broadcaster anything, in satellite television (direct-to-home), cable television and webcasting, each additional receiver means either additional infrastructure (cables and set-top boxes) or additional server load. In the case of webcasting, this marginal cost is small enough to ignore, especially given all the other reasons mentioned previously.

Conclusion

There are still a number of uncertainties surrounding the inclusion of webcasting in the Broadcast Treaty. Michael Nelson of the Internet Society points out that questions such as who the broadcaster is in a download grid, in distributed gaming, for webcasts of surveillance videos, etc., are unanswered. As the example of the download grid (a situation where the 'casting' is multipoint-to-point) shows, many Internet-specific scenarios have not been contemplated by the treaty negotiators. Situations which might soon be reality, such as peer-to-peer relaying of webcasts are also not contemplated, and the treaty would become a policy document preventing such technological innovations. Whether IPTV would be included within webcasting is also unclear. The WIPO chair in his informal paper noted, 'Finally, if after consideration of the options above (A/B) and possible other options, it will not in the present situation be possible to decide on the establishment of a new treaty, the SCCR should end these discussions through an express decision in order to avoid further spending of time, energy and resources to no avail. Such a decision could include a timetable for later revisiting and reconsidering the matter.' (SCCR/15/2 rev) SCCR should end these discussions which have gone on for more than a decade without any progress.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wipo-broadcast-treaty-and-webcasting

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