Centre for Internet and Society

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

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:57Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:52Z

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

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

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

Still confused? It's simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: The Grey Market Deficit

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:41:47Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does India need its own Bayh-Dole?

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:58:46Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:53Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The policy has three objectives:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

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

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

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

The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with Jamie King and Peter Mann

siddharth — 2011-08-04T04:41:31Z

Film-makers Jamie King (producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series) and Peter Mann, in conversation with Siddharth Chadha, on 'Dark Fibre', their latest production, being filmed in Bangalore

'Dark Fibre' is a documentary/fiction hybrid by J. J. King, producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series, which has already reached over six million people online and is working towards achieving international television distribution, and Peter Mann, a British film-maker whose most recent work is titled 'Sargy Mann'.

'Dark Fibre' is set amongst the cablewallahs of Bangalore, and uses the device of cabling to traverse different aspects of informational life in the city. It follows the lives of real cablewallahs and examines the political status of their activities.The fictional elements arrive in the form of a young apprentice cablewallah who attempts to unite the disparate home-brew networks in the city into a grassroots, horizontal 'people's network'. Some support the activity and some vehemently oppose it -- but what no one expects is the emergence of a seditious, unlicensed and anonymous new channel which begins to transform people's imaginations in the city. Our young cable apprentice is tasked with tracking down the channel, as powerful political forces array themselves against it. Not only the 'security' of the city, but his own wellbeing depend on whether he finds it, and whether it proves possible to stop its distribution. Meanwhile, mysterious elements from outside India -- possibly emissaries of a still-greater power -- are appearing on the scene. This quest for the unknown channel is reminiscent of a modern-day 'Moby Dick', with the city of Bangalore as the high seas and our cable apprentice a reluctant Ahab. The action is a combination of verite, improvisation and scripted action.

In conversation with Jamie and Peter in Bangalore

Q: How did you get the idea to make Dark Fibre, a fiction film?

Peter:

We first met through BritDoc--British Documentary--and they run Channel 4 which is a Film Foundation. They have been good to us. They funded both Steal This Film and 'Sargy Mann'--a film on my father who is a blind man. They organised a meeting of all the directors they had funded and we met there. We were both thinking about what to do next and felt frustrated because we were making documentaries but really wanted to make fiction. We both shared the same ideas, with regard to shooting something completely as it is but presenting it in a fictional context.

Jamie:

And furthermore, we agreed that documentaries are not really real life. Because at the end of the day, I will keep only what I like, make you look at the way I want you to, I would cut you out of the picture if I don't agree with you. This happens even with the most worthy of the films. And you can be more truthful in fiction because its always a subjective truth. Fiction allows things to remain more real. I don't need an argument in the film. If I can just say, here is one guy's story and this is his story, then you can see the city with no bullshit. The story would allow you to look at things as they are; it's partly that idea behind Dark Fibre.

Peter:

This is in some way related to the concept of the artistic truth. You use all the tools at your disposal to tell a story, not just literal facts. This is about presenting things within an atmosphere, presenting things in a context. This then adds up to someone understanding something about the world, and I think fiction serves that better than documentary.

Q: What brings you to India to make Dark Fibre?

Jamie:

I think the cablewallah networks are unique. I have never seen anything like this anywhere else myself. India is also in a very, very interesting time and place. The idea of information as a commodity is alive here as it isn't in many other places. The value of information is very high here. There is a western imaginary of Bangalore which is immediately fascinating. It's the place where our information is processed. This is where our credit card and our phone data goes. And it enters a weird black market that we don't understand. This is the cliché. We already have cliché films about Bombay and call centers. We do not want to put a call center into the film because that is already the imagined cliché vision of Bangalore. It is obviously far more sophisticated than that. And in some ways it is far patchier than that. Who are these information workers? What are they doing and at which level are they doing it? Are they the street workers putting cables into walls or is it the guy at Infosys who is hiring people and teaching them to fake English accents? Which is the real information worker? That variegation of information life in Bangalore is interesting, not just to us, but, I think, to everybody. Information dexterity is perceived as the signature of Northern dominance. The ability to manipulate information, to move intellectual property, to transform an idea into a product, to transform someone else's idea into your property. That kind of dexterity is seen as the keynote of western dominance. And watching a developing country transform into an information dextrous economy, seeing information dextrous people is amazing. And then there is the patchiness of it--who gets left behind? Who gets included? Whats missed out and what is added in that vision? How is it manipulated in favor of big businesses? And all of this is fascinating not only from an orientalist's point of view but from a general economic-socio-political point of view.

Q: What is the underlying concept that brought about Dark Fibre?

Jamie:

While making 'Steal This Film' we spent a year on a 36 minute film trying to make an argument that would be staunch, impactful, and radical. What we learned is that it's very difficult to set out to argue your way to the truth. It's relatively easier to let the world itself speak and in the meanwhile observe it in detail. The kind of issues we are engaging with in Dark Fibre are around people's relationships with information and their relationship with freedom. These are very, very hard to nail down and speak about in a radical way. These are things left to the Intellectual Property lawyers, it's already happening, it's already cliché. All the arguments are already written. And even after a year of Steal This Film, it's shown in liberal universities – Wait! Liberal universities? I was supposed to be an anarchist! We want to go further. We want to tell people things through an image.

Peter:

Our idea of relationships is exploring the parallel physical communications networks and the virtual networks. In a city like Bangalore you see it. The traffic here is chaotic but it works. How? There is no answer to that. But it provokes questions. Through Dark Fibre, we are trying to say that there is a potential network in the city (cablewallahs) which is currently being unused and asking what it would take to unlock that potential and where would it take us if that really happens.

Q: Why the cablewallahs? What is so fascinating about them?

Jamie:

Yes, we are interested in the cablewallah network and I think it's quite perverse that it makes people from around here laugh. You see cablewallahs as a fact of life, probably a mundane fact of life. Westerners, Europeans, who are used to orderly deployments of information technology are completely blown away when you tell them that this is how it works in India. Ad hoc, grassroots, messy, out of control.

Peter:

To the West, it is just unthinkable that the government would allow something like these networks, which supply 24 hours television. To not have these under government control is unthinkable.

Jamie:

So, obviously, we are at a point of transition where it's unthinkable to the Global North and it would become unthinkable here too. We are in the middle of that shift and thats one of the things we are trying to document; the network form, which is horizontal, ad hoc and on the street, becomes not only regulated but seditious.

Q: Why would you call it seditious?

Jamie:

Because it begins to be seen as almost dangerous. As the regulators move in, they take Direct to Home control of all the deployments of their intellectual properties. The older networks start to look not only like intellectual property right infringements, but their disorder is also seen to be terrorist.

Q: What is the film trying to propose through linking these cablewallah networks?

Jamie:

Our proposal in this film is - "What if instead of just dying peacefully, someone had the idea of transforming these networks that used to deliver international and local content, by connecting them together, and turning them in to massive local media networks which are used for media sharing, file sharing, your own local channel?" There is a potential because the network is already there.

Peter:

In a way, if you think about the microcosm idea of the Internet as a whole, that essentially is what our plot is. On a certain level you would say that it's just a network but then the internet is the most important driving force of the world today.

Jamie:

The point is that once this idea is out, we can create the infrastructure to connect the entire city, infrastructure we can all use. Everyone starts to have a stake in it, be it the newspapers, TV channels, pirate markets (they will say, "No one is buying our shit anymore because they can share it over the network"), the computer manufacturers, the importer of Chinese routers, a gangster who thinks he can advertise on the network, the intellectual property lawyer... different people start getting the idea that they might have something to do with this network. Basically this is a chaos scenario, from which arises the plot. It is a fictional scenario but is set in the reality of information sharing here today.

Q: What is the technique you use to make the plot hybrid fictional?

Jamie:

The main character is played by an actor and he will be an embedded actor, working with the real cablewallah. Parts of it will be documentary, seeing how the cablewallah works and the viewer, through watching this actor, will understand how the network works. We have already spoken to some cablewallahs. And they have been very happy about all this. We see this as sort of embedded journalism, where the embedded actor takes the place of an interviewer. The film is not going to be historical. The characters will have a background and the film is going to have a background, but what we are trying to do is show the 'now'. We want to make it speak about the past and speak about the future. About our future.

Q: 'Steal This Film' was a critique of the international intellectual property regimes. Would this film also be similarly advocative?

Jamie:

We are going to the next level from 'Steal This Film', and this is more of my argument than Peter's -- that the conversation about Intellectual Propery is over or the film is the last word at all. But I personally need to go somewhere else to say more. I am interested in information in general. And how information affects what we can think, what we can dream, what we can be, how it forms all of us -- that is what we are working on in 'Dark Fibre' and the question of intellectual property is a subset of that question. We spend a lot of time talking about ideas and that's one of the things that connects us. We want to articulate a lot of the philosophical, abstract ideas in this film. And we will see if we can manage to do it in a new context. 'Steal This Film' interested a few people and this will be the next point of departure for discussion.

Q: Peter, do you share Jamie's passion for Intellectual Property?

Peter:

Not in the same way. I am very interested in the subject. Anybody who creates work is interested in it. In my last film, there is a constant commentary of a test match going on and as a result of it, it is almost impossible to sell it to television; people who own the rights to the cricket say that we have to pay them thousands of pounds! I am interested in documenting the world as it is and not what is cleaned up for TV. I am interested in the specifics. If you get on a bus in London, the ringtone everyone has on a mobile phone is not a ringtone but a particular song. But you can't put that on film because Mick Jagger, or whoever the artiste is, will want ten thousand pounds for it. The frustration that I face is that it is impossible to put the world that I see in front of me on film. I used to work with TV commercials and you would never see anything in commercials that is not the product being sold. I was once working on a Coca Cola commercial in New York and there was a person who was appointed by Coca Cola to go around the whole set to ensure that no one is drinking anything that is not made by Coca Cola, whether that is water or juice. Anything. And I think all that is about creating a creased world that we don't live in. I am interested in the world, through documentaries or fiction, that we live in. And it is bits of music, it is referenced films, we reference music, we reference sport. Just because people have rights over these, you never see them on film. That is my main area of interest, more than what is happening on the legal front.

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

Screening of Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone

pranesh — 2011-04-05T04:41:30Z

Artists Soda_Jerk will lead discussions after the screening of their narrative remix video Pixel Pirate II, a film that questions the current state of intellectual property laws (and is composed only of samples).

Soda_Jerk (Dan & Dominique Angeloro) are two Sydney-based artists working collaboratively in the areas of video, photomedia and installation. They work exclusively with found material, recombining fragments of film footage, audio samples and vintage image culture to create new works.

Their hour-long narrative remix video "Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone" (2002-06) is a critique of intellectual property law that is constructed from samples pirated from over 300 film and music sources. Think of it as a sci-fi/ biblical epic/ romance/ action movie that stars Elvis Presley, Moses, the Hulk, Michael Jackson, Jesus, Batman and the Ghostbusters. Since its 2006 launch at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney it has screened internationally in the Czech Republic, Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands, Mexico and India. Soda_Jerk will discuss the process and cultural context of their video remix practice and screen 'Pixel Pirate II' along with other excerpts from their work.

For more information about Soda_Jerk, and about Pixel Pirate II, please visit: http://www.sodajerk.com.au and http://www.pixelpirate2.com.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/screening-of-pixel-pirate-ii-attack-of-the-astro-elvis-video-clone

Lecture by Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary

pranesh — 2011-08-23T02:55:59Z

The Software Freedom Law Center, National Law School, and the Centre for Internet and Society organised a lecture by Mishi Choudhary and Eben Moglen for students of NLS on Saturday, December 13, 2008.

Saturday, December 13, 2008 had Mishi Choudhary and Eben Moglen of the New York-based Software Freedom Law Center speaking to the students of the National Law School of India University in Nagarbhavi, Bangalore, in a talk organized by CIS.

Mishi Choudhary, who will head the Software Freedom Law Center in New Delhi, spoke on "Globalising Public Interest Law: The SFLC Model". She told the students about the importance of non-profit legal work as well as its viability as a career choice. She also laid out the background to the work that SFLC does, and traced a brief history of software patent cases

Eben Moglen chose to speak on "Who Killed Intellectual Property and Why We Did It?". He started off by talking of the interconnections between law and societal change: how law can't keep pace with the changes we see around us, and how law actually sometimes changes in the reverse direction, while trying to maintain the status quo.

This is not a new phenomenon, he noted, and that when law is responsive to anybody, it listens to the 'people of the past' more carefully than the 'people of the future'. This, he says, is compounded by the fact that the primary mode of change in the law is not legislation (since there is nothing legislators hate more than legislating), and that the better lawyers usually represent only those who can afford to pay them, hence resulting in systemic injustice. He emphasised that the clients of the SFLC, on the other hand, are people who create software worth billions of dollars, but who do not own it.

On that point of creation for the purpose of sharing and not owning, a student raised the question of why proprietary rights shouldn't exist in creations of the intellect. In response Mr. Moglen pointed out that while his personal opinions might be different, the Software Freedom Law Center does not seek to bring into dispute the concept of property rights in software, nor the fundamentals of patent law: it is merely concerned with the scope of patent law, and seeks a literal enforcement of patent law as it exists in most jurisdictions.

Another question that cropped up was on the economics of software creation and the anti-competitive nature of free software. To this, Mr. Moglen provided a brief summary of the tragedy of the anticommons by using land to be acquired for public works in the centre of a city as an example. In software, this problem is only exacerbated, he pointed out. Most physical creations over which patents are granted have something like 8 or 10 steps. Software code is different because it contains thousands of instructions. Even big companies face the anticommons problem; but they manage to evade it by cross-licensing agreements which results in efficient transactions for them since it involves no exchange of money whatsoever. Small companies are in a worse situation, since they don't have those kinds of patent portfolios to be able to enter into cross-licensing agreements, no matter how innovative they are. Thus, in effect, the system is rigged against them. This provides a partial answer to the antitrust question, he noted. Competition law is actual in favour of free software. The right to practise a trade or profession, and the right to speech get implicated in any case where a FLOSS-based company is hauled up before a court being accused of conspiring with other to take cost to zero.

Mr. Moglen further explained that when it comes to software, the problem of patenting is very different. A 20-year monopoly is more reasonable from the viewpoint of physical creations. Patent law, however doesn't tailor the rights that are granted by a patent. The problem starts right from the process of granting a patent. The job of a patent office being to apply the tests of non-obviousness, novelty and utility, most patent offices can do a reasonable job in most fields of technological endeavour, since there is a large body of innovation with which the proposed patent can be compared. Software, however, is a recent field with a large number of applications coming in all at once. While the patents that are sought might include claims on ideas and applications that existed in software in 1956, those aren't easy for the patent offices to dig up, since the field of software patents and software itself have not existed for the same length of time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/lecture-by-eben-moglen-mishi-choudhary

Lecture by Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary

pranesh — 2011-04-05T04:42:05Z

Software Freedom Law Center, National Law School of India University and Centre for Internet and Society jointly organize a lecture by Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), National Law School of India University (NLSIU), and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are organizing a lecture by Prof. Eben Moglen of Columbia University and Ms. Mishi Choudhary, head of the New Delhi branch of SFLC.

Prof. Moglen will be speaking on "Who Killed Intellectual Property and Why We Did It", and Ms. Choudhary will be speaking on "Globalising Public Interest Law: The SFLC Model".

Venue:
National Law School of India University,
Gnana Bharathi Main Road,
Nagarbhavi,
Bangalore
[map: http://bit.ly/nlsiu-map]

Date and Time:
Saturday, December 13, 2008
12:30-13:30

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/lecture-by-eben-moglen-and-mishi-choudhary

The Future of the Moving Image

nishant — 2008-11-11T09:06:57Z

All dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. This was probably at the core of the zeitgeist at the international seminar on “The Future of Celluloid” hosted by the Media Lab at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, at which Nishant Shah, Director - Research CIS, presented a research paper. Practitioners, film makers, artists, theoreticians and academics, blurring the boundaries of both their roles and their disciplines and areas of interest, came together to move beyond convergence theories – to explore the continuities, conflations, contestations and confusions that Internet Technologies have led to for earlier technologies, but specifically for the technology of the moving image.

How Digital Cinema changes the notion of authorship...

The concerns that emerged at the Jadavpur University Media Lab's international seminar on The Future of Celluloid, were manifold and not confined to cinema or the moving image. These are concerns that are voiced on all realms of cultural production, where the traditional forms feel stranded at digital intersections, threatened by the emergence of new cultural productions which are so much more quintessentially the form and ideal that the traditional forms aspired to.

The blog, as we saw at the “Writing the Future Conference” was seen as a threat and more fundamentally replacing the novel form. Ars electronica or digital music has long since played the swan song of traditional orchestration practices. Similarly, the digital film (often broadcast on video sharing spaces like YouTube and MySpace) or even mainstream feature films that embody digital technologies of hypervisualisation, show necessarily more than celluloid could ever capture. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, “The capacity to pay almost infinite attention to the celluloid image was made possible only with the digitisation of the celluloid image”.

Through the different presentations, this strain of thought was apparent – will we lose celluloid altogether? Is the future of cinema going to be in infantile pre-lapsarian representations of smiling/dancing/gurgling babies and furry pets made by indulgent mothers and doting pet owners? When cinema transitions from deep celluloid to shallow pixels, will the loss in depth also result in the death of meaning and processes of reading the image? And finally, the question that seems to surface, sometimes in the guise of academic concern, sometimes in the shape of alarm and anxiety, and sometimes in the form of paranoia and raging uncertainty: “Is this the end of Celluloid? “ to which Matt Hanson, who presented his open source film A Swarm of Angels, nuancedly added: "Only the end of celluloid as we know it!”

In my presentation titled ´Of Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns – YouTube Videos and Conditions of Collaborative Authorship´ I made a call to identify these questions as symptomatic of another more deep seated anxiety which makes for a fundamental revisiting of the relationship between the author, the text and the reader. Looking particularly at YouTube videos and the kind of arguments that have surrounded them – on copyright, defamation, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, remix, authorship, ownership – I proposed that at the centre of all these anxieties is the question of authorship, what constitutes it and the need to expand the scope of authorship by looking at the series of engagements that happen online.

I presented two cases to make my argument. The first was the case of 13-month-old Holden Lenz, dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s family had a digital equivalent of a Kodak moment. Her 13-month-old son Holden, pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, started moving to the addictive rhythms of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy song and Stephanie recorded him on her digicam. Wanting more of the family to share the joy, she uploaded the video on to YouTube and it was viewed scores of times. Laughs were shared, gaps were bridged, digital technologies brought families scattered across time-zones and lifestyles together.

However, the lawyers at Universal Music did not seem to share the enthusiasm or the joy. They fired off a notice to YouTube asking them to remove the video because it amounted to a copyright infringement. YouTube, fearing legal ramifications, removed the video. Stephanie Lenz approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which challenged Universal’s claims that held Lenz liable for up to 150,000 USD in fines for sharing the 29 seconds of her son dancing. While it is very easy to draw the battle-lines and look upon the well educated, highly paid lawyers of Universal as ‘idiots’ who spent probably millions of dollars in starting the legal battle, I think there is more at play here than who is right and who is wrong. What is really being debated, is not whether Lenz indulged in wilful copyright infringement or not, but the questions of who is an author, what are the mechanisms of attribution, and how do we understand these in the complex digital worlds that we populate?

Historically, the author was constructed as a communitarian figure whose work depended on and was enhanced by the collaborations and the collective knowledge of the people s/he interacted with. Chaucer, to quote the most canonical example, for instance, was recognised as the author of The Canterbury Tales only after the print industry finds its footing, thus neglecting the fact that the text was heavily distorted, enhanced, mutated, corrected, revised, edited and transformed by the various users of the manuscripts, who were not merely audience or receptors but also collaborative authors of the text. It is only with the establishment of the cultural industries, that such a fluid understanding of authorship gets crystalised into specific forms of engagement, where the author, the reader, the distributor, the consumer, the audience and the end user are all clearly defined and contained within presumed roles.

It is the blurring of these boundaries in the digital world that leads to the kind of debates that we observe around the Stephanie Lenz case. The inability of the newly emerging digital cultural industry to recognise different forms of engagement – remixing, sampling, embedding, referencing, distributing, editing, etc. – as creative and productive forms of authorship is at the basis of the anxieties that run amok in these debates. My presentation made a call for not only a de-criminalisation of pirate positions in the realm of cultural production, but also to recognise and celebrate the various conditions of collaborative authorship – be it by Holden Lenz who probably made the song twice as popular than it was, or by Avril Lavigne fans who went on a spree to make her song Girlfriend, the first video to be viewed one million times on Youtube – not merely as derivative or acts of prank and jests, but as legitimate and distinctive forms of authorship which expand the scope of the cultural object and give it unprecedented layers of meaning and engagement.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image

Screening of 'Steal this Film' (TV Cut)

pranesh — 2011-04-05T04:44:27Z

A screening of a new edit combining Steal this Film and Steal this Film II, which hasn't been released or screened before. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director, Jamie King. The Centre for Internet and Society and Pedestrian Pictures

cordially invite you to a screening of
Steal this Film (TV Cut) by Jamie King

Film:
Steal This Film (TV Cut)
A new edit combining Steal This Film and Steal This Film II, which hasn't been previously released or screened.

Date and Time:
Saturday, November 8, 2007
17:30 - 19:00 hrs.

Venue:
Nani Cinematheque (CFD)
5th Floor, Sona Towers
71 Millers Road
Bangalore

Map:
http://bit.ly/nani-map

(For directions to the venue call, CIS on +91 80 4092 6283.)

More about the film:
'Steal this Film' is a documentary series (available for free download online) about the culture of piracy and issues
surrounding intellectual property, and the cultural and economic implications of the Internet.

It has been selected for screening at Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival, South By Southwest (SXSW) festival in
Austin, Texas, the Singapore International Film Festival, and the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.

Links:
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Film
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/29/steal-this-film-part.html

More about the director:
Jamie King is a film maker, writer and activist working enthusiastically in the area of new media, post-IP culture and social
organisation. A former editor of Mute Magazine, lobbyist at the UN, journalist at ITN News, and consultant for Channel 4 Television, Jamie is now focused on radical approaches to sharing, exchange and co-operation indicated by network technologies across a variety of media.

Co-organiser of the 2003 WSIS? We Seize! counter-UN summit, Jamie continues to be involved in highlighting the importance of information politics in the social movements. STEAL THIS FILM I and II, documentaries exploring the uncertain future of intellectual property, have been downloaded over 4 million times via BitTorrent and featured at numerous international film festivals.

Add to Google Calendar:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/screening-of-steal-this-film-tv-cut

National Public Meeting on Software Patents

pranesh — 2011-04-05T04:45:10Z

This meeting will feature the following speakers: Nagarjuna G. (Free Software Foundation of India), Prabir Purkayastha (Delhi Science Forum), Prashant Iyengar (Alternative Law Forum), Venkatesh Hariharan (Red Hat) and Sudhir Krishnaswamy (National Law School)

Agenda

1000–1100	Presentation on the principles of patent law and software patents	Sudhir Krishnaswamy (National Law School)
		Prabir Purkayastha (Delhi Science Forum)
		Nagarjuna G. (Free Software Foundation of India)
1100–1130	Discussion on software patents in the Indian context: Indian Patent Act, and the draft patent manual	Prashant Iyengar (Alternative Law Forum)
		Venkatesh Hariharan (Red Hat)
1130–1150	Tea break
1150–1240	Discussion on patents and the development sector (freedom of speech, open standards, healthcare, biotech, agro-sector, etc.)	Sunil Abraham (Centre for Internet and Society)
		Anivar Aravind (Movingrepublic)
		Others
1240–1300	Presentation on the software patents that have been granted so far in India	Pranesh Prakash (Centre for Internet and Society)
1300–1400	Lunch break
1400–1700	Open House	Joseph Mathew (IT Adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala)
		T. Ramakrishna (National Law School)
		Abhas Abhinav (DeepRoot Linux)
		Sreekanth S. Rameshaiah (Mahiti Infotech)
		Vinay Sreenivasa (IT for Change)
		Any others who wish to speak

Documents

Other information

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/software-patents/national-public-meeting-on-software-patents