Centre for Internet and Society

Intellectual Property Rights and Trade

royson — 2008-09-21T14:57:53Z

Context

Increasing expansion, propertisation and commoditisation of intellectual property rights, leading to a loss of balance that IPRs are meant to reflect.
Increasing instances where IPRs policies and practices conflict with innovation, equitable access, and freedom of speech.
Unrealistic and inappropriate application of traditional notions of IP to the digital world, where content and medium are often distinct, leading to transitory RAM copies being considered copies, etc.
Increasing tensions between IP and propagation of materials over the Internet, criminalization of every-day actions of ordinary citizens.
Increasing tendency of IP protectionists to call upon access and copy restriction technologies to intermediate digital consumption of IP, displacing notions of fair dealings, exceptions and limitations etc.
Lack of transparency in international negotiations on IP enforcement, and increasing pressures on developing countries to sign IP treaties by using strong-arm tactics (often as a precondition to trade).
Uncritical (or unwilling) adoption of maximalist IP regimes by developing nations as part of asymmetric negotiation for market access or subsidies.
Lack of critical understanding of the role IPR plays in different stages of an industry’s or nation's growth, and an unwillingness to look at deteriorative effects of IPR, such as chilling of technological advancement especially in industries with the incremental advancement model
Unwillingness of governments and industry to explore questions of “negative IP” spaces.
Lack of understanding in judges, lawmakers, and the general public of the meaning, purpose and impact of intellectual property rights.

Research Agenda

Questioning and re-imagination of the philosophical underpinnings of IPRs, to make them more consistent with a framework of equitable access to knowledge, more in line with actual practices of cultural production, and less restrictive of free speech.
Analysing the differences between digital and non-digital frameworks from the viewpoint of copyright, and examining the need and possibilities for a nuanced approach to “copying” in a world where everything is a copy.
Studying the forms of traditional knowledge protection being adopted by various countries, and especially the use of technology in doing so. Understanding the tensions between access to knowledge commons and protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.
Questioning the dominant IPR regime from a constitutional perspective of free speech, and seeing if there is any additional protection to be gained from that constitutional right.
Questioning the dominant IPR regime from the constitutional perspective of competition law and supporting the research agenda of competition commissions in developing countries.
Questioning the dominant IPR regime from the constitutional perspective of tax law and documenting the systemic avoidance of taxation by IP rights-holders.
Contributing to the research agenda of activists interested in a WIPO treaty on minimum exceptions and limitations to copyright law especially from the perspective of disabled, aged and illiterate citizens.
Monitoring the IP policies in various states (both written, like the TK policy in Kerala, and otherwise) and analysing them to see if they promote equitable access and innovation.
Researching issues rising from “common carrier” status for ISPs and online service providers in order to mitigate ISP liability, surveillance, bandwidth shaping, etc.
Collecting information on negative IP spaces, to understand what leads to such fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and raising questions as to whether such spaces (e.g., the fashion industry) are actually embracing IP.
Monitoring, analysing and articulating civil society responses to bilateral and multi-lateral trade agreements that would affect access to knowledge in developing countries.
Unpacking and analysing the Bayh-Dole model being adopted by various countries (and under consideration in India), to see whether it spurs innovation or results in public funds being used to enrich private parties.
Exploring issues of IP rights in personal data, such as that held in various networking sites, etc.

Resources

Copyright and Free Speech (Uma Suthersenan et al., eds., 2005)
EFF’s IP section. http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008)
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail
Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?
Madhavi Sunder, IP3, 59 Stanford L. Rev. 257 (2006)
Rethinking Commodification (Martha M. Ertman & Joan C. Williams eds., 2005)
Yochai Benkler, Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law, 76 New York U. L. Rev. 23 (2001)
Wendy J. Gordon, Copyright Norms and the Problem of Private Censorship, in Copyright and Free Speech: Comparative and International Analyses (Jonathan Griffiths & Uma Suthersanen, eds., 2005)
Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 New York U. L. Rev. 354 (1999)
Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 Yale L.J. 283 (1996)
Margaret Jane Radin & Madhavi Sunder, Foreword: The Subject and Object of Commodification, in Rethinking Commodification (Martha M. Ertman & Joan C. Williams eds., 2005)
Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright 12 (1994)
Madhavi Sunder, The Invention of Traditional Knowledge (U.C. Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 75, 2006), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=890657

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/public-accountability/int-ellectural.-property-right-and-trade

Surveillance

royson — 2008-09-21T14:57:53Z

Context

Technology and Surveillance have always been comfortable bed-partners. Each new technology has led to new and more ubiquitous form of surveillance practices premised on intensive data-mining and centralisation of data. In the age of Information Technologies, where Information is the new capital, Surveillance, as a theoretical concept and as practice takes on an unprecedented everydayness. The experience of the urban is necessarily one of being an object of surveillance. Everyday practices are now structured around models of surveillance—from CCTV in areas of consumption to physical surveillance at areas of transit—such that surveillance has become almost value neutral in its presence around us.

This overwhelming sense of being watched has led to two distinct forms of manifestation in the last four decades. The first is the sense of paranoia—the Big Brother syndrome—which has found many proponents lamenting the loss of privacy and the abduction of the personal by the State and the market. The second is in the anti-surveillance stance which demands either for an abolishing of the surveillance practices or for an ethical use of the data. While both these forms have their own merits, the debate and the stakes change considerably once we enter the digital domains.

Especially within the digital spaces, where ‘presence’, a ‘record of the presence’, and an archiving of the records are inescapable, surveillance becomes more than just a practice; it becomes an inescapable condition of being online. To be online is to leave traces, physical and digital, personal and pseudonymous. In such a case, instead of taking an either-or position around surveillance, we are now looking at what surveillance enables and what are the ways in which it mediates the complex mechanics of urban survival.

Research Agenda

What are the various forms of surveillance that we encounter in the digital world? How do we understand being subject to surveillance as a part of being online?
What are the ways to negotiate, mediate, and surpass the various forms of surveillance that are a part of cyberspaces? Who are the agents of surveillance?
What does surveillance enable for the different actors within a given space? For example, for the agent conducting the surveillance, it might be a question of collecting data. For the actor being watched, it might be a narrative condition where s/he can manifest him/her self in the process of surveillance. For the audience that becomes witness to the surveillance, a new set of relationships might emerge with the object being manifest and the practice of surveillance.
How does surveillance become a threat when it is especially conducted in the promotion of safety and security? What are the paradoxes it generates and how do we negotiate with them?
With the proliferation of portable media capture devices, what is the value of surveillance? What are the new forms of authorship that it creates? Can we look upon surveillance—the process of being watched, the knowledge of being watched, and the incessant historicisation of the present—as an aesthetic paradigm?

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/surveillance