The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
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Letter on South Africa's IPRs from Publicly Financed R&D Regulations
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations
<b>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.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshOpen StandardsBayh-DoleIntellectual Property RightsOpen AccessOpen Innovation2011-08-04T04:42:15ZBlog EntryWorkshop on Innovation, Economic Development and IP in India and China
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/workshop-on-innovation-economic-development-and-ip-in-india-and-china
<b>Anubha Sinha and Rohini Lakshané presented at the SMU-JINDAL-RENMIN Workshop on “Innovation, Economic Development, and IP in India and China,” co-organised by the Singapore Management University, O.P. Jindal Global University, and Renmin University of China, in Delhi during September 27-28, 2016. Amitabh Kant, Chief Executive Officer, NITI Aayog, delivered the inaugural address at the workshop.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>Workshop Brochure: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/invitation-workshop-innovation-economic-development-and-ip-in-india-and-china" class="internal-link">Download</a> (PDF)</p>
<hr />
<h4>Anubha Sinha - "Investigating Limits to Innovation and Peer Production in India's Mobile Apps Economy"</h4>
<p>Slides: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/investigating-limits-to-innovation-and-peer-production-in-indias-mobile-apps-economy" class="internal-link">Download</a> (PDF)</p>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="420" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/hBZDkyN9kkgCfM" width="510"> </iframe></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Rohini Lakshané - "Exploring Open Hardware in Mass Produced Mobile Phones"</h4>
<p>Slides: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/exploring-open-hardware-in-mass-produced-mobile-phones" class="internal-link">Download</a> (PDF)</p>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="420" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/N8TpwEtUAb4hRH" width="510"> </iframe></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/workshop-on-innovation-economic-development-and-ip-in-india-and-china'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/workshop-on-innovation-economic-development-and-ip-in-india-and-china</a>
</p>
No publisherAnubha Sinha and Rohini LakshanéPeer ProductionAccess to KnowledgeIntellectual Property RightsOpen HardwareOpen InnovationMobile AppsPatents2016-10-09T04:41:38ZNews ItemOpenness, Videos, Impressions
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport
<b>The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The notion of free and open is under great debate even under
that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further
splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the
tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively
perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away
with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different,
often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost
endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.</p>
<p>Open video, in that matter, has gone through different
iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it
variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for
the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and
open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective
hearing, through the day: <strong>Access, Archive,
Share, Remix, Repurpose</strong>. And it is these five that we need to now
imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups
today.</p>
<p><strong>Access</strong> has been one primary question that almost everybody
dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements,
where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and
content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging
information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access,
privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To
contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something
that different participants have voiced the need for.</p>
<p><strong>Archive</strong> is a preoccupation with most people because
archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and
usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to
different people, there are older questions of representation, voice,
empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In
education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge
production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of
issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of
access, distribution etc.</p>
<p><strong>Sharing </strong>is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open
and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what
sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to
be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions
of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do
we share it with? Tools by which sharing
leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning
practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks
can be built up?</p>
<p><strong>Remix</strong> has been of great value because it means that you are
being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the
process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the
possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is
interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just
putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc.
can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic
and mechanics seems to have emerged.</p>
<p><strong>Repurpose </strong>is my additional reading of something that perhaps
needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact
remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that
enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms,
protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and
there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still
seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up
and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceOpen StandardsArtWorkshopDigital AccessFLOSSOpen ContentArchivesOpennessOpen InnovationMeetingOpen Access2011-09-22T12:23:13ZBlog EntryWikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session
<b>On May 13, 2013, the Access to Knowledge team led by Subhashish Panigrahi conducted a Wikipedia Introductory Session at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi for the consultants working for Data and India portal. This session was aimed to emphasize how these portals and their useful data could be used on Wikipedia to create good quality articles.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recently <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a>'s <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge</a> team was invited to demonstrate the usefulness of Wikipedia for the consultants of <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nic.in/">National Informatics Centre</a> (NIC) working for the <a class="external-link" href="http://data.gov.in/">Data.gov.in</a> and the <a class="external-link" href="http://india.gov.in/">National Portal of India</a> at NIC's New Delhi office. Data portal being one of the very important open data portal of the Government of India has worked immensely to populate over 2400 datasets from 32 departments participating in it.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many of the data need to be transcribed in popular medias especially on web. Wikipedia being world's largest online encyclopedia could be one such primary platform to use these useful data. <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish">Subhashish</a> from A2K team explained the usefulness of Wikipedia for the people associated with this project. The session went with discussing about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_policies">policies</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style">Manual of style</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars">Five pillars of Wikipedia</a> followed by a demonstration of editing articles on English Wikipedia. Post editing session there was a discussion session about the notability and how to check accuracy of articles by using valid references.</p>
<hr />
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a> <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/11DMH5w">http://bit.ly/11DMH5w</a></p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpen StandardsDigital GovernanceDigital AccessOpen DataOpen ContentOpen AccessOpennessOpen Innovation2013-07-17T06:33:20ZBlog EntryPre-Budget Consultation 2016 - Submission to the IT Group of the Ministry of Finance
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance
<b>The Ministry of Finance has recently held pre-budget consultations with different stakeholder groups in connection with the Union Budget 2016-17. We were invited to take part in the consultation for the IT (hardware and software) group organised on January 07, 2016, and submit a suggestion note. We are sharing the note below. It was prepared and presented by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with contributions from Rohini Lakshané, Anubha Sinha, and other members of CIS.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>It is our distinct honour to be invited to submit this note for consideration by the IT Group of the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, as part of the pre-budget consultation for 2016-17.</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society is (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. We receive financial support from Kusuma Trust, Wikimedia Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, IDRC, and other donors.</p>
<p>We have divided our suggestions into the different topics that our organisation has been researching in the recent years.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the Basis for Digital India</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>We congratulate the policies introduced by the government to promote use of free/libre and open source software and that of open APIs for all e-governance projects and systems. This is not only crucial for the government to avoid vendor lock-in when it comes to critical software systems for governance, but also to ensure that the source code of such systems is available for public scrutiny and do not contain any security flaws.</p>
<p>We request the government to empower the implementation of these policies by making open sharing of source code a necessity for all software vendors hired by government agencies a necessary condition for awarding of tenders. The 2016-17 budget should include special support to make all government agencies aware and capable of implementing these policies, as well as to build and operate agency-level software repositories (with version controlling system) to host the source codes. These repositories may function to manage the development and maintenance of software used in e-governance projects, as well as to seek comments from the public regarding the quality of the software.</p>
<p>Use of FLOSS is not only important from the security or the cost-saving perspectives, it is also crucial to develop a robust industry of software development firms that specialise in FLOSS-based solutions, as opposed to being restricted to doing local implementation of global software vendors. A holistic support for FLOSS, especially with the government functioning as the dominant client, will immensely help creation of domestic jobs in the software industry, as well as encouraging Indian programmers to contribute to development of FLOSS projects.</p>
<p>An effective compliance monitoring and enforcement system needs to be created to ensure that all government agencies are Strong enforcement of the 2011 policy to use open source software in governance, including an enforcement task force that checks whether government departments have complied with this or not.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Open Data is a Key Instrument for Transparent Decision Making</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>With a wider set of governance activities being carried out using information systems, the government is increasingly acquiring a substantial amount of data about governance processes and status of projects that needs to be effectively fed back into the decision making process for the same projects. Opening up such data not only allows for public transparency, but also for easier sharing of data across government agencies, which reduces process delays and possibilities of duplication of data collection efforts.</p>
<p>We request the 2016-17 budget to foreground the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy and the Open Government Data Platform of India as two key enablers of the Digital India agenda, and accordingly budget for modernisation and reconfiguration of data collection and management processes across government agencies, so that those processes are made automatic and open-by-default. Automatic data management processes minimise the possibility of data loss by directly archiving the collected data, which is increasingly becoming digital in nature. Open-by-default processes of data management means that all data collected by an agency, once pre-recognised as shareable data (that is non-sensitive and anonymised), will be proactively disclosed as a rule.</p>
<p>Implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy has been hindered, so far, by the lack of preparation of a public inventory of data assets, along with the information of their collection cycles, modes of collection and storage, etc., by each union government agency. Specific budgetary allocation to develop these inventories will be crucial not only for the implementation of the Policy, but also for the government to get an extensive sense of data collected and maintained currently by various government agencies. Decisions to proactively publish, or otherwise, such data can then be taken based on established rules.</p>
<p>Availability of such open data, as mentioned above, creates a wider possibility for the public to know, learn, and understand the activities of the government, and is a cornerstone of transparent governance in the digital era. But making this a reality requires a systemic implementation of open government data practices, and various agencies would require targeted budget to undertake the required capacity development and work process re-engineering. Expenditure of such kind should not be seen as producing government data as a product, but as producing data as an infrastructure, which will be of continuous value for the years to come.</p>
<p>As being discussed globally, open government data has the potential to kickstart a vast market of data derivatives, analytics companies, and data-driven innovation. Encouraging civic innovations, empowered by open government data - from climate data to transport data - can also be one of the unique initiatives of budget 2016-17.</p>
<p>For maximising impact of opened up government data, we request the government to publish data that either has a high demand already (such as, geospatial data, and transport data), or is related to high-net-worth activities of the government (such as, data related to monitoring of major programmes, and budget and expenditure data for union and state governments).</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Promotion of Start-ups and MSMEs in Electronics and IT Hardware Manufacturing</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>In line with the Make in India and Digital India initiatives, to enable India to be one of the global hubs of design, manufacturing, and exporting of electronics and IT hardware, we request that the budget 2016-17 focus on increasing flow of fund to start-ups and Medium and Small-Scale Manufacturing Enterprises (MSMEs) in the form of research and development grants (ideally connected to government, especially defense-related, spending on IT hardware innovation), seed capital, and venture capital.</p>
<p>Generation of awareness and industry-specific strategies to develop intellectual property regimes and practices favourable for manufacturers of electronics and IT hardware in India is an absolutely crucial part of promotion of the same, especially in the current global scenario. Start-ups and MSMEs must be made thoroughly aware of intellectual property concerns and possibilities, including limitations and exceptions, flexibilities, and alternative models such as open innovation.</p>
<p>We request the budget 2016-17 to give special emphasis to facilitation of technology licensing and transfer, through voluntary mechanisms as well as government intervention, such as compulsory licensing and government enforced patent pools.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Applied Mathematics Research is Fundamental for Cybersecurity</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>Recent global reports have revealed that some national governments have been actively involved in sponsoring distortion in applied mathematics research so as to introduce weaknesses in encryption standards used in for online communication. Instead of trying to regulate key-length or mandating pre-registration of devices using encryption, as suggested by the withdrawn National Encryption Policy draft, would not be able to address this core emerging problem of weak cybersecurity standards.</p>
<p>For effective and sustainable cybersecurity strategy, we must develop significant expertise in applied mathematical research, which is the very basis of cybersecurity standards development. We request the budget 2016-17 to give this topic the much-needed focus, especially in the context of the Digital India initiative and the upcoming National Encryption Policy.</p>
<p>Along with developing domestic research capacity, a more immediately important step for the government is to ensure high quality Indian participation in global standard setting organisations, and hence to contribute to global standards making processes. We humbly suggest that categorical support for such participation and contribution is provided through the budget 2016-17, perhaps by partially channeling the revenues obtained from spectrum auctions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen StandardsOpen SourceCybersecurityOpen DataIntellectual Property RightsOpen Government DataFeaturedPatentsOpennessOpen InnovationEncryption Policy2016-01-12T13:34:41ZBlog Entry'We Need to Proactively Ensure that People Can't File Patents Representative of the Creativity of a FOSS Community'
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/we-need-to-proactively-ensure-that-people-cant-file-representatives-of-the-creativity-of-a-foss-community
<b>Rohini Lakshané attended “Open Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Our Digital Culture” in Bangalore on August 13, 2015. Major takeaways from the event are documented in this post.</b>
<p class="Textbody" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Speakers:</b> Prof. Eben Moglen, Keith Bergelt, and Mishi Choudhary; <b>Panel discussion moderator</b>: Venkatesh Hariharan. See the <a class="external-link" href="http://pn.ispirt.in/event/open-innovation-entrepreneurship-and-our-digital-future">event page here</a>. The organizers <a class="external-link" href="http://pn.ispirt.in/open-source-leaders-discuss-innovation-entrepreneurship-and-software-patents">republished Rohini's report on their website</a>.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p class="Textbody" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Prof. Eben Moglen on FOSS and entrepreneurship</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>The culture of business in the 21<sup>st</sup> century needs open source software or free software because there is one Internet governed by one set of rules, protocols and APIs that make it possible for us to interact with each another. The Internet made everybody interdependent on everybody else. Startup culture needs free and open source software (FOSS) because startups are an insurgency, a guerrilla activity in business. The incumbents in a capitalistic world dislikes competition and detests that existing resources, such as FOSS, enable insurgents to circumvent some of the steep curve that they had to climb in order to become incumbents.</li>
<li>Hardware is developing in ways that make the idea of proprietary development of software obsolete. There is no large producer of proprietary software that isn't also dependent on FOSS. Microsoft Cloud is based on deployments that do not use Windows but are based on FOSS. The era of Android as a semi-closed, semi-proprietary form of FOSS is over. Big and small companies around the world are exploiting the open source nature of Android. </li>
<li><b>Free software is a renewable resource not a commodity. </b>Management is needed to avoid over-consumption or destruction of the FOSS ecosystem. Software is to the 21<sup>st</sup> century economic life what coal, steel, and rare earth metals were at the end of the previous century.</li>
<li>FOSS turned out to be about developing human brains. It turned out to be about using human intelligence in software better. Earlier universities, engineering colleges and research institutions were the greatest manufacturers and users of FOSS. Now businesses of all sizes are.</li>
<li>When Richard Stallman and Prof. Eben Moglen set out to make GPL free, they initiated a large public discussion process, the primary goal of which was to ensure that individual developers have as much right to talk and to be heard as loudly as the largest firms in the world. At the end of the negotiation process, 35 or 36 of the largest patent holders in the IT industry accepted the basic agreement to be a part of the commons. --- Incumbents like people to pay for a seat at the table. Paying to have an opinion is a pretty serious part of the landscape of the patent system.</li>
</ul>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Prof. Eben Moglen on Digital India</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><b>Every e-governance project that the Indian government buys should use FOSS.</b> The very nature of the way the citizens and governments interact can come to be mediated by software that people can read, understand, modify, and improve. An enormous ecosystem will come up -- a kind of public–private partnership (PPP) in the improvement of governance and government services, which is far more useful than most other forms of PPP conceptualised in the developed world in the 20<sup>th</sup> century.</li>
<li>Everybody has a stake in the success of this policy. Several corporations are working against this policy as they once stated that they do not need FOSS.</li>
<li>The biggest market for both making and consuming software in the world is in India, because the science done here will dominate global software making, which in turn will define how the Internet works, which in turn will define society. One can't develop the largest society on earth by reinventing the wheel. <b>The government is going to understand that only the sharing of knowledge and the sharing of forms of inventing would enable the largest society in the world to develop itself freely and take its place in the forefront of digital humanity.</b></li>
<li>If every state government's data centre across India is going to be turned into a cloud, one state might have VMWare, another might have AWS, and so on, it would be disastrous. To prevent this, <b>all e-governance activities of every state government and federal agency in India could be conducted in one, big, homogeneous Indian cloud. </b>This would enable utility computing across the country for all citizens, which would also make room for citizen computing to happen. When one moves towards architectures of omnipresent utility computing with large amounts of memory flatly available to everybody, one is going to be describing a national computing environment for a billion people. We can't even begin to model it until we start accomplishing it.</li>
<li>Prof. Eben Moglen's ambition is that there comes a time not very long from now when basic data science is taught in Indian secondary schools. The software is free and all the big data sets are public. A nation of a 100 million data scientists rules the world.</li>
</ul>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Keith Bergelt on the Open Invention Network</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Over the past 10 years, Open Invention Network (OIN) has emerged as the largest patent non-aggression community in the history of technology. It has around 1,700 participants and is adding almost 2 participants every day. In the last quarter, OIN had approximately 200 licensees.</li>
<li>There is now a cultural transformation where companies are recognising that where OIN members collaborate, they shouldn't use patents to stop or slow down progress. Where members compete, they choose to invent while utilising defensive patents publications. What we are doing is a patent collaboration and a technical collaboration that exists in major projects around the world.</li>
<li>OIN has been making a major effort since January 2015 to spend more time in India and China to be able to ensure that the technological might and expertise represented in the two countries can be a part of the global community, and that global projects can start here. <i>“We can expect to leverage the expertise of the community to be able to drive innovation from here [India and China]. It's not about IBM investing a billion dollars a year since 1999 and having some birthright to driving the open source initiatives around the world or about Google or Red Hat or anyone else. You have the ability to impact major changes and we want to be able to support you in the name of freedom of action as participants.”</i></li>
</ul>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Panel Discussion</b></p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Patent Wars and Innovation</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>In the past 5 to 7 years, patent wars in the handset segment of the information technology (IT) market have wasted tens of billions of dollars on litigation, and on raising the price of patent armaments. This patent litigation was purely an economic loss to the IT industry and it contributed nothing. If the patent system strangles invention, non-profit groups, non-commercial bodies, free software makers, and start-ups cannot invent freely.</li>
<li>Defensive patent publications, such as those made by IBM, lead to the gross underestimation of the inventive power and output of the company. People are struggling to find something to evaluate the productive output of an entity – startup, micro-industry or macro-industry. Patents are being used inappropriately and it's part of the corruption of the patent system. Any venture capitalist (VC) who believes that either the innovative capacities or the potential success factors of a start-up are tied to its patents should know that there are only a minuscule number of cases where patents are the differentiator. The differentiators required in order to sustain business are how smart the people are, how quickly they innovate, and how quickly they are able to adapt to complex situations. We see a trend in the US of not equating patents with innovation. The core-developer and hacker communities are largely anti-patent.</li>
<li>However, the flip side is that if the FOSS communities do not patent defensively, i.e., acquire and publish patents for their inventions in order to prevent others from getting patents in one jurisdiction or another, patent trolls will eventually encroach on the communities' inventive output. The only people making money out of this whole process are lawyers. It is slowing down the uptake of technology by creating fears and doubts in the system.</li>
<li>FOSS communities didn't qualify everything produced in the 23 years of (Linus') Linux, which would have let the service serve as stable prior art, preventing other people from filing patents. We can debate what is patentable subject matter in general or whether software should be patentable, but in the meantime <b>if we can be proactive and file everything that we have in defensive publications and make it accessible to the patent and trademark offices here and around the world, we will have far fewer patents.</b> <b>We need to be activists in making sure that people can't file patents that are representative of the creativity of a community.</b></li>
<li>The Chinese government has instituted a programme designed to produce defensive publications in order to capture all the inventiveness across their industries, to be able to ensure that the quality of what ultimately gets patented is at least as high.</li>
<li>The US has a massive repository called ip.com, which is with every patent examiner of the USPTO.</li>
<li>India does not grant software patents as per section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, but that doesn't mean that no software patents are being granted. One of the empirical studies conducted by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) in India shows that 98.3% of the [telecom and computing technology] patents granted till 2013 went to multinational corporations. Almost none of the assignees are Indian.</li>
<li>In the context of the ongoing patent infringement law suits filed in the Delhi High Court by Ericsson [<a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/compilation-of-mobile-phone-patent-litigation-cases-in-india">link</a>]: The Delhi High Court has had a reputation of being very pro-intellectual property from the beginning.</li>
<li>Also, there is pressure from trade organisations. In August 2015, Ericsson along with ASSOCHAM invited the Director General of the Competition Commission of India to present a paper about why patents are good. It is essential to determine how the rules of conflict of interest apply here. This is exactly what the pharmaceutical industry would do. The only bodies who would object are Doctors Without Borders (MSF) or some local organisations who realise that high priced patented drugs is not what India needs and that we do not need to have the same IP policy as the US or Japan. We only need a different policy.</li>
<li>The Special 301 Report of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is a big sham, and it suggests that India doesn't have strict enforcement of IP law. India does, unlike China.</li>
<li><b>Accenture has been granted a software patent in India.</b> The patent is about an expert present in a remote location transferring knowledge to somebody who is listening in another location. Universities offering MOOCs, BPOs, and many other services would fall under such a patent. SFLC spent four years trying to fight this patent. The first defence of Accenture's battery of lawyers was that they won't use the patent.</li>
<li><b>Patents of very low quality are being bought at very high prices. </b>The tax system or the subsidy system for innovation regards all patents as equal. This is a pricing failure and that should be corrected by other forms of intervention. The pendulum has already begun to swing the other way. Alice Corp was the third consecutive and unanimous ruling by the US Supreme Court that abstract ideas are not patentable. Patent applications pertaining to business methods and algorithms are increasingly being rejected by the USPTO after the ruling.</li>
</ul>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Prof. Eben Moglen on Facebook:</b></p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook is a badly designed technology because there is one Man in the Middle who keeps all the logs. The privacy problem with Facebook is not just about what people post. It's about surveillance and data mining of web reading behaviour. It is a social danger that ought not to exist. I have said since 2010 is that we can't forbid it; let's replace it. It means bringing the web back as a writeable medium for people in an easy way. What I see as next-generation architecture could just as well be described as Tim Burners Lee's previous generation architecture.</p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; ">You have to be able to trust the Internet. If you can't, you are going to be living in the shadow of govt surveillance, corporate surveillance, the fear of identity theft, and so on. We need to be able to explain to people what kind of software they can trust and what kind they can't. Distributed social networking will happen; it's not that difficult a problem.</p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; ">An example of federated networking is <b>Freedombox</b>, a cheap hardware doing router jobs using free software in ways that encourage privacy. The pilot project for Freedombox has been deployed in little villages in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These routers don't deliver logs to a thug in a hoodie in Menlo Park.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/we-need-to-proactively-ensure-that-people-cant-file-representatives-of-the-creativity-of-a-foss-community'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/we-need-to-proactively-ensure-that-people-cant-file-representatives-of-the-creativity-of-a-foss-community</a>
</p>
No publisherrohiniOpen SourceAccess to KnowledgeOpen InnovationFOSSPatents2015-09-27T11:51:50ZBlog EntryResources
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources
<b>A collection of resources that will help one navigate through the arguments and evidence for and against the Indian "Bayh-Dole" bill.</b>
<p><u><strong><br /></strong></u></p>
<h2><strong>PUPFIP</strong></h2>
<h3>News-related/General Coverage</h3>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/relook-at-publicfunded-r&d-bill-to-address-red-tape/376844/0">Relook at public-funded R&D Bill to
address red tape</a> (The Financial Express)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2008/12/01144901/CSIR-looks-at-commercializing.html">CSIR looks at commercializing, leasing
out patent</a> (Live Mint)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2008/02/exporting-bayh-dole-to-india-whither_21.html">Exporting Bayh-Dole to India: Whither Transparency Part II</a><span class="post-author"> (Shamnad Basheer)</span></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://ww.scidev.net/es/science-and-innovation-policy/intellectual-property/news/proyecto-de-ley-de-patentes-suscita-debate-en-la-i.html">Indian Patent Bill stirs debate among scientists</a> (Science and Development Network)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/legal.asp">Letter from the Knowledge Commission</a> (GoI)</p>
<h3>Scientific
Culture</h3>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.thehindu.com/delhi/?p=16251">Does Patenting research change the Culture of Science?</a> (The Hindu)</p>
<h3>Analytical Pieces<strong> </strong></h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/indian-patent-bill-let-s-not-be-too-hasty.html">Indian Patent Bill: Lets not be too Hasty</a>(Shamnad Basheer)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2008/11/01001052/Not-in-public-interest.html">Not in public interest</a>(Live Mint)<a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_6_128/ai_n32062853/"><br /></a></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_6_128/ai_n32062853/">The Indian Public Funded IP Bill: Are we Ready?</a>(K. Satyanarayana)</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>Bayh-Dole</strong></h2>
<h3>Technology
Transfer</h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1476653">Innovation's Golden Goose </a>(The Economist)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=10787664">Improving Innovation</a>(The Economist)</p>
<h3><strong>Scientific
Culture</strong></h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-129366990.html">Patents and America's Universities</a>(The Economist)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/technology/07unbox.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print">When Academia Puts Profits Ahead of Wonder</a>(The New York Times)</p>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=E1_VPNSGGT">Bayhing for blood or Doling out cash?</a>(The Economist)</p>
<h3>Evaluative
Pieces</h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Thursby.pdf">University Licensing under Bayh-Dole: What are the Issues and
Evidence?</a>(Thursby and Thursby)</p>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060262">Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US
Experience</a>(So et al.)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/09/19/8272884/index.htm">The Law of Unintended Consequences</a>(Fortune Magazine)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V77-41NCXY8-6/2/fa828bbd7705f51ffd8fcf60338daf16">The Growth of patenting and licensing by U.S. universities and the Bayh-Dole Act</a> (Mowery et al.)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5g.htm">Overall Assessment of the Bayh-Dole Act</a> (Nelson, Mowery, et al.)</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>General Resources</strong></h2>
<p> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5b.htm">Joint Ventures and Intellectual Property</a>(Andreas Panagopoulos)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5c.htm">Patents vs. Other Knowledge Transfer</a>(Agrawal and Henderson)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5f.htm">Incentives Structure and Licensing Success</a>(Dan Elfenbein)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5e.htm">University Licensing and Research Behavior</a>(Lach and Schankerman)</p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5b.htm">Open Science and Private Property</a>(Paul David)
<p> <strong><br /></strong></p>
<h2><strong>IP Alternatives</strong><br /></h2>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040293">New Approaches to Filling the Gap in TB Drug Discovery </a>(Casenghi, Cole and Nathan)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://keionline.org/misc-docs/Prizes/prize_tb_msf_expert_meeting.pdf">The Role of Prizes in Developing Low-Cost Point-of-Care Rapid Diagnostic Tests and Better Drugs for TB</a>(James Love)</p>
<p>How to boost R&D for essential drugs and diagnostics</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/333/7582/1279.pdf">Scrooge and intellectual property rights</a> (BMJ January 2006)</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshBayh-DoleAccess to KnowledgeAccess to MedicineOpen AccessPublic AccountabilityOpen Innovation2009-10-20T03:29:16ZPageDesign Public Conclave, 6th Edition
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/design-public-conclave-6th-edition
<b>The 6th edition of the Design Public Conclave was hosted by Civic Labs, an initiative of the Center for Knowledge Studies, and part of the Vihara Innovation Network, in partnership with Social Innovation Exchange, Okapi, Business World, Business World for Smart Cities, and the Delhi Jal Board.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>This <a href="http://designpublic.in/">edition of the conclave</a> was focused on the challenges and opportunities faced by Indian cities. It sought to explore new mechanisms for integrating collaborative dialogue and problem solving into processes of government and citizen interaction. Participants included individuals from organisations such as Okapi, Hyderabad Urban Labs, Fields of View, Innovation Academy, Hewlett Packard, LIRNEasia, among others.</p>
<p>The conclave began with a round of light yoga before moving into the introductory session. Namit Arora, a member of the Delhi Dialogue Commission, who gave the opening remarks introduced some of the subjects to be discussed and raised issues of citizen engagement, massive migration, pollution, unplanned growth, housing, water and power shortage, social problems like sectarianism and crime as some of the challenges faced in civic innovation. He stressed the lack of engagement between public and private parties and the issue of having no sense of commons in civic life in India.</p>
<h2>What is Civic Innovation?</h2>
<p>The first panel titled “What is civic innovation?” comprised Diastika Rahwidiati from Pulse Lab, Pavan Srinath from Takshashila Institution, Sriganesh Lokanathan from LIRNEasia and Aditya Dev Sood from Vihara Innovation Network. Pavan raised questions about how more people can be involved in civic issues, and spoke about the training program for public governance run by the Takshashila Institution as a means towards that. He also shared the example of Bangalore Political Action Committee, a citizen’s collective that includes several eminent personalities from the city that aims to improve the quality of life in the city. The panel continued to discuss how technology can be harnessed for social activism, and how the data revolution and data sciences can be used for civic innovation. Questions were asked about whether digital activism, such as civic hackathons, is not just a passing fad. A lot of solutions that are only technological in nature, can be misinformed, and so it is essential that other actors are involved along with technologists.</p>
<h2>The Vision of a Smart City</h2>
<p>Next, Sumit D. Chowdhury from the Ministry of Urban Development, Karuna Gopal from Foundation for Futuristic Cities, Parvathi Menon from Innovation Alchemy, Debashish Rao from HP, Bharath Palavalli from Fields of View and Namrata Mehta from CivicLabs spoke about how smart cities can be built. Parvathi Menon kicked off the conversation by saying that while it is impossible to design smart cities, it is possible to design smart communities. Sumit Chowdhury shared some of the factors that, in his opinion, make a smart city—the creation of scalable infrastructure, transparency in governance, velocity of business and quality of life. A city that can measure itself and use that knowledge to improve itself is a true smart city. Bharat Palavalli chimed in that while technology can make cities more efficient, efficiency can be dangerous. It can become easy to forget who the city is becoming more efficient for. Here, Sumit brought up the example of Shivpur in Maharashtra, where there are water meters in every village, public consciousness about planning and services and timely payment of taxes by citizen to drive the point that smart cities are driven by communities, and technology plays a role in enabling processes and the State in institutionalizing successful solutions. Finally, it was pointed out that under the 100 Smart Cities Initiative, the MoUD does not have a consistent understanding of what smart cities should be.</p>
<h2>Dialogue between Society and State</h2>
<p>This panel was followed by Elizabeth Elson’s keynote talk, “The dialogue between society and the state.” She spoke about the the power struggle between citizens and the government even in the case of technological application about who brings about change. She shared her experiences from the MAMPU programme. She pointed out some issues faced during the programme like too much focus on symptoms without really understanding the underlying causes, the use of intermediaries, creating mutually empowering coalitions. Elizabeth Elson pointed out that the terms, innovation and technology are used interchangeably . She pointed out that this was problematic as all technological solutions were not innovative. Another important issue that she raised was the need for technological intervention make media more accountable to the society. This session was followed by lunch.</p>
<h2>Changing Society and Governments</h2>
<p>The next session was moderated by Sumadro Chattapadhyay of Centre for Internet and Society. This panel included Garima Agarwal from Ashoka Innovators, Bangalore and Maesy Angelina from MAMPU programme, Jakarta. The session focussed on what were the appropriate modes of dialogues between civil society, private sector and government. Maesy Angelina focussed on design thinking as one of key methodologies for social innovation. Garima Agarwal emphasised on the importance of developing empathy as an institution. The panel said that while civil society and private sector could continue to point out the issues to the government, very often there is a failure of the government apparatus in that they do not know how to respond to these issues.</p>
<h2>Civic Tech Demos</h2>
<p>After lunch, there was a small session of brief pitches of examples of civic technological innovations. These include Local Circles, Meri Awaaz, SocialCops, On Track Media and BusBud. The issues that the solutions sought to addressed ranged from citizen engagement, awareness about reproductive issues, MNREGA, public transport and parking. I was reminded of the words of Pia Mancini who felt that she had failed in leveraging technology to solve governance issues as those problems were not technological but cultural. Having said that, a number of the ideas and the desire of use technology to solve social problems were laudable and one hopes to see more applications like these in future.</p>
<h2>Breakout Sessions</h2>
<p>This was followed by three simultaneous breakout sessions on the following topics – 1) Form and Function: Data Protocols for Civic Innovation, 2) Water Management for Improved Urban Health, and 3) Gaming for Decentralized Waste Management. I was part of the group discussing data protocols for civic innovation. Various question were raised with the implications of open data. One of the recurring themes was the question of ownership of data and who had a rightful claim over it. We broke the discussion down into two heads – risks of data and opportunities for governance and solutions. Among risks, we discussed issues such as privacy risks, chilling effects on free speech, reliability of data, profusion of data without clear insights, social profiling and re-identification of anonymised data. We look at different forms and opportunities for governance including licensing and control, cross linking of data silos, clear guidelines on who controls and owns data. The failure of conventional data protection principles like collection limitation and data minimisation principles were also considered and alternate models which involved having hierarchies of different kinds of data based on potential harm through misuse were discussed. After the breakout sessions, each group made a presentation of their observation.</p>
<h2>Concluding</h2>
<p>The final session was on accelerating civic innovation. The panel comprised Kartik Desai from ASHA Impact, Delhi, Nishesh Mehta from Water Co-Lab, Ahmedabad, AIyong Paul Seong from USAID, Delhi, Santosh Singh from World Bank, Delhi and Aditya Dev Sood from Vihara Innovation Network. The discussion was focussed on what kinds of services can have an impact on the way citizens interact with the state. Elizabeth Elson’s keynote on the dialogues between the state and the citizens is also relevant with regard to this discussion. Different actors including citizens, civil society actors, government institutions and industry were discussed as agents who may create the new platforms for interaction. The conclave concluded with dinner and drinks in the lawns of the Vihara Innovation Campus.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/design-public-conclave-6th-edition'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/design-public-conclave-6th-edition</a>
</p>
No publisheramberOpen DataOpen InnovationOpenness2016-06-18T16:45:05ZBlog Entry