Centre for Internet and Society

Free Copyright Control to Help Blind Students: Xavier's Resource Centre

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:10:36Z

This article throws light on the fact that even though technology has made it possible for visually challenged to access print material, there is little awareness among authors and publishers to make it accessible, and hence, only an amendment in copyright laws can bring about this awareness.

Technology has made it possible for the visually challenged to access the print. But there is little awareness among publishers and authors about the need to make printed documents accessible to all. An amendment in copyright laws is needed to bring about this awareness.

To make it happen, the Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC) has urged authors and publishers to support the global Right to Read [RTR] campaign initiated by the World Blind Union and Sight Savers International among others.

“The proposed amendments to the Indian Copyright Act are yet to be tabled in Parliament. But it is not just the law that needs to change,” said Dr Sam Taraporevala, XRCVC director. “There needs to be a quantum leap in the mindset, where people are thinking of accessibility across diverse dimensions.”

The XRCVC has urged authors and publishers to sign the RTR declaration. Technology can convert print into audio, larger print or Braille. But very little content has been converted into formats accessible to the print impaired.
The RTR campaign seeks to bring about changes to copyright laws, increase public awareness on the issue of access to reading for the print-impaired, and gather support for the treaty for the blind proposed by the WBU at the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

The XRCVC feels that amendments to the Indian Copyright Act should take interests of all stake holders into consideration. “A coordinated effort is required by all the stake holders, like the government, the copyright owners, persons with print impairment and organisations representing them, and the public,” Taraporevala said. “Signing the declaration does not involve handing over rights but indicates a statement of intent in support for the cause.”

For link to the original story on DNA.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/free-copyright-control-to-help-blind-students

The Cultural Politics of Neo-Pentecostalism in India

praskrishna — 2013-08-21T11:04:26Z

Talk by Pradip Ninan Thomas

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore invites you to a talk by Pradip Ninan Thomas on The Cultural Politics of Neo-Pentecostalism in India. Harvey Cox, the scholar of religions, has described pentecostalism as ‘a religion made to travel’ and as the global face of Christianity today. While there is little hard data available in India on any changes in Christian denominational membership, there is evidence available via the Pew Study on Global Pentecostalism and any amount of soft data that indicates that there has been a massive expansion in new churches in India predominantly linked to the Pentecostalist and neo-Pentecostalist traditions.

This brief lecture is based on a study of Christian fundamentalism and Communications in India that Pradip Ninan Thomas had carried out in 2006. This lecture will explore the cultural politics of neo-Pentecostalism in India including its organizational strategies, ideological struggles, communicative practices and correspondences between the global and the local.

The religious marketplace in India has experienced extraordinary growth over the last two decades. Christianity too has been affected by this growth and Pradip Ninan Thomas argues that the commodification of Christianity is tied into Church planting, the numbers game and contestations with Hindutva in India.

Speaker

Pradip Thomas is Joint Director of the Centre for Communication & Social Change, University of Queensland, Brisbane. His research trajectory primarily comes out of the political economy of communication tradition and he has written/co-edited a number of books and papers on issues related to media ownership, intellectual property, religion and the media and communication and social change. A forthcoming book that will be published by Sage is entitled ‘Political Economy of Communications in India: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. He is currently in India carrying out interviews related to a book project on Communication Rights Movements in India. He has had a long standing research interest in issues related to religion and media, particularly religious fundamentalism and the media.

Time and Date

Wednesday, 24 February, 2010; 5.00 to 7.00 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 71

VIDEO

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/cultural-politics-neo-pentecostalism-india

Right to Read, Now in Mumbai

praskrishna — 2011-08-17T08:46:02Z

The third phase of the 'Right to Read' campaign in India held in Mumbai was coordinated by the Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC). The Mumbai Phase of the Right to Read Campaign was launched on 1st January 2010 and ran till the 27th of January 2010.

India has over 70 million persons who are unable to read printed materials and published information due to some forms of physical, cognitive or sensory disabilities. This includes the blind, visually impaired, persons with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and persons who are unable to use their hands or the upper part of their body and hence, cannot hold books. For these persons, information has to be converted into formats such as Braille, large print, audio, electronic and other formats which they can access using assistive technologies.

The ‘Right to Read' campaign was started for such persons. The campaign is part of a global initiative by the World Blind Union (WBU), Sightsavers International (SSI) and other such organizations. In India it is being spearheaded by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Daisy Forum of India (DFI), Inclusive Planet and Xavier's Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC).

The campaign seeks to accelerate changes in copyright law, raise public awareness on the issue of access to reading for the print-impaired and gather Indian support for the Treaty for the Blind proposed by the World Blind Union at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The XRCVC as part of its work in the field of creating an accessible and inclusive society and promoting print access has campaigned for this cause mainly in Mumbai and Western India. This report focuses on the genesis and outcome of the Mumbai chapter of the global Right to Read campaign.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/mumbai-phase-of-right-to-read-campaign

The print-impaired millions and their right to read

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:10:56Z

Books, books everywhere, but not a word to read. This is the scenario for the approximately 70 million print-impaired in India, a sizeable population that includes the visually-impaired young people as well the elderly — whose vision depletes with advancing age.

If you are visually impaired and want to read the latest bestseller, the chances are that you would be staring at a blank, almost-impenetrable wall. The reason: hardly about 500 to 700 of the approximately one lakh titles that are published in India every year are converted to formats like Braille, audio books and e-books for the benefit of this population, as well as versions with large prints for those with weak vision.

Now, as the Budget Session of parliament is likely to consider amendments to the Copyright Act, those advocating a ‘right to read’ for the print-impaired are hoping that among the changes would be a permission to convert books to various accessible formats like Bookshare or Daisy Book Forum for this population that want to travel into the magic world of words but are forced to be out of it.

A National Right to Read Campaign, backed by the Global Right to Read Campaign (GRRC), is already on the job, creating public awareness against what activists call the ‘exclusion’ of millions of Indians from the ‘fundamental right’ to read books.

While there are technologies and software that have enabled this population to access print materials in electronic formats that are read aloud by the machine, it is still illegal for the print-impaired people to, say, scan a book and read it using a screen reader software (such as Adobe Read Aloud) or share it with others. The matters are complicated even more by lack of international laws that allow cross-border sharing of accessible-format books between libraries in India and other countries.

“Even though the International Publishers Association is looking for a licensing system, specifically for conversion of books to accessible formats for the visually impaired, publishers are not publishing in these versions,” says Chris Friend, chair of the GRRC and World Blind Union (WBU) representative.

However, 600 authors — including Arun Shourie, Tarun Tejpal, Meghnad Desai and Girish Karnad — and publishing houses like Harper Collins, Marg Publications, etc have pledged support to the campaign.

Persons who cannot read print are not only the blind, as is the popular perception. A print impaired person can be either visually impaired or those who have other physical, cognitive or sensory disabilities such as dyslexia, autism, learning disabilities, etc, point out Sam Taraporevala and Nirmita Narasimhan of the Centre for Internet and Society, which is spearheading the Right to Read Campaign along with the Daisy Forum.

Dismal scene

In developed countries, according to WBU estimates, only about five per cent of published books are available to print-impaired persons. In developing countries like India, the percentage is reduced to a dismal 0.5 per cent. There is increasing global attention on the issue in the form of a Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons, which is being discussed at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) of the UN, and for which India has expressed its support.

Disabled rights activists like Javed Abidi are for faster availability of books in other formats, and say that it’s a ‘matter of shame’ that it has not been the norm despite India moving fast along the information highway.

Publishers like Cambridge University Press and Sage, while joining the movement for making books accessible for the print impaired, are a little apprehensive about the potential of abuse of the converted formats by book pirates as well as violation of rights of authors, whose permissions are necessary to convert any book to another format under the law.

“Publishers fear leakage of accessible formats into the open market,” says Manas Saikia of CUP. Something that Friend completely pooh poohs. “It’s a myth that we visually impaired are going to rob authors’ rights or leak the books into the open market. The Daisy format watermarks every converted production, and any leakage can be traced back to the source. Also, some publishers are opposing the WBU treaty at WIPO saying we want free books. That is another myth. We are ready to pay, just give us books to read,” he says.

But the debate in public space seems to be creating some impact. Even as publishers and authors are coming out in large numbers to support access of books to the print impaired, the human resource development ministry is working on providing an exception for conversion to various formats if it is for the print impaired.

In fact, G R Raghavendra, registrar for copyrights at the ministry, confirms that such a move is afoot to remove this ‘unfortunate’ lacuna in the law. Quite naturally, everyone who loves the printed word is hoping that the print-impaired book worms will sooner than latter witness sunnier days.

For the original article in the Deccan Herald

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/print-impaired-millions

De facebook

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:41:13Z

Facebook used to be our playground but privacy concerns are now souring that fantasy. Why do we trust a clutch of new corporations with such phenomenal amounts of personal data?

The age of privacy is over, Facebook’s fresh-faced founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared a couple of months back. Social norms have shifted. We are now used to living out loud. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, ‘Why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’” he said.

That paranoid past is behind us, claimed Zuckerberg, justifying Facebook’s controversial new decision to fling open the curtains and make maximum visibility the new normal. “In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and (there are) just all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” he said.

In other words, get over the stage fright. Everyone else is out there over-sharing, arguing, preening, and generally acting out online.

In June last year, Facebook sneaked in a feature called the Everyone update. This makes it much like Twitter, and also allows it to share with and sell information to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. “Facebook’s privacy changes are relevant as it tries to compete with real-time search on platforms like Twitter. It does give you an option to work around that though I am certain the whole process of setting privacy preferences could be a lot more intuitive,” says Sidharth Rao, digital industry watcher and CEO of internet marketing firm Webchutney.

On the surface, the new Facebook settings are better and much more malleable, if you can figure out how to work them — you can now choose, per post, what you want different sets of people to see. They have eliminated regional networks which would unwittingly expose you to an entire city sometimes (meaning that not everyone who is on the Delhi network, say, has automatic access to your information if you are in Delhi). But on the other hand, the default setting that Facebook recommends is deeply problematic. You, your profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of are all “publicly available information”. Earlier, you could make sure only your friends saw the rest of your friends — now, that option no longer exists as a setting.

Wasn’t privacy once a Facebook fundamental? Unlike the seedier environments of Orkut or Myspace, Facebook grew out of a small Harvard community, expanded to cover other East Coast schools, then conquered companies and countries. In September 2006, Facebook opened registration to anyone with an email address. But it was extremely cautious about how it engineered interaction. In essence, you were meant to socialise with people you already knew.

“It felt safer. It wasn’t about random people sending you scraps and stalking you, like on Orkut or whatever. Facebook reflected my real world. It kept you loosely, comfortably connected to so many people”, says Nomita Sawhney, a young Delhi-based architect. Unlike the threat of cyberstalking, intimidation, and impersonation that stalk less selective networks, Facebook remained clear of what media scholar Danah Boyd calls ‘stranger danger’. Only two years back, Zuckerberg told tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick that privacy “is the vector around which Facebook operates”.

I Like To Watch

Why are these changes such a big deal? Zuckerberg’s claim about privacy rings true for most unself-conscious Facebookers. After all, only recently, bra colour status updates were the big buzz on Facebook, ostensibly in support of breast cancer awareness. Now, it’s doppelganger week, where you tell the world what celebrity you most resemble. You can take dippy quizzes, remember birthdays, discuss the news, giggle over pictures. Grim warnings about corporate avarice and government spying sound faintly ridiculous in this pleasant context.

Social networks and blogs have certainly reconfigured privacy. Anyone who’s spent time on Facebook knows the impulse to meander through the pages and pictures of people in that amorphous category called ‘friends of friends’. In just a few years, we have got used to the thought that our lives are externalised and sprawled out for near-strangers to see.

In fact, Facebook is now the largest photo site in the world. When you join Facebook, under its Terms of Service, you give it a “license” (that is, legal permission) to use your content “on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” It takes some effort to realise how recent all this is, that it’s still a great unfolding experiment, and that we are granting these companies fabulous power.
In his recent book, The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki describes the digital glasshouse: “Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies of a fat kid pretending to be a Jedi Knight, cell phone photos — posted online — of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone of Web 2.0 and the engine of corporate and government data mining.”

Web 2.0 was the clunky name for a whole range of liberating personal expression platforms — from Flickr and Youtube to Livejournal and Facebook. These companies provide the space and you bring the party. They encourage you to feel right at home and treat these platforms like your lounge, confessional or salon. Meanwhile, they also collect and refine data about you, and often wield it without your awareness.
In its over-eagerness, Facebook has blundered into several privacy minefields before this—when it first introduced Newsfeed, pushing a steady stream of your friends’ status updates at you, it embarrassed and annoyed many. Boyd compared it to the experience of shouting to be heard at a party, when the music abruptly stops and everyone else can suddenly hear your careless small talk. Of course, it turns out Zuckerberg was right when he told users to “calm down and breathe”, and Newsfeed has been naturalised into the Facebook experience. Another, more scarring experience was Beacon — its attempt to track what users in the US bought on partner sites — and tell on them to their friends. After an avalanche of protests, Facebook backed down and modified the ad platform. It even employs a chief privacy officer to address our fears.

In the early days, Facebook generated awkwardness because it didn’t respect context — the fact that you wear and cast off selves depending on who you’re interacting with, your crazy roommate or your conservative grand-aunt who decided to befriend you online. “It is the problem that arises when worlds collide, when norms get caught in the crossfire between communities, when walls that separate social situations come crashing down,” writes Chris Peterson of the University of Massachusetts, who has studied Facebook’s privacy architecture.

But now you can tweak settings and set up differential access. People have figured out how to work Facebook and not get burnt. “Profile pictures flatter, tagged pictures shatter,” says Priya Singh, a twenty-something law student, with a laugh. “You never know what someone’s going to put up and who’s going to see what. I don’t want everyone to see drunken party pictures, and so I’ve just learnt to place family on a new level of privacy settings.” And that’s the general pattern on Facebook: most people have learnt to adjust to the public glare, after some initial blinking and bemusement.

Privacy from Whom?

You can segment your social world as minutely as you like, but that doesn’t mean your life is any more private. It’s not just the fact that potential employers can scan and dismiss you, or current employers keep tabs — though such stories abound. For instance, MIT’s Gaydar research project discovered that you can identify a person’s sexual preferences by studying who their friends are on Facebook, even if they have avoided sharing that information in their profile.

But perhaps we have been gulled into thinking that the whole privacy fuss is about each other. “It’s very clever of Facebook to foreground this aspect of control. Your other friends, pictures, the games you play — that’s something we regularly give out anyway”, says Nishant Shah, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “But Facebook is not a single entity — it is a collection of third party apps (applications) that we have no control over. A simple birthday calendar can harvest all your data, all your online traces and you grant it access without knowing it,” he says. So Facebook makes a big show of protecting you from your acquaintances, even as it sells your information continuously.

This becomes a much bigger possibility when it comes to search engine integration, which allows the open flow on Facebook to be harnessed for perfect reach and recall.

To get a clearer sense of what’s at stake with these influential corporations, take a more powerful example: Google.com. Every day, we confide our trivial confusions, our deep doubts to one willing ear. And these billions of broken questions can add up to an eerily accurate picture of the world. But do you search Google or does Google search you? “Google can track you across applications: email, search, blogs, pictures and books read. That means they can profile you in a very detailed, exhaustive way, and they do,’ says Rahul Matthan. “They never delete information, and they’re getting progressively more intelligent about you, as they make search more relevant with features like Google Suggest.” As technology scholar Siva Vaidyanathan puts it, “we have to realise that we are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We are what Google sells to advertisers.” These behaviourially targeted ads are the most perfect, evolved form of advertising so far and in concept, the least annoying, because they are customised to you. Google has promised that its information is utterly secure and that search logs are anonymised after a certain period.

It provides limited disclosure of outside ads, lets users manage the categories that Google has assigned to them and tinker with it for a more accurate picture and also provides an opt-out option. But Search 2.0 is a scary beast — it can also facilitate social control and surveillance. Your online activities are not scattered across applications any more, Google can hear what you tell Facebook.

While selling us stuff more efficiently is probably a good thing, what happens when this intimate knowledge shades into active surveillance? Even if we live in countries where rights are respected, “we give out enough personal information in an innocuous way to a single repository. They are sitting on top of a very valuable resource, and all this information can easily be reverse-engineered to reveal specifics about you,” says Rahul Matthan, technology lawyer and founder-partner of Trilegal.

In India, we are even more oblivious to such stealthy watching. “Privacy concerns here are lesser than in the West, where they’re so dependent on digital ID. There, if someone impersonates you or overdraws credit limits, it could affect your house, your job,” says Matthan.

Privacy legislation doesn’t really exist in India — the right to keep personal information confidential has only been articulated as protection against state action. “There’s no easy legal recourse to being thoroughly spied on by a company,” says Matthan (Europe has enforced data protection directives since 1984 — you can control what information is gathered about you, and how it is used. While the US has somewhat diluted laws, personal information is still strongly guarded). While it’s tempting to think that you have nothing to hide, you are acceding to a set-up where outliers can be identified and dealt with. Privacy matters, no matter how unexceptionable your own life. So what’s to be done? “Holding Facebook and other companies to account is crucial. We must set up legislations by which people can look back, ask exactly what about their activity is being tracked. They have to treat consumers as peers,” says Shah. “If Facebook can gaze at us, we must be given the right to gaze back at its functioning — it has to be a peer-to-peer relationship.”

So far, Facebook and the Googleverse and Twitter are still our friends and enablers. But as they amass more and more power, it is better to see them as fallible companies rather than confidantes, and to make sure that they account for our information.

For original article on the Indian Express

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/de-facebook

Can’t read, so use new tech to let books speak

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:43:27Z

An article in the Times of India about the Right to Read campaign organised by the Centre for Internet & Society at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi as the world book fair kicked off.

Fifteen-year-old Ravi has never read a book. Diagnosed with a brain disorder when he was just three years old, he was taught how to read in a school for special children. But apart from some local newspapers and occasional letters from his family, he could never manage to enjoy a book because reading printed words was never comfortable to him.

On Saturday, Ravi was among the 300 print-impaired people — all dressed in identical blue sweatshirts and suffering from various disabilities like blindness, autism, dyslexia etc — who gathered at Pragati Maidan as the World Book Fair kicked off. Taking part in ‘Right to Read’ campaign organized by Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), they tried to create awareness about the plight of nearly 70 million people in the country who cannot read but, nevertheless, have the ability to enjoy a book or get information if book publishers take care to use the technology.

‘‘We want that people with disabilities should also be able to enjoy popular books like White Tiger or Five Point Someone. But for this, a lot needs to be done. The outdated copyright act needs to be amended so books can be converted to form which is accessible like audio books. Many publishers and writers do not give permission to have their books converted,’’ says Nirmita Narasimhan, programme manager of CIS.
As Amina flashes her wide grin, she seems just like any other normal 12-year-old child. However, a learning disorder stopped future studies for her and now her parents want to get her ‘‘settled’’ in life. ‘‘I want to study further,’’ was all she said. Amina has come from a small town in Bihar and is in Delhi with an NGO that is helping her adjust to life as a dyslexic.

Another participant in the campaign, Manoj, is blind. While he learned braille several years ago, his biggest regret is that because of his disability, he cannot enjoy the latest bestsellers. ‘‘I read whatever books are available in braille. Popular books are never accessible to me,’’ he said. The nationwide campaign began last year and since then has taken place in Kolkata and Mumbai, with Delhi being the third destination.
‘‘The campaign seeks to draw attention to the fact that out of nearly one lakh books that are published each year, barely 700 are available to people who cannot read print. The books can be converted into formats like braille, audio and large print to make them accessible to disabled people using screen readers (talking software) but it’s rarely done,’’ said a campaign volunteer.

Members of the campaign claimed that according to World Blind Union nearly 5% books are available to print-impaired persons in the developed countries. But in India the number of such books is just .5%. Javed Abidi, convener of Disabled Rights Group and one of the key-note speakers in the campaign, said: ‘‘Mostly it’s the visually impaired who have carry out the task to make the books more accessible to them. They have to scan the book and convert it and so that they can enjoy it. This needs to be changed. The onus should be on the publishers so books are made accessible to everyone.’’

The leaders of the campaign approached Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal when he came to speak at the inauguration ceremony of the fair. The minister said he has already done a lot for disabled citizens. Since the campaign was launched, over 600 authors and publishers have pledged their support to the campaign. ‘‘While technology has enabled the print-impaired community to access print materials in electronic formats that can be read using assistive technologies, converting books to these formats is not permitted by the law. The campaign also seeks necessary amendments in the Indian Copyright Act,’’ said Narasimhan.

For original article on The Times of India

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/new-tech-to-let-books-speak

No Software Patents: Meetup at CIS on February 6

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T04:14:13Z

Our team at CIS India thanks you for opposing software patents in India by signing the petition. If you stay in Bangalore, we invite you to a meetup on the topic of Software Patents, this Saturday (Feb 6th). We will have a few subject matter experts amongst us too.

There will be Barcamp style discussions on Software Patents with the following interesting elements:

How do software patents affect entrepreneurs, particularly start-ups and SMEs.
Impact of software patents on open source.
What can we do about it.

Please send an email to "Amit Singh" amitsingh.mail@gmail.com amitsingh.mail@gmail.com with the subject line "Software Patents Meetup" to confirm your participation.

If you want to organise a similar meetup in your city, please write to "Pranesh Prakash" pranesh@cis-india.org,

If you cannot make it for the event kindly continue to support the cause by referring your friends to http://petition.nosoftwarepatents.in.

We are targeting as many virtual supporters as can be, to sign the petition.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/meet-up-software-patents

Year Ahead Copyright 2010: Between An Enforcement “Gold Standard” And Stronger Limitations

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:43:24Z

Whereas copyright is increasingly being exchanged for contractual relationships why all the debate and new efforts in national and international copyright legislation. Monika Ernet's article in the Intellectual Property Watch examines this in the wake of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the international treaty on access to online books for the visually impaired. The article also carries Pranesh Prakash's views on introduction of technical protection measures and the protection of them by law.

The secretly negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is now in centre stage in the global debates around copyright, as is a prospective new international treaty on access to online books for the visually impaired which comes as part of a broader push to clarify limitations and exceptions to copyright. But some are asking, why all the debate and new efforts in national and international copyright legislation when copyright is increasing being exchanged for contractual relationships?

ACTA may bring with it the punishment of internet denial for infringement that has been fiercely discussed in several European countries and adopted in France, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. ACTA is seen by critics as another push by governments backing their rights holders in the eternal wars over copyright.

But on the other side, there is much hope that a new treaty for the visually impaired will be negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Open-ended consultations on outstanding issues were promised to be finalised over the early months of 2010 by the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.

ACTA and Enforcement

The seventh round of negotiations for ACTA ended after four days of talks in Guadalajara on 29 January. Round eight is expected for April in Wellington, New Zealand. If you ask the negotiators, they will tell you that they expect to get this done in 2010.

There seems to be a sense of urgency to complete ACTA just at the moment when a growing list of members of national parliaments from the United States (Congress), the United Kingdom and Germany are asking for access to the ACTA documents and while the first small street protest was organised outside the meeting place in Guadalajara, Mexico. “Are the commitments of negotiators to transparency real or a strategic move?” asked New Zealand’s Labour Party politician Clare Curran before the meeting in Guadalajara.

“We will have a hearing on ACTA presumably in March,” said EU Member of Parliament Alexander Alvaro, who has questioned the European Commission on the transparency, timeline and scope of the agreement. The Commissioner Designate for International Trade, Karel de Gucht, said clearly: “If there is confidentiality, I will respect it and I have to respect it.” It is impossible, he said, to change the terms during the negotiations.

While he promised that he would make sure Parliament - which has now to agree to ACTA under the newly in effect Lisbon Treaty - would be “duly informed,” the Parliament which just engaged in its first fights over its new competencies with the European Council and Commission might not take that bite, said Alvaro.

The Commission, meanwhile, is for 2010 preparing to put forward a follow-up to the IP enforcement directive (IPRED), as a draft text on IPRED II for criminal sanctions is expected to be put forward in May or June, immediately after the evaluation report on IPRED due in April.

Rethinking Limitations and Exceptions

While there is a big push for ACTA - which International Trademark Association President Richard Heath from Unilever said should be set as “gold standard” - there are growing concerns in academic circles. Annette Kur, IP law expert at the Max Planck Institute of Intellectual Property and Tax Law, said there is a feeling in the expert community that “we cannot go on and on tightening the screw.”

Talks at WIPO about a treaty to grant exemptions for blind and visually impaired people have shown promise, but might also slow down other initiatives for a re-balancing of copyright that academics were hoping for. The implementation of other elements of the WIPO Development Agenda would be a good counterpoint against the current wave of maximal demands in rights protection, according to Kur.

But proponents say there is gathering momentum for the visually impaired exception now - including a draft treaty text, which does not exist for any other issue in the committee - and to wait risks losing the chance and gambling on an uncertain and potentially very lengthy process.

National Copyright Reforms and FTAs

Some ongoing national copyright legislative reforms echo the demand for the re-balancing, with Brazil’s copyright reform the most far-reaching of these, as copyright law expert Volker Grassmuck recently wrote. The Brazilian law could be the first copyright law “balancing copyright with access and usage rights and consumer protection its declared goal,” Grassmuck wrote, but also said that the reform work might be stopped by the Brazilian election campaign in 2010. For several months, a final draft has been announced, Grassmuck told Intellectual Property Watch, yet every time publication has been postponed. “There certainly are concerns that the delay results from industry lobbying against the reform at the highest levels,” Grassmuck said.

Indian copyright reform (that like the Brazilian effort started in 2005) also has made a reference to amendments to secure limitations and exceptions for the visually impaired, but is more conservative when it comes to other issues. It more closely follows the line of harmonising its regulation to the international treaties, namely the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.

The reform effort just got a new push when the Indian Copyright office published a final draft on 24 December. Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Center for Internet and Society in Delhi, said that the introduction of technical protection measures and the protection of these by law would bring a big change in India.

Prakash said he is afraid that intermediary liability is on the political agenda of the Indian Copyright Office. This would make sense if one considers the negotiations for a free trade agreement between India and the EU that can be expected to include a lengthy section covering intellectual property, copyright and online service provider liability similar to the one in the EU-Korea FTA. The EU-Korea FTA was to be voted on by EU Parliament this week; the EU-India FTA is expected to be finalised in 2010.

Copyright reforms are also under way in Canada, Hong Kong, Serbia, and in the United Kingdom the digital economy bill is under heavy discussion because of far-reaching regulatory power planned for UK communications regulator OFCOM. In Germany, a third round of copyright law reform is on the agenda with private broadcasting companies, publishers and the music industry asking for better copyright protection.

Contracts Instead of Copyright?

But while these reforms and treaty and FTA negotiations are ongoing, there is also another trend seen by experts and users of copyright, said Jeanette Hofmann, an internet governance expert. “Copyright, this moral beacon, more and more ceases to play a role in practical terms. As an author I have to live with a complete buy-out and as a copyright customer, let’s say in the library, I am often dependent on the contracts that the library has with private companies, too.”

Benjamin White, head of the intellectual property at the British Library, has asked the question of whether copyright is still relevant in the digital age. “What I deal with is contracts,” he said, warning that “in most EU member states contracts effectively trump copyright laws. Limitations and exemptions are irrelevant, if there is a contract that says otherwise.” Libraries are contracting with private companies that could help them to fund digitisation projects, but would then regulate access to these objects.

White said while he credits Google for getting the discussion started on how digitisation could be funded, he also wants to see a debate on whether people are comfortable with one private company having access to million of books. The Google book settlement and contracts with libraries in the US and other countries in effect could be seen as a monopoly being created around orphan works and a way to control access to millions of works for years. The EU Commissioner Designate for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes, when asked what she thought of Google’s book project, said she liked competition. Regulation for orphan works is on the EU Commission’s work agenda.

Competition and more business offers were also said by Swiss IP lawyer Rolf Auf der Maur to be the focus of the music industry instead of enforcement. Auf der Maur, regular panellist at Midem (the largest annual conference of the music industry), said acknowledgement was trickling down in the music industry that collective licence models, for example licensing music to internet service providers, or even thoughts about flat-rates might be better than only focussing on enforcement.

The major labels are interested in ventures like streaming service Spotify. Paul Brindley, co-Founder of digital music expert consultant Music Alley, said government funding for digital music service models could be expected from the British Technology Strategy Board.

Yet this message could sound overly optimistic given that the music industry is the party heavily promoting a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ approach against copyright infringers.

Or might there be rights owners that think what Joe McNamee, political expert for European Digital Rights (EDRI), predicts: “you can forget about enforcement of copyright, if you focus on copyright and do not get the right content in the right formats available to consumers then you will not solve the problem.“ Innovation would be blocked, he warned, and ever stronger enforcement regulation would finally lead to a lot of collateral damages in civil rights.

For librarian White there also is an urgent need for a change. He said regulators need to create clear rules on access in the digital world like are set out in the Brazilian copyright reform proposal. White said he was hoping that WIPO, whose secretary general, Francis Gurry, had acknowledged the challenge of solving the relationship between private contracts and copyright, would act on the issue of access. Will that happen in 2010?

Monika Ermert may be reached at info@ip-watch.ch

For original article on IP Watch, click here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/year-ahead-copyright-2010

Campaigners for Inclusion to Organise Awareness Raising Event at Kolkata International Book Fair on February 6

praskrishna — 2011-08-31T10:43:29Z

Campaigners for Inclusion is organising an awareness raising event on Right to Read at the Kolkata International Book Fair on February 6, 2010.

Campaigners for Inclusion (a voluntary citizen group imitative of Sruti Disability Rights Centre & CRY) had introduced the Right to Read Campaign in Kolkata last November. The programme was hosted by National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) where Nirmita Narsimhan from CIS and Rahul Cherian of Bookbole were present. Senior academicians like Dr. S. Das, Vice chancellor, University of Calcutta, Senior Journalists from The Telegraph as well as the Principal of Blind Boys Academy participated in a panel discussion and interacted with the audience which comprised of BPOs, DPOs, NGOs and students.

In continuance with the programme, an awareness raising event is being organised in the famous Kolkata International Book Fair on 6 February 2010. The volunteer group will be meeting in front of the Publishers Guild office at 2 p.m. Different Disability groups are expected to join them there—they will tour the entire Book Fair complex, with posters and leaflets, and end the tour in front of the Publishers Guild Office. The campaigners will then give a memorandum to the officials of the Guild.

More than one lakh people visit Kolkata Book Fair every day, so please join us to bring in awareness on non- availability of books for the print impaired.

For further information, please call:

Agni Srinivasan@ 09831477703, or

Moumita Chakraborty@ 09804364095

Video

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/awareness-raising-event-Kolkata

Piracy Studies in India

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T04:35:42Z

The word ‘piracy’ assumes negative connotations. In the imagination of an ordinary middle class urban Indian it is linked directly to the informal economy, crime and even terrorism. But the ‘pirated good’, that is, the ‘optical disc’ is not seen with a similar perception. The ‘CD’ is the access key to the cultural wealth of music, cinema and software contained inside. This paradox is created in the sphere of information and knowledge that is created by anti-piracy agencies using extensive reports and statistics that are published every year. These statistics often have a tendency to create a feeling of ‘shock and awe’ for the readers that see these numbers splashed across headlines of news and media reports. Till 2004, the creation of numbers conjuring losses up to millions was mostly the domain of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which is now supplemented by reports commissioned to consultancy groups like McKinsey, PWC, and Ernst & Young. This article by Siddharth Chadha traces a few reports that have come to become popular benchmarks of piracy in the past few years.

Special ‘301’ Reports

The ‘Special 301 Reports’ are published annually by the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to examine ‘in detail the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights protection’ in countries around the globe. Sections 301-310 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, empower the USTR ‘to identify foreign countries that deny adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights or fair and equitable market access for U.S. persons that rely on intellectual property protection.’

India has faced considerable pressure to amend and enforce its copyright laws, more to the needs of the United States rather than reflecting the needs of its population, businesses and innovation. The 301 reports over the last decade have been largely concerned with the general problems of counterfeit and piracy in India, unlike China where specific laws adopted and enforced by the state have been critiqued. Over the course of the decade, according to the reports, the United States has been concerned with a large number of subjects including the backlog and inadequacy of India’s legal system, lack of enforcement of IP protections for media oriented products like ‘motion pictures, music, software, books and video games’, need for stronger protection of copyrights, trademarks and patents, optical media and procedural inadequacies. In 2004 the USTR reported, ‘copyright piracy is rampant, and the U.S. copyright industry estimates that lost sales resulting from piracy in India of U.S. motion pictures, sound recordings, musical compositions, computer programmes, and books totaled approximately $500 million in 2004.’

The United States articulates the reasons for concern in India – the challenge posed by Indian pirated and counterfeit goods entering American markets. It expresses its concern for lack of piracy enforcement as ‘‘growing concern for U.S. copyright industries, especially given the pirated imports are entering the market from Southeast Asia.

Over the past few years, it has also included suggestions of taking criminal action against those engaging in copyright infringement. India’s supposed ‘weak’ criminal system is mentioned in the 2008 reports, focused specifically on the need for a greater police presence enforcing IPR infringements through criminal means and ‘stronger’ border control.

The Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy on India’s Entertainment Industry

Published in March 2009 by United States-India Business Council (USIBC) and prepared by Ernst and Young India, claims that as much as Rs.16, 000 crores are lost due to piracy. Alongside, as many as 80,000 jobs are lost directly as a result of theft and piracy, afflicting India’s entertainment industry. This report was commissioned as a part of the USIBC–FICCI Bollywood–Hollywood initiative and covered film, music, television and video games. It was funded by the Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The spectacular press launch meeting was organized in Mumbai and also attended by Yash Chopra, chairman of FICCI Frames and Ramesh Sippy, the famed director who commented on the occasion, “I know first hand the importance of fighting piracy to support the growth of Bollywood. I commend the USIBC–FICCI initiative for enlisting all elements of the entertainment industry against piracy.” The President of USIBC, Ron Summers used the opportunity to suggest stronger legal means to tackle piracy. He said, “We strongly support passage by India of optical disc legislation that will thwart piracy in this important industry. We are pleased to stand shoulder to shoulder with counterparts in India to help protect jobs and revenues that are now being needlessly lost to piracy.”

Sixth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study

Business Software Alliance, in partnership with a market analysis firm IDC, published their annual study on global trends in software piracy in May 2009. Sixth in its annual series, the report critically blames the Asia Pacific region, especially India and China, for the growing levels in piracy, despite countries bringing down their piracy rates. The report says, ‘In 2008, the rate of PC software piracy dropped in slightly more than half (57) of the 110 countries studied, remained the same in nearly one third (36), and rose in just 16. However, the worldwide PC software piracy rate rose for the second year in a row, from 38 per cent to 41 per cent, mainly because PC shipments grew fastest in high-piracy countries such as China and India, overwhelming progress in these and other countries.’

In addition, it also makes an India specific point by highlighting India’s piracy trends,

‘India’s rate has dropped six points in five years, despite its sprawling PC market, of which consumers and small businesses account for 65 per cent. While consumer PC shipments grew more than 10 per cent last year, shipments to other categories dropped 7 per cent.’

Motion Pictures Distributors Association’s Internet Piracy Studies

Earlier this month, the MPA Office in India named Motion Pictures Distributors Association, along with a DtecNet a global anti-piracy company, released a study on the Internet piracy trends in India. This report places India as the fourth largest global hub of online film piracy, behind United States, Britain and Canada, with Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai accounting for the major share of illegal downloads. It estimates that Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, was downloaded 350, 000 times on Bit Torrent with about 2/3rds of downloaders being from India. MPDA also links this study to another consultancy, Envisional’s similar suggestions, while MPDA’s managing director, Rajiv Dalal pushed for strong laws to support copyright, strong enforcement and stiff sentences for people who violate laws, on the basis of these reports.

Despite the availability of a large number of critiques available in the academic world, the media – both broadcast and print, reports shock inducing statistics verbatim, treating them as expert evidence without engaging in any analysis of the published material. Most of the piracy studies are quantitative in nature and do not provide any social class or demographic break up either of those who engage in piracy or those who buy pirated goods. It has also been pointed out by scholars like Shujen Wang that it is unreasonable to assume that every pirated copy could be counted as a lost sale, and thus a loss. In absence of research on the cultural aspects of piracy and the subsequent circulation, these reports have been successful in creating a fear psychosis in the civil society.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/piracy-studies-india

Enforcement of Anti-piracy Laws by the Indian Entertainment Industry

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T04:35:48Z

This brief note by Siddharth Chadha seeks to map out the key actors in enforcement of copyright laws. These bodies not only investigate cases of infringement and piracy relating to the entertainment industry, but tie up with the police and IP law firms to pursue actions against the offenders through raids (many of them illegal) and court cases. Siddharth notes that the discourse on informal networks and circuits of distribution of cultural goods remains hijacked with efforts to contain piracy as the only rhetoric which safeguards the business interests of big, mostly multinational, media corporations.

International Intellectual Property Alliance

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is an international lobby group of US media industries with close ties to the United States Trade Representative. It has in its reports consistently expressed dissatisfaction with Indian efforts to deal with piracy. IIPA works in close cooperation the other US lobby groups like the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the BSA (Business Software Alliance). The IIPA reports, which place India in a 'danger zone', significantly influence regional and international discourses on piracy. Interestingly, the IIPA in India has been very successful in regionalizing and nationalizing a global discourse. Thus, in the past few years, local industry associations in India in cinema, music and software have independently run highly emotional campaigns against piracy, reminiscent of IIPA's own campaigns.

Motion Pictures Association

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) through its international counterpart, Motion Pictures Association (MPA), has been unofficially operational in India for the last 15 years. Its member companies are Walt Disney, Paramount, Sony Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. The MPA's work in India was mostly non-obtrusive till 1994 when MPA Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore, started being represented by the high profile legal firm Lall & Sethi Advocates.

They have collectively worked on forming enforcement teams for coordinated raids in Mumbai and Delhi since 1995. Earlier this year, MPA announced its first India office to be set up in Mumbai, called the Motion Picture Distributor's Association India (Pvt.) Limited (MPDA), under the directorship of Rajiv Dalal. Mr. Dalal had previously directed strategic initiatives from the MPAA's Los Angeles office. The MPDA will engage itself in working jointly with local Indian film industries and the Indian government to promote the protection of motion pictures and television rights.

According to the organization's own assertion, in 2006 the MPA's Asia-Pacific operation investigated more than 30,000 cases of piracy and assisted law enforcement officials in conducting nearly 12,400 raids. These activities resulted in the seizure of more than 35 million illegal optical discs, 50 factory optical disc production lines and 4,482 optical disc burners, as well as the initiation of more than 11,000 legal actions.

Indian Music Industry

The world's second-oldest music companies' association, Indian Music Industry (IMI), was first established as Indian Phonographic Industry in 1936. It was re-formed in its present avatar in 1994, as a non-commercial and non-profit organization affiliated to the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and is registered as a society in West Bengal. IMI members includes major record companies like Saregama, HMV, Universal Music (India), Tips, Venus, Sony BMG (India), Crescendo, Virgin Records, Magnasound, Milestone, Times Music and several other prominent national and regional labels that represent over 75 per cent of the output in corporate recordings.

It was one of the first organizations in the country to start the trend of hiring ex-police officers to lead anti-piracy operations. In 1996, IMI hired Julio Ribeiro (a former Commissioner of Police, Mumbai; Director General of Police, Punjab; and Indian Ambassador to Romania) to head its anti-piracy operations. Their anti-piracy work is split into three specific regions, North and North Eastern, Western and Southern and East, each zone headed by a former senior police officer. IMI operates through offices in Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and several other cities and towns across India, focusing on surveillance, law enforcement, and gathering intelligence through an 80 member team hired to tackle piracy. During 2001 to 2004, IMI registered over 5500 cases, seized over 10 lakh music cassettes, and around 25 lakh CDs.

Business Software Alliance

Headquartered in Washington DC, the Business Software Alliance has a regional office in Delhi, and has been instrumental in conducting anti-piracy operations across the country. According to the BSA, India ranks 20 in global software piracy rankings, with a rate of 73 per cent while the Asia Pacific average is 53 per cent. China ranks second with a rate of 92 per cent and annual losses of $3,823 million while Pakistan ranks nine with 83 per cent piracy rate. They have engaged the general public in providing them with information on pirated software through an anti-piracy initiative – The Rewards Programme. Launched in 2005, reward amount up to Rs.50, 000, would be provided for information leading to successful legal action against companies using unlicensed software. The reward program was aimed to encourage people to support the fight against piracy and to report software piracy to the NASSCOM-BSA Anti-Piracy Software Hotline.

In 2006, BSA and NASSCOM got a shot in their arms by winning the largest settlement amount for a copyright case in India, with Netlinx India Pvt. Ltd. The case had emerged after a civil raid was conducted at the premises of Netlinx in December 2000, leading to inspection and impounding of 40 PCs, carrying illegal unlicensed software. The settlement includes damages of US$ 30,000, complete legalization of software used by them, removal of all unlicensed/pirated software and submission to an unannounced audit of computer systems during next 12 months.

Industry Enforcers

Bollywood Film and Music companies, such as T-Series and Yashraj Films, have established anti-piracy arms to combat piracy in specific markets. T-Series has been in the industry for over 15 years, as a brand of Gulshan Kumar founded Super Cassettes Industries Limited, and has often been at the forefront for conducting raids along with police officials to check piracy of its copyrighted content. In its latest announcement earlier this year, T-Series launched an anti-piracy campaign against those stealing digital content. The announcement came after they filed a complaint on June 1 with a police station in Mangalore against Classic Video shop for infringement of its copyright works like Billu, Ghajini, Aap Ka Suroor, Apne, Fashion and Karz that had been illegally downloaded and copied onto multiple discs, card readers and pen-drives.

Yashraj Films, a leading film studio, has long been a part of enforcement activities against piracy, both in the Indian market and internationally. Most recently, it was a key member in the formation of the United Producers and Distributors Forum, which also included chairman Mahesh Bhatt, Ramesh Sippy, Ronnie Screwalla of UTV, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Eros International. This organization is now trying to enforce anti-piracy laws by conducting raids across the country with the help of another ex-cop from Mumbai, A.A. Khan. Yashraj Films has also established anti-piracy offices in the United Kingdom and the United States to curb piracy in those markets, as overseas returns of its films, watched by the desi diaspora is one of its largest revenue earning sources. The website of Yashraj Films lists news reports from across US and Europe of instances of crackdown on pirates.

In the context of intellectual property in the creative industries, these anti-piracy agents have successfully created the halo of illegality around the subject of piracy. The discourse on informal networks and circuits of distribution of cultural goods remains hijacked with efforts to contain piracy as the only rhetoric which safeguards the business interests of big media companies and multinational corporations.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/piracy-and-enforcement

The Right to Read Campaign, now in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-08-17T08:45:56Z

The Right to Read campaign, this time in Delhi, the national capital of the country has been announced. This is the third in the series. The previous two held in Calcutta and Chennai were highly successful and Delhi too promises quite a lot.

About 70 million Indians are unable to read printed material owing to various forms of disabilities. According to industry estimates, around 80,000-100,000 books get published every year in India of which only about 700 are made available for these persons. Technologies like screen readers make it possible for persons with disabilities to access knowledge in alternate formats like Braille, e-text, audio, large print, et cetera. Yet people are unable to convert books into accessible formats thanks to the provisions of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957.

India needs to change the situation quickly and put an end to the shortage of books and enable these 70 million persons to participate in social life. For this we need to make use of the developments in technology which makes it possible for all persons to access knowledge and enable them to live a life of social inclusion and participation on par with the rest of society. People with disabilities too have a right to access information like other persons- let copyright laws recognize the diverse needs of persons with disabilities and open up the gates of knowledge to all.

Objectives of the Right to Read Campaign

To expedite copyright law reform by informing policy makers on the necessity and nature of amendment. This has to be made to the Indian Copyright Act 1957 to give effect to the rights of persons with disabilities.
To raise awareness on the issue amongst the parliamentarians, members of the judiciary, educationalists, publishers and the public.

The Campaign

The Indian campaign is a part of the global Right to Read campaign which was started by the World Blind Union in 2008. It is a nationwide campaign and seeks to:

Accelerate change in the copyright law;
Raise public awareness on the issue of access to reading for the print-impaired; and
Gather Indian support for the Treaty for the Blind proposed by the World Blind Union at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/right-to-read-campaign

Impaired Social Mobility

praskrishna — 2011-08-18T05:07:22Z

Leading e-mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail have introduced open protocols for copying e-mails offline through Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird but popular social networking websites like Facebook, Myspace, etc generally do not allow the user to backup their own data. Sunil Abraham through this article points out that if competition and technological development does not rectify the situation then the government needs to intervene for the sake of its citizens.

A good number of netizens spend hours on social networking websites – lovingly building a circle of friends, or alternatively a social or commercial marketing campaign. God forbid –if something goes wrong then we start again from square one. There are several serious threats right there on the horizon, of which I will name only two. One, the owner of the social networking services could go bust – if it could happen to the Lehman Brothers it can happen to Web entrepreneurs still dreaming about their business model. Two, a security slip from either side could result in a bot or hacker gaining control of your account and also corrupting your data. Last year, Myspace was breached and 17 GB of private photographs was leaked onto The Pirate Bay. Earlier this year, Microsoft almost lost data for nearly 800,000 sidekick smart phone users in the US. Today, compromised twitter accounts can be noticed by the increased frequency spam messages. As these systems become increasingly complex and ownership shifts, these mishaps are only going to get more frequent. And in most cases you just can't backup your own data.

In the days of offline software – vendor lock-in was achieved using proprietary formats thus preventing users from migrating to the competition. As a result, very few of us have files from the Word Star and Word Perfect days. Proprietary formats force the user to keep renewing the license for the associated software or worse, pirating it. Fortunately, the copyright law in many countries including India allows for reverse engineering and free software developers were able to provide us alternatives such as OpenOffice.org. This combined with anti-trust investigation in Europe and US has resulted in Microsoft embracing an open format as native storage for the latest version of the Office suite.

Today it is déjà vu in the world of social networking in particular and cloud computing more generally. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut and their ilk all provide file storage, contact management, messaging and calendaring functionality. However, very few of them actually allow the user to backup their data – for example on Facebook and Myspace it is not possible for a user to backup their contact database. Some exceptions like Orkut allows for export of contact database, etc., but that is more because it is not the primary monopoly that Google wants to protect. Fortunately, email providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail have all finally embraced open protocols and are using POP3 or IMAP protocol and we can copy our mail offline using Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. In the future, social networking sites may congregate around a couple of open standards and offer their users true digital social mobility. There are already some initial signs of hope here – for example, the Data Portability Project is supported by individuals from Plaxo, Facebook and Google.

However, if competition and technological development does not rectify the situation then there might be a case for government intervention. Especially, because citizens wishing to engage in e-governance have no choice but to embrace the choice of the politicians and bureaucrats whether it is Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. In Canada, the Privacy Commissioner forced Facebook to change its policies on retaining user data after they had deleted their accounts. In US, the Attorney Generals of 49 states gave a laundry list of modifications to Myspace in order to keep children safe from paedophiles. In India too, the government and civil society should collaborate on policy reform to ensure that citizens’ rights are protected on social networking websites. Think of it as a phone number portability equivalent for Web 2.0.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/impaired-social-mobility

Right to Read Campaign - Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-08-31T10:43:49Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is organizing a Right to Read Campaign on January 30th 2010, at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi

Millions with print - impairment need access to books Out of these, at least 70 million live in India! They are unable to grow and participate meaningfully in the society because they have no access to books! For this, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) invites you to a Right to Read Campaign to be held in New Delhi on January 30th 2010.

Download the invitation

PHOTOS

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/right-to-read-campaign

IGF 2009 - Main Session: Emerging Issues: Social Networks

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:46:50Z

Current laws don't seem to scale well to handle Web 2.0 issues

Session description: Discussion was centered on the development of social media (social networks, user-generated content sites, micro-blogging, collaboration tools, etc.) in order to explore whether these developments require to new or modified policy approaches. Key issues explored include privacy and data protection, rules applicable to user-generated content and copyrighted material, and freedom of expression and illegal content. The session also addressed the importance of the “terms of service” of large platforms, how they are developed and their relationship with emerging business models that are based on behavioral analysis.

Participants in the discussion included: Sunil Abraham, director of policy, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore; Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of the Global Network Initiative; Grace Bomu, manager, Kenya-Heartstrings and Fanartics Theatre Company, Kenya; Sergio Suiama, prosecutor, State of São Paulo, Brazil; Rachel O'Connell, VP of people networks and chief safety officer, Bebo.

November 18, 2009 - Sunil Abraham, an Internet policy expert from Bangalore, was a key panelist in this session who introduced the primary concerns tied to social networks today.

"I'm going to raise nine emerging issues about social media," he began, "and I categorize them into four categories: Intellectual property rights, morality laundering, the hegemony of the connected and the hegemony of text."

He noted that intellectual property law is completely outdated and cannot be applied in today's communications environment, saying it is "irrelevant." He added, "To take some examples, the right of the consumer to review, the right of the consumer to privacy, the right of the entrepreneur or enthusiast to make interoperable, complementary or competing products. All these rights used to be protected under the right to reverse-engineer. Issue 2 under IPR: On some corporate-mediated social media platforms, copyright takedown notices from one political party are acted on much more swiftly when compared to similar takedown notices from an opposing party. Issue 3, under IPR: Some rights holders, and in particular news organizations, use copyright takedown notices selectively to purge social media Web sites of content that opposes their editorial viewpoint. Issue 4 under intellectual property rights: The increased use of automated enforcement of copyright by rights holders is seriously undermining freedom of expression on the Internet, as in the case of the baby dancing to Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy.'"

He explained "morality laundering" - saying that, like policy laundering, it is "trying to impose a globally homogenized morality regime." He cited the example of breast-feeding photos on a social network being deleted because they were considered obscene. "Breast-feeding, I may remind you, is still a public activity in many southern countries," he said. "Photographs of public life on a beach in a country where nudism is the norm becomes child pornography in another country."

He said that religious traditions can sometime be reduced to a monoculture on community-managed social media platforms that "depend on editors to determine the truth," adding "That is because upper-crust and upper-class populations have greater access to the Internet. Literate communities will try to maintain their hegemony on the Internet. Community-managed social media platforms that depend on textual citation often ignore the knowledge of the oral communities of the global south."

Session moderator Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, asked Abraham if automated enforcement of social network policies should be outlawed. "I don't think it is possible for us to completely take out machine involvement in moderating content online," Abraham said, "whether it is from a freedom-of-speech perspective or a hate-speech perspective or from an intellectual-property-rights perspective. But I think the process has to become more transparent, so that the public will know what happened and why it happened and that there is due process and the possibility of appeal."

Davies had kicked off the session with a plea that participants try to think ahead in this discussion of social networks. "Our role today in this panel is to look to the future, and our mentors at the UN and at IGF have urged me to motivate, as much as possible, an imagining of the future," he said. "Our role, as we can see on the program, is to look at social networks and social spaces such as micro-blogging and Web 2.0, as we move through to the next - what are the issues that we're likely to confront. So our two goals, if I can suggest a focus, is: What have we brought out of this last few days that tells us something about the way the future will go? Particularly in terms of social interaction. And second, imagine that future."

Sergio Siuama, prosecutor for the State of São Paulo, Brazil, was asked to describe the privacy problem that developed there on Google's social network Orkut. "Social networks are the fourth most popular online activity, ahead of personal e-mail," he said. "Eighty percent of Brazilian Intenet users interact through social network sites. In Brazil as well in India and Pakistan, the most popular social networking service is Google's Orkut. More than 30% of Brazilian users access regularly use Orkut and about 25% of them are children and teenagers." He said many social networks accessed by people globally are transnational. "The most-accessed services in Brazil are provided by companies physically located in the United States," he said.

In 2005 Google set up a branch in São Paulo, but it was not enough to handle the business of 30 million users. Since 2004 Brazilian authorities have been receiving reports of cyberbullying, drug dealing, child pornogrphy and other human rights violations in Orkut's space. In 2006 the federal attorney's office started a collective lawsuit against Google. Google responded with a proactive plan. After two years of litigation, in July 2008, the parties settled on a collective agreement in which Google agreed, among other obligations, to comply with Brazilian legislation, to store traffic data for at least six months, to take down child-abuse images, to develop a proactive system of child-abuse images detection, removal and report to law enforcement, and to establish a customer-service office able to quickly respond to all users' complaints. Some of these obligations were adopted as standards for the whole of Latin America in a document - the memorandum of Montevideo.

Siuama raised several governance issues that arise from this case: Which criteria should be used to define the ability of a country to legislate over and sanction conducts committed on the Internet? Is it legitimate to enforce rules at a local company's office regarding a service operated from another country? What are the basic standards we should expect from ISPs to help cope with human rights violations on the Internet? Is any national law enforcement agency equipped to cope with crimes committed on social networking sites? Will it be necessary to ensure minimum levels of transparency and social accountability of networking services?

Panel member Rachel O'Connell, vice president of people networks and chief safety officer for Bebo, chaired the European Union's Safer Social Networking Cross-Industry Task Force - an effort by 18 social networking companies, including Facebook and Google, working with the European Commission and civil liberties, child welfare, law enforcement and parenting groups.

"We came up with seven principles that relate to education and ensuring that we have prominent and easily accessible safety messages and also addressing reporting abuse and providing people with the technologies and capabilities so they can use the Internet safely," she said. "We are doing a lot of filtering on the back end. We have moderation teams in place. We have very strong links with law enforcement. We look at the legal issues in each of the countries and the markets in which we operate and see how that ties up with being a US-based company. We're also aware of treaties like the multinational legal assistance treaty, in terms of working with law enforcement and investigators."

O'Connell said the industry has probably not been clear enough about how these procedures are implemented. She expects that the principles set out by the task force will make things more clear. "The number of signatories was 18 and now it's up to 23, and part of my role is to encourage companies to become signatories," she said. "It means you need to self-declare how you have implemented the principles and each of the substantive recommendations. These self-declarations are being reviewed by independent researchers, and their report will be released to coincide with Safer Internet Day in February."

She added that U.S. attorneys general have asked social networking companies to begin being more transparent and accountable. "Facebook has an internal auditor to ensure that they are meeting the requirements outlined by the attorneys general, and similarly MySpace has an agreement, so there is an incredible amount of work going on," she said. "That said, there is still a log of work to do, as there always will be. For example, AOL has been working closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and are diligent about working with law enforcement in other countries to ensure we can facilitate the investigative process. We also have a filtering process we run on the back end."

Grace Bomu, manager for Kenya-Heartstrings and Fanartics Theatre Company, Kenya, was on hand to talk about the positive influence of social networks. Her creative troupe uses them to do marketing, research and concept development. "From our Facebook page," she explained, "we're able to tell which issues the youth in Kenya are facing, and from those issues, we are able to develop a concept and sell our plays. On our Facebook page, people propose lines, other people propose they be actors, and this has really changed the way we do business. It's the actors who write the script, and our friends help us in writing the script.

"Another way the Internet helps us is using the mobile money payment systems. Our management uses a mobile phone to update the page, to make comments and so on. Friends came up with the idea that they could pay to attend plays using mobile money payment systems."

She said there are some negatives. Anonymous respondents and competitors write negative comments on the troupe's page, politicians sometimes try to use the page to advance their goals, "and we have had problem of balancing what some people call abusive language with what others say is artistic expression."

"We'd say that these tools have really helped news opening up culture, in growth of urban language and also in the contribution of topical issues," she concluded. "Tools are helping us to expand freedom of expression rather than caging it. So what we have done as a company is that we are coming up with - slowly, we are coming up with a code within us that we shall follow in balancing the competing interests."

Rebecca MacKinnon, Open Society Institute fellow and co-founder of the Global Network Initiative, noted that throughout the sessions of IGF-2009 people have been speaking out about the power of social networks as spaces where individual citizens can speak truth to power. "Spaces that help to make governments and other institutions more accountable to individuals," she said. "This is happening all over the world, across a range of political systems. But there are trends that are counteracting the potential of social networks to be a force that can truly help citizens participate in public life. This may be contributing to social networks acting as more opaque extensions of incumbent power in some situations, rather than as transparent conduits between citizens and institutions."

MacKinnon raised four key points. The first is the level of liability governments place on social networking services in regard to user-generated content.

While it is part of the groundrules for IGF that participants are encouraged to avoid singling out people or nations when meting out criticism, it was clear that she was referring to China when she said, "In some jurisdictions, international social networking sites end up being blocked because the sovereign government is not happy with some of the content being posted on the sites. And in some of those jurisdictions, what then ends up happening is that a robust set of domestic social networking sites evolve. And the social networking sites that are hosted domestically are held liable for all the content that their users are posting on the site. And so in order to comply with government requirements and the particular government's definition of what constitutes legal speech, these social networking sites end up having to develop large departments of people whose job it is to police content. international social networking sites that want to act - want to operate in certain jurisdictions have to make a choice, either to be blocked to users in that country because users may post things that the local government objects to, or agree to develop a locally hosted site in the local language which would then be subject to greater local jurisdiction and agree to police it. And there have been some cases where certain - and I have again been asked not to name and shame - but where certain companies have chosen to host locally and comply with government requests for political censorship in that regard. And so this is one challenge that social networking companies around the world are facing, is how to deal with this."

Other points she outlined were:

- Social network users are often not allowed to be anonymous. "There's at least one country where now anybody who uses a social networking site or Web service over a certain size has to register with their national ID number," she explained, "and many human rights groups have expressed concerns about some users who have been traced for political speech. At least one international social networking service decided to disable the local uploading of videos and comments onto its service, so people in that country have to use the international version of the service rather than the local service - so that this particular social networking site would not be in the position of handing people over for speech that might arguably be political."

- Administrators of social networking sites will sometimes perceive that something is going against the terms of service when the content has a much different intent. "There are political activists from a range of countries who found their Facebook accounts frozen because their pattern of activity resembled spamming," she said, "and this had an impact on their ability to conduct political activities. And there have been situations where activists in various countries post images of abuse by authorities against citizens and these are quite graphic and are deemed to be against terms of service. And the people concerned feel that 'if these sites do not let me speak truth to power, then were can I go?' So that's another sort of human-rights issue."

- A new multistakeholder group, the Global Network Initiative, is being co-founded by MacKinnon and others to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in ICTs. "Our approach recognizes that a lot of these issues are difficult to legislate for because they involve very nuanced contextual situations that differ greatly," she said. "Companies do feel there is a need to have some kind of assistance in doing the right thing. How can social networks fulfill their potential and serve their users so they feel they can use these services without becoming victims of oppression in various ways? The Global Network Initiative combines companies who have signed on as well as human rights groups, socially responsible investment funds and some academics to help companies proactively figure out how to anticipate free-expression issues in order to avoid problems and assist in making choices about how to structure businesses."

Pavan Duggal spoke from the floor of the session about the formation of a dynamic coalition on social networks, which came together after a session on legal issues and social media earlier in the day. "These issues not only relate to data protection and privacy," he said. "They also relate to the issue of jurisdiction and ownership, storage, retention and transmission of user-generated content. Do we have the right to be anonymous? Do we have a right to oblivion? Can there be a right to delete in the context of social media? Is there a right of purging children-generated content? Can there be a right to forget and to forgive in the context of information? We also discussed how the deadly cocktail mix of social media and cloud computing is venturing us into a wild, wild west as far as jurisprudential rules and principles are concerned. Which country, what data, which server, which law would apply, which would be effective remedy, which would be the relevant court and how would the ultimate adjudication be done?"

He said it is expected that national governments will try to legislate in this area. "While the Internet has made geography history, the fact still remains that national governments will try to legislate," he said. "It is time that respective stakeholders must come together, not just the players, the users, but also the industry, the government, the lawmakers, law enforcement."

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