Centre for Internet and Society

Agenda and minutes of meeting_09.10.2013 (1).pdf

praskrishna — 2016-05-19T01:31:57Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/Agenda%20and%20minutes%20of%20meeting_09.10.2013%20-1.pdf

Agenda and minutes of meeting_07.09.2011 (1).pdf

praskrishna — 2016-05-19T01:29:02Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/Agenda%20and%20minutes%20of%20meeting_07.09.2011%20-1.pdf

Agenda & Minutes of the SInC's meeting_ 10.02.2012 (1).pdf

praskrishna — 2016-05-19T01:24:51Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/Agenda%20-%20Minutes%20of%20the%20SInCs%20meeting_%2010.02.2012%20-1.pdf

International Copyright Law

praskrishna — 2016-05-15T15:32:23Z

Anubha Sinha will be attending the 2016 IViR Summer Course on International Copyright Law as a beneficiary of the OSF Civil Society Scholarship in Amsterdam from July 4 to 8, 2016. The event is being organized by the University of Amsterdam.

For more info click here.

Monday July 4
8:45-9:15	Welcome
9:15-9:30	Opening Session by Bernt Hugenholtz
9:30-12:30	‘International Framework’ by Bernt Hugenholtz	This session sets out the framework of international copyright protection, and describes the main norms of the Berne Convention, the TRIPS Agreement, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and various bilateral instruments.
14:00-17:00	‘TRIPS and Other Trade Agreements' by Daniel Gervais	This session focuses on the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property, administered by the WTO, and other more recent trade agreements. It takes a look at the negotiation process leading to their adoption, at the decisions from the WTO Dispute Resolution Panel and the impact on developing nations.
18:00-21:00	Boat tour on Amsterdam canals and welcome dinner

Tuesday July 5
9:30-12:30	'Copyright and Competition Law' by Thomas Vinje	In principle, the objectives of copyright law and competition law are complementary in that they are both meant to promote creativity and innovation. In some cases, however, the exercise of exclusive rights runs afoul of competition rules. This session describes how these two fields of law interact.
14:00-17:00	‘Recent Case Law of the Court of Justice of the EU' by Stef van Gompel	This session examines the recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has been very active in issuing preliminary rulings interpreting various provisions of the Directive on Copyright in the Information Society and others. This leads to further harmonization of copyright within the EU but it also holds its share of ambiguities.

Wednesday July 6
9:30-12:30	'Collective Administration of Rights' by Daniel Gervais	Sometimes required by law and other times necessary due to practical reasons, rights owners must exercise their rights through collecting societies. This session outlines the general workings of a collective administration of rights system, and considers its future in a digital environment.
Afternoon	(free)
Evening	(free)

Thursday July 7
9:30-12:30	‘The EU Copyright Reform Package’ by Martin Senftleben	Following its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission is in the process of rolling out plans to modernise the EU copyright framework. This session discusses these plans and examines their implications.
14:00-17:00	'Limitations & Exceptions for Libraries and Archives' by Lucie Guibault	Archives and libraries increasingly wish to engage in digitization projects, e-lending and other relevant activities. This session explores in what way the WIPO agenda and relevant EU Directives provide room for such activities.

Friday July 8
9:30-12:30	'Database Protection' by Bernt Hugenholtz	In Europe, makers of databases enjoy an exclusive right on their databases pursuant to the European Directive on the legal protection of databases. This session examines the scope and content of the sui generis right on databases, and discusses the case law from the European Court of Justice and the national courts.
14:00-17:00	'Digital Copyright Controversies' by Fred von Lohmann	This session discusses the changes brought by the digital networked environment with respect to copyright infringement liability. It describes in greater detail the liability regimes that apply to Internet intermediaries, the challenges posed by user generated content online, as well as emerging solutions to these controversies.
17:00-19:00	Closing reception

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/international-copyright-law

The Nehru you don’t know

praskrishna — 2016-05-15T13:40:23Z

Even as India's first PM is scrubbed out from textbooks, his reputation is being savaged on the internet.

The article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan was published by the Times of India on May 15, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

Jawahar, the Arabic word for pearl, could not have been chosen by any Kashmiri Brahmin as a name for his child.
Jawaharlal Nehru's grandfather was Ghiasuddin Ghazi, a kotwal of the Mughals, who changed his name to Gangadhar Nehru.
Nehru was born in a brothel in Allahabad.
Nehru got a Catholic nun pregnant, and was indebted to the church for spiriting her away from India. He died of syphilis.
Amitabh Bachchan is his son.

Welcome to the virtual world of Nehru vilification. Entirely unhinged from reality, these wild stories about India's first prime minister, who laid the foundations of its democracy, are nonetheless the default on the internet. Unlike the academic challenge of changing details in textbooks, the Web is a terrain for the taking. "Anything that questions dominant historical views is going to find visibility and virality online," says digital media scholar Nishant Shah.

Crackpot stories about Nehru have circulated for decades - for instance, former RSS chief K S Sudarshan has claimed that Nehru killed Gandhi. But "these are voices that never made it to the mainstream. Now, because there is such a preponderance of them online, these rumours take on a life of their own," says Rohit Chopra, media studies professor at Santa Clara University, who works on online Hindutva. This is particularly problematic because for many people now, reality is what they can find through Google, he says.

Nehru, of course, is highest on the list of hate objects for Hindutva extremists. "After Partition, and even more after Gandhi's murder, Nehru was convinced that India must not in any circumstances become a Hindu Pakistan. He saw the RSS as dangerous because of its demonising of minorities, and repeatedly and publicly attacked it," says historian Ramachandra Guha.

And the RSS continues to attack him right back. The hegemony of his ideas, and the persistence of his bloodline are both intolerable to them. "Indira's, Rajiv's, Sanjay's, Sonia's and Rahul's mistakes (real or imagined) are retrospectively attached to Nehru," says Guha.

On YouTube, a search for Nehru throws up smear after smear. The first, declaring him "Hindustan ka sabse ayyash aadmi", was watched 40,16,640 times at last count. These stories lay bare the campaign against him — Nehru must be cast as Muslim, westernised and dissolute, to discredit him. To establish him as a philanderer, there is a patchwork of images of Nehru at innocuous moments, with Jacqueline Kennedy and Mrinalini Sarabhai, embracing his sister at the airport, lighting a woman's cigarette.

Last year, Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, caught sneaky edits to the Wikipedia entries of Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, emanating from a central government IP address. Recently, a patently fake and misspelt "historical" letter did the rounds, where Nehru supposedly described Subhas Chandra Bose as a war criminal.

The right wing has mastered the arts of seeding misinformation, says Shah. Their claims do not come from one author, but from many different users, each adding layers to the rumours. Then, he says, "It is a matter of faith through repetition, rather than truth through inquiry".

While such conspiracy theories sprout all around the world, in India, they dominate search results, says Prakash. Apart from forums that rationally disagree with Nehruvian economics, foreign policy or defence, or make credible assertions about his positions, there are voices that simply slander Nehru. "Many kinds of right-wing animosities, economic, cultural and those that are reacting to the actions of the Nehru Gandhi family, come together in this attack," observes Prakash.

These ideas have also taken root, to some extent. A startup employee unconnected to any political party recently set up a Twitter handle called Nehruvian, trying to counter such propaganda. He explains why he was stirred into action - "On a train to Lucknow, I was reading The Discovery of India, when a young man in his twenties asked me, "kyon padh rahe ho is chor ki kitaab?"

And yet, there is no way to counter motivated rumours, short of undesirable censorship. Propaganda is a legitimate activity, and any rebuttal is also likely to be confined to its own echo chamber, Shah points out. Rather, what is needed is a new digital literacy, the "capacity to sift trustworthy information, to look critically at the sources they come from", says Prakash.

As for Nehru, it may not be easy for textbook warriors of keyboard guerrillas to dislodge him. If after 52 years, there's still so much panic about his legacy, there must be something very durable about it."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/times-of-india-amulya-gopalakrishnan-may-15-2016-the-nehru-you-dont-know

DU (2).pdf

praskrishna — 2016-05-15T10:48:29Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/DU%20-2.pdf

DU.pdf

praskrishna — 2016-05-15T10:29:51Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/DU.pdf

Why The New Government Policy Mandating Panic Buttons On Phones Isn’t Going To Protect Women

praskrishna — 2016-05-15T09:45:36Z

Recently, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad tweeted about new rules mandating a panic button in every cell phone sold in the country from January 2017. To keep ladies safe, of course.

The story by Madhura Kadaba was published in the Ladies Finger on May 14, 2016. Rohini Lakshané was quoted.

According to a statement released by the Telecommunications Ministry, the panic button will be activated by pressing a designated button on a smartphone or by holding down both ‘5’ and ‘9’ keys on a basic phone. Pressing the panic button is expected to alert police and designated friends or relatives, similar to apps launched previously by police departments like Himmat.

It followed remarks from the Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Ms Maneka Gandhi, in the Lok Sabha in December 2015. “Every cell phone will have an in-built panic button. Now, all new cell phones will be made with panic buttons. But in case of all old cell phones, you can go to the person who owns the company or the dealer and they will adjust it for you. If a woman is in trouble, she can just press the button on the cell phone and she will immediately get help.”

Two days later, reacting to concerns that the mandate could increase mobile phone costs, Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “Manufacturers… have given their support. My expectation is that they will render their support in social justice and women security.”

After a point, it almost becomes a farce — the government’s continuous search for grand, one-stop solutions to dealing with sexual violence. We had the vast coffers of the Nirbhaya fund, which went nowhere. It had tech solutions coming out of its 1000-crore ears. It included plans for setting up control rooms in 114 cities within 9 months back in 2014 and surveillance cameras in all public transport vehicles including autos! Who was going to be watching the feed of these cameras, if ever by some vast change in the face of humanity such a thing happened, you may wonder? Or as journalist Revati Laul wrote, “Given that police stations across the country are short staffed, given how many of them cannot even afford paper to file a first information report (FIR) or fuel for the police personnel’s motorbike, just how will the appearance of these control rooms change that? How will switchboards help if police stations in even big cities like Varanasi have too few vehicles to cater to the existing load of emergencies they have to deal with?” But hush, don’t interrupt when Daddy is talking.

Recently, we published an investigation into the one-stop centres promised by the Nirbhaya fund. These centres are supposed to provide services like assistance in lodging FIRs, medical assistance for medical examinations, and therapy. On paper, Delhi is supposed to have 6. Good luck locating them because they don’t exist. Most of the staff of the hospitals where the centers were to be located were clueless about the program.

But perhaps we should forget the tiresome past and move to the shiny button-filled future. We asked Rohini Lakshane, a technology expert and Program Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society what she thought of panic buttons. Recently she reviewed a bunch of personal safety apps geared toward women and was very unimpressed. About the government’s new plan, she said, “GPS accuracy in India can sometimes be patchy and not very accurate, and continuous location tracking drains the battery, something that could be problematic for people with phones that do not have good GPS hardware or a long battery life.” Lakshane added, “The app would also enable tracking by family members, which can increase the chance of intimate partner abuse and violence. There have been instances in which apps that provide real-time location or periodic updates of the location of a person to a contact have enabled abuse by intimate partners or by members of the family.” In short, you are unlikely to get the help you need in case of stranger danger and continue to face whatever oppression you maybe facing from your ‘loved ones’.

Which brings us to the biggest problem with panic buttons, the idea that what Indian women should live in fear of scary strangers outside the house.

The story by Madhura Kadaba was published in The Ladies Finger on May 14, 2016. Rohini Lakshane was quoted. The story by Madhura Kadaba was published in the Ladies Finger on May 14, 2016. Rohini Lakshane was quoted.

In fact, carefully conducted research shows over and over again that Indian women are most likely to face violence from their families, within their homes. The Mumbai programme RAHAT’s report shows that 91 percent of the accused in reported cases of rape were by known persons. Add on the fact if you have even a fleeting acquaintance with a man who attacks you the police are additionally reluctant to do anything.

Not that the police like to file complaints if you have been raped by a stranger. That way they are quite equal opportunity about ignoring complaints.

Perhaps we should have a panic button in our phones after all. A daily reminder that you should fear rape, in case for a moment you had decided to stop worrying. A daily reminder that if you do get raped you must remember to press a button that goes nowhere. A great metaphor for how we deal with victims of sexual violence in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/why-the-new-government-policy-mandating-panic-buttons-on-phones-isn2019t-going-to-protect-women