From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Wed Mar 3 14:37:26 2004 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:07:26 +0500 Subject: [Commons-Law] EFFector 17.7: Court Overturns Ban on Posting DVD Descrambling Code Message-ID: <608922560830ef.60830ef6089225@vsnl.net> An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Effector List Subject: EFFector 17.7: Court Overturns Ban on Posting DVD Descrambling Code Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 00:07:52 -0800 (PST) Size: 19095 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040303/a600461c/attachment.mht From LOALLARD at aol.com Wed Mar 3 17:55:13 2004 From: LOALLARD at aol.com (LOALLARD at aol.com) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 07:25:13 EST Subject: [Commons-Law] Trans. : Clarion Call to African Governments Message-ID: <96.4cbcf70.2d7728a9@aol.com> > The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) is concerned > with the recent agreements and partnerships African Governments and their > organs have been signing with the Microsoft Corporation which in essence are > killing local software industry and inhibiting the potential of developing > local human capacity in the field of Information and Communication > Technologies (ICTs). FOSSFA compares the scenario being created similar to > the tea and coffee crisis where the producers in the developing world do not > get a decent return from the crops whilst the processors in the developed > world reap all the profits. > > Most recently, Microsoft has signed agreements with the New Partnership for > African Development (NEPAD), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and > the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to the tune of > thousands of millions of dollars which effectively confines these agencies > and the governments they represent from pursuing and practicing the freedom > of CHOICE especially from the local software producers who are currently > coming up in all pockets of Africa. See: > http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/Jan04/01-23WorldEconomicForumP R > .asp > > FOSSFA wishes to air this clarion call to African governments to be wary of > these unfair trade practices from big multinational corporations such as > Microsoft and emulate the Asian Tigers who realised the benefits of promoting > local products and local talent. FOSSFA estimates Africa's ICTs industry to > be worth more than 25 Billion Dollars and growing. It will be unfair to > Africa if our leaders were to give away this industry to already rich > corporations when local talent exists to service this industry in this > continent. That is the only way we can achieve economic empowerment and > sustainable development. Buy African. Build Africa. Visit our portal to see > software products produced in Africa. www.fossfa.org > > - -- > With Kind Regards, > > Bildad Kagai > CEO - Circuits & Packets Communications Ltd. > Coordinator - Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) > Suite B2, Tetu Apartments, State House Avenue > P. O. Box 20311 - 00200, Nairobi, Kenya > Tel. 254 20 2728332 > Fax. 254 20 2726965 > Cell. 254 722 379409 > URL. www.circuitspackets.com > www.fossfa.org > Email. bill at circuitspackets.com > > _______________________________________________ > AFLUG mailing list > AFLUG at globalcn.tc.ca > http://globalcn.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/aflug > > - ------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040303/22448c31/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Jocelyn Pierre" Subject: Clarion Call to African Governments Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 11:38:07 +0100 Size: 3913 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040303/22448c31/attachment.mht From eye at ranadasgupta.com Wed Mar 3 20:20:44 2004 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 06:50:44 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Making folk music into property: Bulgaria Message-ID: <200403030650.AA1585381564@ranadasgupta.com> MUSIC AND PROPERTY The processes by which Bulgarian folk music became national property (These brief notes are based on Timothy Rice's overview of Bulgarian music, May It Fill Your Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).) INTRODUCTION When Bulgaria became a Communist state in 1944, all property became "of the people". This did not simply mean, however, that land and factories were taken from private owners and made the property of the state. It also meant that many goods that had never previously been considered "property" were now made so. These are some notes on how this happened in the case of music, and what it entailed. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND >From 1396, present-day Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire. At the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, under pressure from the western European powers, Istanbul in 1878 made Bulgaria an "autonomous principality" and the country chose for itself a prince, the German aristocrat Alexander von Battenberg. His successor took advantage of Ottoman crises to declare full independence in 1908. Bulgaria's own crises of ethnic violence, labour unrest and military vulnerability led to an increasingly authoritarian, Fascist- friendly, monarchy in the 1920s and 30s. In 1941 Tsar Boris signed the Tripartite Pact and allowed Germany to use Bulgarian territory for their planned invasion of Greece. In 1944, with the Red Army at its borders, Bulgaria surrendered to Russia. The monarchy was abolished and a Communist state established under Russian control. Like all the Balkan states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, Bulgarian C19 and C20 nationalism faced a problem of definition: What was Bulgaria? Despite the fact that the territory had been ruled by Istanbul for five centuries, Bulgarian nationalism sought to erase the "Oriental" from its culture, and focussed both on its own medieval, Orthodox past and on the western European Enlightenment for its cultural identity. Turks were killed in large numbers in 1878 and after, and Bulgarian intellectuals rued the fact that Turkish rule had excluded them from the Renaissance. As far as music was concerned, the growing urban bourgeoisie adopted the institutions and styles of Paris and Moscow, with operas, ballets and orchestral concerts. Music in the villages, however, was thought to have been largely unaffected by Ottoman rule and to represent the pure Bulgarian tradition. Until 1944 it continued much as before, and was also idealised in symphonic and operatic compositions by Bulgarian composers. FOLK MUSIC UNTIL 1944 Folk music was closely integrated with agricultural life. Bulgarian villages were organised around a number of smallholdings surrounded by common land for grazing. Bulgarian peasants identified their livelihood with the land and very few became professional musicians. In this they were self-consciously different from the gypsies who travelled from village to village giving performances. Enthusiastic musicians exchanged melodies while working, and practised them in groups during spare time. Music was extremely important to village life and those who became talented and/or managed to commit large repertoires to memory were popular members of the community. Individual invention - new songs, new variations, etc - was added to a store of commonly-held music which was not written down. Women, especially, spent a lot of time teaching each other songs. There was a complete gender division in musical performance: men played, women sang. Everyone in the village danced. Bulgarian folk music was played by small bands who would either accompany sung ballads or play dance music. The rhythms of this music could be extremely complex, and recordings from the period show dazzling virtuosity on the part of soloists, who would decorate melodies with elaborate ornamentation. MUSIC AND THE COMMUNIST STATE The new Communist state reformed music in a single-minded and epic way. Music was to serve a modernising, nationalistic purpose. The essence of Bulgarian folk music would be taken and used by modern composers to produce a new music that would both educate the peasant, and, since it would be made for the concert hall rather than the village square, close the gap between peasants and the bourgeoisie. The new music would characterise the new, beautiful nation: sophisticated rather than visceral, and purged of all Turkish excess. Along with a number of other rural practices, traditional folk music, as it stood, was stamped out as a sign of old, dark times. The new music was often considerably different from folk music. It was written by Paris- and Moscow-trained composers on the basis of folk music and was supposed to be a step in the civilising process on the way to everyone listening to Bach and Beethoven. It was written down, and was formally more complex than traditional music whilst being less complex in terms of ornamentation and improvisation. It did not invite the participation of audiences as singers or dancers, since they were now expected to be passive "concertgoers". The new music gave rise to new technologies of musical instruments, since suddenly folk instruments that had been made in villages by craftsmen were being produced and modernised by urban manufacturers used to making clarinets or cellos. This new music would be produced by professional composers for the state and performed by professional performers. Both groups of people now made their living as musicians and were paid wages for compositions and performances. Music was completely professionalised, partly as a natural result of the collectivisation of rural land and the consequent destruction of village ways of life, and partly as a deliberate and monumental project. Educated urban musicians were sent out across the country to hold auditions for village performers. The best were brought to Sofia where they joined the new Bulgarian-style orchestras who performed in concert halls and on Radio Sofia (in cultural terms at least, the intellectuals of the Bulgarian Communist state saw the project of becoming modern as one of becoming-bourgeois). They were trained to read music and to standardise their regional techniques. MUSIC AS PROPERTY The ownership of music now changed in curious ways. All Bulgarian music became the property of the state. This meant that it was suddenly considered to be "property" when it had not been before. Most importantly, it became assigned to a particular composer who would be paid for his work and credited in concert brochures etc. This led to many disputes; for many compositions were simply arrangements by urban composers of traditional songs that many rural people knew, and there was resentment at composers who cashed in on this knowledge at the expense of everyone else. Sometimes composers credited the "informants" who supplied them with melodies and songs; more often they anonymised the tradition by referring to "folk texts" or "folk tunes". About one woman whose large repertoire of songs made her particularly attractive to composers at this time, Timothy Rice writes: "Todora was ... hurt by the ethical issue of credit for performance, part of a problem caused by the collision of village and literate traditions. In Gergebunar, songs were not private property; everyone knew them ... since they were performed and potentially learned at public events like village dances. In any case, since no money was involved, the issue of ownership was moot. Songs were freely and gladly passed between family and friends, who were proud to acknowledge the sources of their songs: my mother, my aunt, my girlfriend from Drachevo. In the new postwar society, however, copyright - or "author's rights" ("aftorsko pravo") as it is called in Bulgaria - reared its ugly head because the radio and Balkonton were willing to pay fees to the performers, conductors, or arrangers involved in the recordings. Todora and others, who served as the "izvor" or "source", were lost in the shuffle, reduced to invisibility by the intellectuals self-serving understanding of folklore as anonymous art. Conveniently, the performer and arranger claimed "author's rights" for songs learned not from anonymous tradition but from living singers and musicians." (ibid, 213) From monica at sarai.net Thu Mar 4 13:59:24 2004 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 13:59:24 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Out now - Sarai Reader 4: Crisis/Media Message-ID: Dear Friends, We are happy to announce the print and web publication of Sarai Reader 04 : 'Crisis/Media' . Please find more details about the book below. We would welcome responses, reviews and critiques of the publication, and discussions based on its contents. If you would like to write a review of the book, and wish to obtain a review copy, do write to publications at sarai.net, mentioning details of the publication where the review will appear, and when it is likely to be published. The contents of the book may also be translated into other languages, and published elsewhere. We, and the authors, would like to be informed. Looking forward to your responses The Editorial Collective, Sarai Reader 04 --------------------------------------------- Sarai Reader 04 : Crisis/Media Published by the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, 2004 [cc] Edited by - Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram [Sarai-CSDS, Delhi] and Geert Lovink [Amsterdam] ISBN 81-901429-3-3 Price : Rs. 295, US $ 15, Euro 15 496 pages --------------------------------------------- 'Crisis/Media', the fourth publication in the Sarai Reader series, examines issues of global crises - (war, civil conflict, terrorism and state terror, the deep instabilities of everyday life, technologies of surveillance and political life, threats to the freedom of expression) - and critically analyses the representation of these crises in the media. Are the crises in the media also instances of crises of the media? Have current forms of media practice lost the ability to articulate questions of conflict and contention, other than in terms of crises ? Can media practitioners evolve forms of practice that are not beholden to the idea of Crisis? The Sarai brings together several distinguished critical voices, as well as new, emerging writers from all over the world (and especially from South Asia) to attend to ideas, situations, contexts and dillemmas related to crises and the media. Authors include : Arundhati Roy, Ranjit Hoskote, Taslima Nasrin, Geert Lovink, Soenke Zehle, Nandita Haksar, Toby Miller, Martin Shaw, Ravi Vasudevan, Shahid Amin, Ivo Skoric, Nancy Adajania, Raqs Media Collective, Nitin Govil, Ranjani Mazumdar, Shohini Ghosh and others. For the complete table of contents, and the text of the introduction, see below. The complete text of Crisis/Media, like the entire contents of previous readers, is available for free browsing and download as pdf files at http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader4.html For Purchase, Distribution and Other Enquiries, mail to - publications at sarai.net or, contact - Publications Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India Tel : (+91) 11 2396 0040 http://www.sarai.net E mail : dak at sarai.net Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab ---------------------------------------------- TABLE OF CONTENTS OF SARAI READER 04 : CRISIS/MEDIA Introduction I APPROACHING CRISIS Bearing Inconvenient Witness: Notes in Pro/Confessional Mode - Ranjit Hoskote Peace is War: The Collateral Damage of Breaking News - Arundhati Roy Financialization, Emotionalization and Other Ugly Concepts - Toby Miller Interventionist Media in Times of Crisis - Soenke Zehle Western Wars and Peace Activism: Social Movements in Global Mass-Mediated Politics - Martin Shaw IMAGE DISTURBANCE Let us Become Children! Training, Simulations and Kids - Kristian Lukic What is to be Done? - Bhrigupati Singh Disreputable and Illegal Publics: Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis - Ravi Vasudevan Protesting Capitalist Globalization on Video - Oliver Ressler Barcelona Pictures - Sasja Barentsen From One Crisis to the Next: The Fate of Political Art in India - Nancy Adajania On Representing the Musalman - Shahid Amin Machines Made to Measure: On the Technologies of Identity and the Manufacture of Difference - Raqs Media Collective CRISIS MEDIA - CASE STUDIES Media Representations of the Kargil War and the Gujarat Riots - Subarno Chatterji Small Town News - Taran N. Khan 'Out of the Box': Telelvisual Representations of North East India - Daisy Hasan Lost in Transit: Narratives and Myths of The Crash of Egypt Air Flight 990 in Egyptian and American Newspapers - Mahmoud Eid Of Nasty Pictures and 'Nice Guys': The Surreality of Online Hindutva - Christiane Brosius Media Looking Beyond Crisis? The Urdu/Pakistani Press in New York after 9/11 - Rehan Ansari Tried by The Media: The S A R Geelani Trial - Nandita Haksar TRUTH/TESTIMONY 'I Saw it on CNN so it Must be True...Wrong !' - Craig Etcheson 'CNN Made Me Do (Not Do) It' : Assessing Media Influence on US Interventions in Somalia and Rwanda - Lyn S. Graybill Left To Their Own Devices: The Impact of Informal Information and Communication Networks on Security in the Tanzanian Refugee Camps - Amy West Readers vs. Viewers - Ivo Skoric Cracks in the Urban Frame: The Visual Politics of 9/11 - Ranjani Mazumdar Truth Telling, Gujarat and the Law - Arvind Narrain CAUTION: REPORTERS AT WORK Massacres and the Media: A Field Reporter Looks Back on Gujarat 2002 - Darshan Desai The Everyday Life of a Srinagar Correspondent: Reporting from Kashmir - Muzamil Jaleel A Reporter in Prison - Iftikhar Gilani Covering Kashmir: The Datelines of Despair - Basharat Peer Mumbai(Dongri)-Gujarat-Mumbai-Kashmir: Pages from my Diary - Zainab Bawa WAR CORRESPONDENCES: FIRST PERSON PLURAL Thoughts on Afghanistan in Five Parts - Meena Nanji On Experiencing Afghanistan - Daphne Meijer The Afghan eXplorer - The Computing Culture Group - MIT Media Lab Waiting: Entries from a Filmmaker's Diary in and around Tel Aviv - Anna Faroqhi Last Email from the Gaza Strip - Rachel Corrie Guerrila News Network's Digital Documentaries: Interview with Stephen Marshall - Geert Lovink Synchronicities: Baghdad/Delhi - Anand Vivek Taneja Portrait of a Day in Baghdad - Paul Chan Diary of a News Cameraman: Baghdad, July 2003 - Shakeb Ahmed Rescued Pages of War-Sense - Tarun Bhartiya DEEP INSTABILITIES Politics in the Picture: Witnessing Environmental Crises in the Media - Sanjay Kak The Toxic Times of India: The Plastic Monster and a State of Emergency - Ravi Agarwal Remembering SARS in Beijing: The Nationalist Appropriation of an Epidemic - Sanjay Sharma Evictions - Projections: Watching Dharmendra in Suburban Lagos - Hansa Thapliyal Mediated Guilt: The Illusion of Participation in Delhi's Social Welfare Advertisements - Omar Kutty Journey through a Disaster: A Filmmaker's Account of the Gujarat Earthquake, 2001 - Batul Mukhtiar CYBERMOHALLA STREET LOGS LOG OO1, 20th October, 2003 - Dakshinpuri Cybermohalla Media Lab INFORMATION = POLITICS P2P: Power to the People - Janko Röttgers War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction - Nitin Govil Floss and the 'Crisis': Foreigner in a Free Land? - Martin Hardie Introducing AIDC as a Tool for Data Surveillance - Beatriz Da Costa + Jamieson Schulte + Brooke Singer Anagrams of Orderly Discorder (For the New Global Order) - Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa + Adrian Ward The Tools and Tactics of A Festival: Looking Back at N5M4 - David Garcia The Revenge of Low-tech: Autolabs, Telecentros and Tactical Media in São Paulo - Ricardo Rosas CONTESTING CENSORSHIP - Reasonable Restrictions and Unreasonable Speech - Lawrence Liang 'The Whole Constitution Goes for Six': Legislative Privileges and the Media - Sudhir Krishnaswamy Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms - Shohini Ghosh Homeless Everywhere: Writing in Exile - Taslima Nasreen Manifesto Against Labour - Gruppe Krisis Digital Declaration - Infossil Corrective Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com Tue Mar 9 16:36:00 2004 From: lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com (Lawrence Liang) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 03:06:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: [claw-in] Is password-lending a cybercrime? Message-ID: <20040309110600.82592.qmail@web13606.mail.yahoo.com> Note: forwarded message attached. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Nandkumar Saravade" Subject: [claw-in] Is password-lending a cybercrime? Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 11:00:03 +0000 Size: 9052 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040309/9f6489ac/attachment.mht From lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com Fri Mar 12 11:23:14 2004 From: lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com (Lawrence Liang) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:53:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Commons-Law] Naomi Klein on call cantres Message-ID: <20040312055314.98026.qmail@web13603.mail.yahoo.com> Note: forwarded message attached. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: =?iso-8859-1?q?SANJUKTA=20MUKHERJEE?= Subject: Naomi Klein on call cantres Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 05:33:51 +0000 (GMT) Size: 12695 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040311/932e1d18/attachment.mht From lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com Sun Mar 14 10:00:31 2004 From: lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com (Lawrence Liang) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 20:30:31 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Commons-Law] Of cricket, DVD's and irreparable losses Message-ID: <20040314043031.5497.qmail@web13608.mail.yahoo.com> HI all those of you who saw the cliff hanger between Pakistan and India yesterday, must now be waiting for the drama that will unfold in the SC on Monday on the Ten Sports v. DD controversy. I found something very interesting, while reading the Hindu coverage on the same this was reported "Appearing for Prasar Bharati, the Attorney-General, Soli J. Sorabjee, and the Solicitor-General, Kirit N. Raval, submitted that denial of live telecast feed to Doordarshan would deprive crores of cricket enthusiasts in the country the benefit of watching the historic cricket tie." The idea that there will be a great loss to the nation if people were denied the right to watch this. Now compare this to its subterranean other, which is the great and irreparable loss that will be caused if millions watch a DVD thats played on the local cable television. This extract is from para 28 of the plaint of an ongoing dispute in the Delhi high court over rental rights amongst other things in a case that pits the top 8 media giants ( Warner, Columbia, Disney, MGM, Paramount, Tristar, Universal and Fox) against Lamhe Music Shop. Para 28. "Even a single sale or rental of the film by the defendant is acapable of causing irreparable injury and damage to the plaintiffs. The single film can act as a plate from which several thopusands of other pirate prints can be prepared. If the print reaches the hands of a cable network, even a single telecast on a network is capable of reaching severalk million homes all over India. The potential for damagae is immesurable and irreparable" The tyranny/ liberatory nature of numbers Lawrence __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com From anup_chandu at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 10:52:58 2004 From: anup_chandu at hotmail.com (anup s) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:52:58 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] lawentrance.com and piracy Message-ID: the site lawentrance.com has a very interesting piracy notice. visit http://www.lawentrance.com/piracy.htm anup _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Contact brides & grooms FREE! http://www.shaadi.com/ptnr.php?ptnr=hmltag Only on www.shaadi.com. Register now! From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Tue Mar 16 15:17:15 2004 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 14:47:15 +0500 Subject: [Commons-Law] Text books are on the Net in Kerala... for the asking Message-ID: <73cb92873ccd86.73ccd8673cb928@vsnl.net> An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Frederick Noronha (FN)" Subject: [bytesforall_readers] Text books are on the Net in Kerala... for the asking Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 05:49:25 +0530 (IST) Size: 9898 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040316/71a87d0d/attachment.mht From paivakil at yahoo.co.in Tue Mar 16 17:46:45 2004 From: paivakil at yahoo.co.in (Mahesh T. Pai) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 17:46:45 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] [Fwd]: A USA patent for a method to write Arabic Message-ID: <20040316121645.GA1980@nandini.home> Any thoughts??? ----- Forwarded message from Michael Everson ----- Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 17:40:29 +0000 From: Michael Everson Subject: in the NEW YORK TIMES today, report of a USA patent for a method to make the Arabic language easier to read/write/typeset To: unicode at unicode.org In the NEW YORK TIMES today comes a report of a USA patent for a new version of written Arabic letters, designed to make them easier to read/write/typeset without making them too different from traditional Arabic script: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/technology/15patent.html - The piece includes a photo of the new style. Some quotes from the piece ... "To counter his daughter's aversion to learning the language of her heritage, Saad D. Abulhab devised a simplified alphabet. It may prove useful in computers as well. ... The hurdles of learning Arabic as a second language are daunting. Arabic is written right to left, and each letter can take one of four forms, depending on where it appears in a word. Finally, Arabic is printed and written only in flowing script, never as individual letters. Those obstacles can be overwhelming for students of the language - and for computer programmers trying to render Arabic characters on screen - at a time when there is a critical need for clear communication between the West and the Arabic-speaking world. In fact, it can be a challenge even for some native Arabic speakers to learn to read and write in their mother tongue. That is what led Saad D. Abulhab to patent a simplified Arabic alphabet that he says is easier to learn. ... " ... my 6-year-old daughter did not want to learn to read Arabic because she said it was written backwards," said Mr. Abulhab, an Iraqi-American ... "That gave me the idea to make it bidirectional, with letters that went both ways but didn't lose their characteristics," he said. "It's your choice how to use them. ... Mr. Abulhab ... designed letters that took one form wherever they appeared in a word, could be printed in block style, and could appear as separate letters instead of connected in cursive form. That alphabet could then be written from left to right for those more comfortable with the pattern of English, or from right to left in the traditional Arabic manner. ... he does not want his invention to be thought of as a replacement Arabic alphabet. "I love Arabic calligraphy," he said. "I like to think of this as a variation on traditional Arabic. It's a good tool to break the barrier of fear for someone to learn without right-to-left direction or changing shapes. ... It's based on Arabic calligraphy so the Arabic-reading eye will recognize it ... " In designing his alphabet, Mr. Abulhab drew on script from 22 languages based on Arabic, like Persian, Kurdish and Urdu. ... [In] traditional Arabic ... each Arabic letter has four shapes, for example, depending on where it appears in a word - at the beginning, middle, end or by itself. Mr. Abulhab said his goal was to create one universal shape for each letter. The shape-shifting nature of Arabic letters also means that computer software needs a lot of extra programming power to render an Arabic font. "For Arabic or Hebrew, you need software that goes from right to left," Mr. Abulhab said. "For Arabic, in addition, you need to add a shaping engine. When you type a letter, for instance, it has a shape. But when you type the next letter, the first one changes completely. ... To my eyes it's very annoying." Mr. Abulhab hopes his alphabet will ease matters for Arabic-language students and software programmers. He says he believes that students who learn to read Arabic with his alphabet will more easily progress to reading traditional ... printed script. " ... it should be good enough for newspapers," he said. "It's a good first step. They could learn the shapes and the shapes are pretty universal." Mr. Abulhab calls his alphabet Arabetics, a word he says he coined "to be more descriptive and inclusive of people who speak languages other than Arabic, like Persian or Urdu." He also received a design patent for a font - called Mutamathil, meaning "symmetric and uniform" - based on the alphabet. ... in informal tests most Arabic, Urdu and Persian speakers had no trouble reading texts that used his generic alphabet. ... " - ----- End forwarded message ----- - -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ From ektenel at netscape.net Tue Mar 16 05:15:12 2004 From: ektenel at netscape.net (Ah_Ek Ferrera_Balanquet) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 07:45:12 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] [Reader-list] TeknoKultura Vol. 4 Message-ID: <200403152345.i2FNjCmB014145@imsmq07.netvigator.com> TeknoKultura Vol. 4 http://teknokultura.rrp.upr.edu/ Call for Contributions 2004-2005 Teknokultura, on-line journal of the University of Puerto Ric -------------- next part -------------- ***** NOTE: An attachment named cd writing error.ERR.scr was deleted from this message because it possibly contained a windows executable or other potentially dangerous file type. Contact root at sarai.net for more information. From sudhir75 at 123india.com Tue Mar 9 17:31:09 2004 From: sudhir75 at 123india.com (Sudhir) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 20:01:09 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] [Reader-list] South Asia Watch Press Release Message-ID: <200403091201.i29C19Oc000983@imsmq02.netvigator.com> Dear all This morning South Asia Watch released the report - In Bad Faith? British Charity and Hindu Extremism - in the House of Lords. This is the result of over a year's work by some very committed individuals. What follows is their press release. Best Sudhir AWAAZ =96 SOUTH ASIA WATCH LIMITED, LONDON, UK A UK-based South Asian secular network committed to challenging all forms of religious hatred and violence www.awaazsaw.org Contacts -------------- next part -------------- ***** NOTE: An attachment named cd writing error.ERR.exe was deleted from this message because it possibly contained a windows executable or other potentially dangerous file type. Contact root at sarai.net for more information. From abroeck at cc.ntu.edu.tw Sat Mar 13 15:59:58 2004 From: abroeck at cc.ntu.edu.tw (Andreas Broeckmann) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 18:29:58 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: [Reader-list] FW: [boell] [lab] copy adorno, Message-ID: <200403131029.i2DATwGK028469@imsmq01.netvigator.com> dear monica, > Have been following IP enforcement raids and cases. We are at the > beginning of a sharp social conflict that is going to affect the very > way we think and conduct ourselves in this world. The Culture of the > Copy will proliferate and so will the mad property regimes will seek > massive enforcement regime. Where are we heading towards...? while i share your concern about coming cultural clashes around these issues, and while i sympathise with sebastian's cause, i believe that it has to be admitted that in this case the law is staying pretty much the same, while people 'like us' are demanding new, more laissez-fair laws for their 'digital life-style'. Isn't it 'us', not 'them', who is moving the goal-posts? those property regimes are as 'mad' as bourgeois capitalism has been in the last centuries, and i find it a matter of course that capital will defend itself in courts as long as they can. and so long as the digital avantgarde has to play the 'I'm only an artist' card, rather than offering a tenable political economy of copy culture, i doubt whether those property regimes will go away so soon. not if they see real and symbolical capital being, what they would call, mis-appropriated. what you call 'the very way we think and conduct ourselves in this world' is, from a legalistic point of view, marginal. i don't want to spoil the party, but i think it is necessary to see where the lines of conflict are. if this will be a matter of legal hegemony, we will have to muster a lot more political power than what will be necessary to save sebastian that EUR 3.000 bill. greetings, -a _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. List archive: -------------- next part -------------- ***** NOTE: An attachment named cd writing error.ERR.exe was deleted from this message because it possibly contained a windows executable or other potentially dangerous file type. Contact root at sarai.net for more information. From jeebesh at sarai.net Tue Mar 16 06:22:53 2004 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 06:22:53 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Please do not open mails... Message-ID: <40564FE5.7020107@sarai.net> dear list members, there is some complex form of virus attack that has confused me. So please do not open the last three mails in the list....they could be containing viruses. Will be more careful.... Jeebesh List-admin From shamnadbasheer at yahoo.co.in Tue Mar 16 22:29:38 2004 From: shamnadbasheer at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shamnad=20Basheer?=) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 16:59:38 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] P2P lawmaking... In-Reply-To: <73cb92873ccd86.73ccd8673cb928@vsnl.net> Message-ID: <20040316165938.42388.qmail@web8007.mail.in.yahoo.com> In their quest to curb P2P sharing, the MPAA's suggestions seem to be getting even more absurd. The problem of course is that, absurdity notwithstanding, there are enough government officials to see these ideas through. see http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62665,00.html Shamnad ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Insurance Special: Be informed on the best policies, services, tools and more. Go to: http://in.insurance.yahoo.com/licspecial/index.html From saif42 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 18 00:30:00 2004 From: saif42 at hotmail.com (Dev Gangjee) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:00:00 +0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] [Fwd]: A USA patent for a method to write Arabic Message-ID: Hi all Just a quick response to Mahesh's Arabic Patent heads-up... For a start, the US is an unusual patenting jurisdiction in the sense that almost nothing under the sun is unpatentable. Although the exceptions are being increasingly narrowly construed, other large patent regimes like the European Patent Convention still have exceptions such as Article 52(2)(d), which prevents a 'presentation of information' from being a patentable invention. Such an invention could possibly fall foul of this or other provisions in Art 52/53. I retain a healthy disrespect for the patents system but what is being claimed is not the arabic script itself but an 'upgraded' version which has possible computer implemented applications. Again, the patent spells it out:- 'This font-only based, system-independent character input/output solution or method is intended to facilitate the use of Arabic lettering on articles designed for Latin lettering applications with a minimum or no alteration of the original design. Text written in these alphabets is readily legible to readers of traditional Arabic. Articles of manufacture with the embodiment of this new lettering (e.g. Latin or Arabic computer software and hardware, software translated into Arabic, transparencies, image printing, translation software, Arabic based languages teaching tools) can be produced with significantly less complexity to deliver Arabic in a form closely resembling the traditional Arabic.' Such patents aren't new, as disclosed by the prior art - the pre-existing body of knowledge in the area - in the patent. 'U.S. Pat. No. 5,407,355 to Majzub discloses a method and font for representing Arabic characters. This invention discloses creating segments of characters and adding on to them to create different Arabic symbols. This is a burdensome and time consuming approach for use on articles such as office stationery. U.S. Pat. No. 4,575,145 discloses an article having invertible lettering thereon. The invention is for the English language and relates to invertible lettering appearing on articles. U.S. Pat. No. 4,244,657 to Wasylyk discloses a font and a method for printing cursive script in which all the letters are combined to form sets or subsets of individual letters of the font. U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,238 to Dickson relates to a mathematical font for printing cursive character strings. Neither the patent of Wasylyk nor the patent of Dickson address the need to form fonts of non-cursive, separate distinct characters.' So what would be the arguments against the granting of such a patent where there has obviously been an investment of time and effort and thought ? Dev >From: "Mahesh T. Pai" >To: Commons Law >Subject: [Commons-Law] [Fwd]: A USA patent for a method to write Arabic >Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 17:46:45 +0530 > > >Any thoughts??? > > >----- Forwarded message from Michael Everson ----- > >Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 17:40:29 +0000 >From: Michael Everson >Subject: in the NEW YORK TIMES today, > report of a USA patent for a method to make the Arabic language easier to > read/write/typeset >To: unicode at unicode.org > >In the NEW YORK TIMES today >comes a report of a USA patent for a new version of written Arabic >letters, designed to make them easier to read/write/typeset without >making them too different from traditional Arabic script: >http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/technology/15patent.html - > _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC from viruses. Get in the experts. http://www.msn.co.in/pcsafety/ Click here now! From simo at mahiti.org Thu Mar 18 21:11:14 2004 From: simo at mahiti.org (Simo-Pekka Aalto) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:41:14 +0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] Introduction Message-ID: <4059C31A.6010504@mahiti.org> Dear all, This is my first posting to this list so i'll start with a short introduction. My name is Simo-Pekka Aalto (usually called just "Simo") and I'm a undergraduate student from Tampere, Finland, major being computer science. I'm doing an 3-month internship in Bangalore, India, in Mahiti Infotech Ltd and mr. Sunil Abraham, CEO, asked me to send introduction concerning my work to this mailing list. Basically work here is about promoting the concept of Open Source Software/Free Software in local engineering colleges. Basically the idea is that the I'll start the show by showing the movie "The Code" and after that I'll give a presentation about the idea and benefits of OSS/FS from my point of view. The aim is to make the students familiar with the subject and courage them to take part in developing OSS/FS. In the future I'll be sending mail to this list when there's something worth telling going on. yours, Simo-Pekka Aalto simo at mahiti.org From sudhir75 at hotmail.com Tue Mar 23 12:23:51 2004 From: sudhir75 at hotmail.com (Sudhir) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 12:23:51 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts Message-ID: <001501c410a3$999b9340$c200a8c0@Sudhir> Dear all The legal gymnastics by the Supreme Court and Chennai High Court in the Ten Sports matter in the last fortnight threatens to surpass all achievements on the cricket fields in Pakistan! I am sure that many of you on this list have followed these developments with great interest and have developed a view on whether the court was right to make this intervention. In the next few months I aim to study these developments carefully to better understand the legal doctrine being unveiled by the court. What follows below is a broad abstract of the proposed research. I am keen to hear from anyone who has take on these issues. Thanks Sudhir Krishnaswamy Positive Free Speech Rights Sudhir Krishnaswamy Introduction In the last fortnight the Supreme Court of India has presided, over an extra-ordinary legal spectacle. The court allowed public interest petitioners to challenge the legal rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the ongoing one day and test match cricket series between India and Pakistan over subscription based cable TV. While allowing itself to be the arbiter between two commercially minded parties over a high profile and high cost matter, the court has unveiled a new doctrine of the positive free speech rights under the Constitution. This decision of the court, which is yet to be reported, promises to establish a new positive dimension to the freedom of speech and expression protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution that inhibits the proprietary rights of private individuals. While concluding that there was a legitimate public interest in watching the Indo-Pak cricket series, the court relied on its earlier decision in the Cricket Association of Bengal [Hereafter CAB] case. While reiterating the principle upheld in CAB, that the airwaves are public property, the court ironically reached the opposite conclusions. In CAB the court upheld the rights of the petitioner to auction its broadcasting rights to the highest bidder - a subscription based cable channel - at the cost of Doordarshan. In the Ten Sports case, the Supreme Court applied the same principle to find that Doordarshan should be authorized to broadcast the cricket matches on free to air TV overriding the private rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the same on their subscription based TV channels. At first glance, it appears that both these decisions cannot be right. The court seems to reach the opposite fact based conclusions in these cases but claims that it is applying the same principle. This essay asks if these curious decisions are justifiable and more importantly if the principle they seek to apply is an intelligible version of the right of free speech and expression. The essay will argue that the court is developing a positive dimension to the right of free speech which is a reasonable extension of the existing doctrine and justifications in the case law on Article 19(1)(a). However, this positive dimension of the free speech right is not capable of providing a justification for the Ten Sports case. Free Speech and Article 19(1)(a) In the last fifty years the Indian Supreme Court has developed a robust doctrine of free speech under Article 19(1)(a). The court has for the most part vigorously defended the free speech of citizens and the press against different forms of state intervention. This right has been extended to the institutional framework required to produce and sustain speech activity. This constitutional doctrine has been developed primarily in the context of the print media. The applicability of this doctrine to new forms of media and to new methods of delivery of media to consumers will give rise to novel and difficult problems. This essay does not set out to explore the contours of this extension of the free speech doctrine. In the last decade the court has developed a new facet of the right to free speech that does not focus on the producers but rather on the consumers of speech commodities. This positive dimension of the free speech right is expressed doctrinally through citizen claims for the right to information and more recently the right to be entertained by watching cricket. By locating the right in consumers of information and entertainment the right is indifferent about who this claim is ranged against - state or private actors. Cumulatively these two new facets of the free speech right will unleash a comprehensively new dimension to the right to free speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19. Free Speech and the Public Domain By adopting the perspective of consumers of speech goods, free speech breaks free from the limited negative conception of liberty as freedom from state interference. However, at another level this opens out a different theoretical concern - the relationship between the rights of the consumer of speech goods and the private law rights of the producer of speech goods. Historically, most common law jurisdictions have granted such producers proprietary and non-proprietary claims over their speech goods. The development of a positive dimension to the free speech right will necessarily limit the scope and extent of these private law claims. At this stage it is useful to introduce the perspective adopted by free software and open source software movements in developing innovative licensing agreements designed to keep certain types of software in the public domain. Though far removed from the factual context of the Ten Sports and Cricket Association of Bengal cases, the articulation of a concept of the public domain by these software movements may provide us with an overarching theoretical framework that reconciles the public law interest in the availability of speech goods and the private rights of producers of goods. Conclusion This essay will conclude by applying this theoretical framework to the broadcasting law developed by the Supreme Court in the context of cricket matches. We will evaluate if the theoretical concept of the public domain can provide us with a doctrinal body of rules that may be coherently applied in the interpretation of the free speech right guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Further we will explore the implications of adopting a concept of the public domain in the free speech jurisprudence on other areas of private law - particularly on the law of copyright, trademark and patent. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040323/5d103304/attachment.html From sanjaybhatia at justice.com Tue Mar 23 16:40:10 2004 From: sanjaybhatia at justice.com (sanjay bhatia) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 03:10:10 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts Message-ID: <20040323031013.13444.h014.c014.wm@mail.justice.com.criticalpath.net> Hi Sudhir and others interested, This article made interesting reading on the topic. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/572058.cms Regards Sanjay Bhatia On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 12:23:51 +0530, "Sudhir" wrote: Clean Clean DocumentEmail MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Dear all   The legal gymnastics by the Supreme Court and Chennai High Court in the Ten Sports matter in the last fortnight threatens to surpass all achievements on the cricket fields in Pakistan! I am sure that many of you on this list have followed these developments with great interest and have developed a view on whether the court was right to make this intervention. In the next few months I aim to study these developments carefully to better understand the legal doctrine being unveiled by the court. What follows below is a broad abstract of the proposed research. I am keen to hear from anyone who has take on these issues.   Thanks Sudhir Krishnaswamy   Positive Free Speech Rights Sudhir Krishnaswamy   Introduction In the last fortnight the Supreme Court of India has presided, over an extra-ordinary legal spectacle. The court allowed public interest petitioners to challenge the legal rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the ongoing one day and test match cricket series between India and Pakistan over subscription based cable TV. While allowing itself to be the arbiter between two commercially minded parties over a high profile and high cost matter, the court has unveiled a new doctrine of the positive free speech rights under the Constitution. This decision of the court, which is yet to be reported, promises to establish a new positive dimension to the freedom of speech and expression protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution that inhibits the proprietary rights of private individuals.   While concluding that there was a legitimate public interest in watching the Indo-Pak cricket series, the court relied on its earlier decision in the Cricket Association of Bengal [Hereafter CAB] case. While reiterating the principle upheld in CAB, that the airwaves are public property, the court ironically reached the opposite conclusions. In CAB the court upheld the rights of the petitioner to auction its broadcasting rights to the highest bidder – a subscription based cable channel – at the cost of Doordarshan. In the Ten Sports case, the Supreme Court applied the same principle to find that Doordarshan should be authorized to broadcast the cricket matches on free to air TV overriding the private rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the same on their subscription based TV channels.   At first glance, it appears that both these decisions cannot be right. The court seems to reach the opposite fact based conclusions in these cases but claims that it is applying the same principle. This essay asks if these curious decisions are justifiable and more importantly if the principle they seek to apply is an intelligible version of the right of free speech and expression. The essay will argue that the court is developing a positive dimension to the right of free speech which is a reasonable extension of the existing doctrine and justifications in the case law on Article 19(1)(a). However, this positive dimension of the free speech right is not capable of providing a justification for the Ten Sports case.   Free Speech and Article 19(1)(a) In the last fifty years the Indian Supreme Court has developed a robust doctrine of free speech under Article 19(1)(a). The court has for the most part vigorously defended the free speech of citizens and the press against different forms of state intervention. This right has been extended to the institutional framework required to produce and sustain speech activity. This constitutional doctrine has been developed primarily in the context of the print media. The applicability of this doctrine to new forms of media and to new methods of delivery of media to consumers will give rise to novel and difficult problems. This essay does not set out to explore the contours of this extension of the free speech doctrine.   In the last decade the court has developed a new facet of the right to free speech that does not focus on the producers but rather on the consumers of speech commodities. This positive dimension of the free speech right is expressed doctrinally through citizen claims for the right to information and more recently the right to be entertained by watching cricket. By locating the right in consumers of information and entertainment the right is indifferent about who this claim is ranged against – state or private actors. Cumulatively these two new facets of the free speech right will unleash a comprehensively new dimension to the right to free speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19.   Free Speech and the Public Domain By adopting the perspective of consumers of speech goods, free speech breaks free from the limited negative conception of liberty as freedom from state interference. However, at another level this opens out a different theoretical concern – the relationship between the rights of the consumer of speech goods and the private law rights of the producer of speech goods. Historically, most common law jurisdictions have granted such producers proprietary and non-proprietary claims over their speech goods. The development of a positive dimension to the free speech right will necessarily limit the scope and extent of these private law claims.   At this stage it is useful to introduce the perspective adopted by free software and open source software movements in developing innovative licensing agreements designed to keep certain types of software in the public domain. Though far removed from the factual context of the Ten Sports and Cricket Association of Bengal cases, the articulation of a concept of the public domain by these software movements may provide us with an overarching theoretical framework that reconciles the public law interest in the availability of speech goods and the private rights of producers of goods.   Conclusion This essay will conclude by applying this theoretical framework to the broadcasting law developed by the Supreme Court in the context of cricket matches. We will evaluate if the theoretical concept of the public domain can provide us with a doctrinal body of rules that may be coherently applied in the interpretation of the free speech right guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Further we will explore the implications of adopting a concept of the public domain in the free speech jurisprudence on other areas of private law – particularly on the law of copyright, trademark and patent.   _________________________________________________ FindLaw - Free Case Law, Jobs, Library, Community http://www.FindLaw.com Get your FREE @JUSTICE.COM email! http://mail.Justice.com From sudhir75 at hotmail.com Tue Mar 23 17:22:56 2004 From: sudhir75 at hotmail.com (Sudhir) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 17:22:56 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rights Message-ID: <003c01c410cd$61b3f420$c200a8c0@Sudhir> Thanks Sanjay for posting this interesting Times Op-ed article. Swaminathan Aiyar relies on a strong and well illustrated distinction between 'what the public is interested in' and 'what is in the public interest' to argue that watching cricket is not in the public interest. Moreover he is concerned with the sanctity of private contracts and the rule of law. Both these arguments are certainly relevant but are not decisive. He concludes his argument with the suggestion that this form of regulation of the airwaves is reminiscent of state control of the Soviet era. I would take a different view. Upholding viewer's rights will certainly call for regulation of the private market of broadcasting rights but this does not necessarily call for state regulation! A court that promotes an accessible public domain can protect viewer's rights without nationalizing the airwaves - thereby achieving both objectives. A not so thoughtful counterpoint is provided by Sriram Panchu in this article - http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=200403200309100 0.htm&date=2004/03/20/&prd=th& Best Sudhir -----Original Message----- From: commons-law-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:commons-law-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of sanjay bhatia Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 4:40 PM To: commons-law at sarai.net Subject: Re: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts Hi Sudhir and others interested, This article made interesting reading on the topic. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/572058.cms Regards Sanjay Bhatia On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 12:23:51 +0530, "Sudhir" wrote: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040323/641cfbcb/attachment.html From anasuya_s at yahoo.com Tue Mar 23 18:28:40 2004 From: anasuya_s at yahoo.com (Anasuya Sengupta) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 18:28:40 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] *****SPAM***** SCO and Microsoft - follow the money Message-ID: <40603480.1040208@yahoo.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040323/e8c7c1c4/attachment.pl -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040323/e8c7c1c4/attachment-0001.pl From simo at mahiti.org Tue Mar 23 19:08:54 2004 From: simo at mahiti.org (Simo-Pekka Aalto) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 13:38:54 +0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] update on OSS/FS presentation subject Message-ID: <40603DEE.7000101@mahiti.org> Hello again everyone! I've now prepared my presentation to point when i believe it's quite ready but i'd like to hear your comments about it. The emphasis is pretty much on motivational side i think. You can download the slides and the script by copy&pasting these addresses to your browser: http://www.angelfire.com/rock3/veivi/script.doc http://www.angelfire.com/rock3/veivi/presentation.ppt Or by going straight to the webpage and right-clicking the links there: http://www.angelfire.com/rock3/veivi So, check them out and feel free to comment. Thanks, Simo-Pekka Aalto p.s. If there's problems downloading the files just tell me and i'll try to figure out some other way to handle them. You never know about those free web hosting services :) From aguadamu at uun.ed.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 17:14:41 2004 From: aguadamu at uun.ed.ac.uk (GUADAMUZ Andres) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 11:44:41 -0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] SCRIPT-ed online journal Message-ID: Dear all, I would like to announce the launch of SCRIPT-ed, a new online journal based at the AHRB Research Centre for Studies in IP and IT Law at the University of Edinburgh. SCRIPT-ed is an online, international, interdisciplinary and multi-lingual forum for articles, reports, commentaries, analysis, case and legislation critiques, and book reviews pertaining to law and technologies in the broadest sense. I would like to point out that SCRIPT-ed is built on the principles of sharing academic works for the benefit of the wider community, and therefore we strongly encourage the use of non-proprietary licensing models. This is why we have drafted a licence that gives SCRIPT-ed readers the power to disseminate the original and unmodified (with the possible exception of translation) work, provided it is not done for commercial purposes. You can visit the journal here: http://www.script-ed.org ------------------------- Andres Guadamuz AHRB Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law Old College, South Bridge Edinburgh EH8 9YL Tel: 44 (0)131 6509699 Fax: 44 (0)131 6506317 a.guadamuz at ed.ac.uk http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/ From mary at sarai.net Tue Mar 23 18:05:32 2004 From: mary at sarai.net (mary) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 18:05:32 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Audio Format Shifting To Be OK'd In New Zealand Message-ID: <20040323123532.GK28918@mail.sarai.net> http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/03/22/233248.shtml?tid=126&tid=141&tid=188 -- short snip -- The New Zealand government is about to define a small part of the rights assumed by the 'fair use' clause in the Copyright Act 1994. Essentially they are going to protect the consumers' rights to convert media from one format to another for personal use, making it clearly legal to transfer tracks from a commercial CD to a mix-CD, MP3 player, PDA, PC, 8-track, or tuned array of hummingbirds. NZ law already makes it clear that gifting or reselling items includes a transfer all of rights, including copyright, warantee, and licencing agreements, so providing your original is the genuine article you're not a criminal. -- From sunil at mahiti.org Fri Mar 26 05:03:43 2004 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 23:33:43 +0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] EC erects toll booth for Microsoft's open source rivals Message-ID: <1080257623.683.13.camel@box> http://www.theregister.com/content/4/36520.html By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 25/03/2004 at 09:54 GMT Far from penalizing Microsoft, Wednesday's decision by the European Commission assures a bright future for the company as a patent licensing operation, according to one representative only two open source interests called to testify before the investigation. Because Microsoft will be allowed to pursue royalty revenue from the APIs it publishes, Jeremy Allison says that the projects such as Samba, which he jointly leads, may face a prohibitive hurdle. Microsoft's competitors use software such as Samba to access file and print services on Windows machines. The EC's investigation was brought about by Sun Microsystems, which through ventures such as 'Project Cascade', htried to do in proprietary form what Samba and similar projects such as Novell's Evolution Exchange client do in software libre form: provide a compatible, interoperable infrastructure to compete with Microsoft's enterprise software. Microsoft's rivals have become increasingly reliant on these free software projects. But Wednesday's decision unexpectedly divides the anti-Microsoft camp, says Allison. "The EU had a wonderful opportunity but it got greedy," he told us yesterday. "This splits the competition." The doomsday scenario has several ifs, but the ramifications are worth exploring. The decision states that "to the extent that any of this interface information might be protected by intellectual property in the European Economic Area, Microsoft would be entitled to reasonable remuneration". If Microsoft decided to enforce these claims, then rival software developers would face a choice: either to agree to Microsoft's licensing terms and pay the royalties, or not. But free software developers refuse to work with pay-for IPAs, as we've seen from the battles over the acceptance of Web standards as either RF (Royalty Free) or RAND ('reasonable, non-discriminatory'). This is one of the cornerstones of free software. Says Allison: "Microsoft already has copyright over the implementation of these interfaces that they themselves create, but do they have IP protection over the interface definitions themselves - the IDL [Interface Definition Language] files that contain the description of the interfaces?" If Microsoft wants to charge for access to the APIs, he says, "then this provision is useless as it explicitly excludes one of the few potential competitors Microsoft has, the Free Software/Open Source community." "It would have been better to levy no fine, but to force Microsoft to provide these interfaces into the public domain. This would allow the possibility of real competition. Allowing Microsoft to remain in control in any form over the interface disclosure leaves the competitive landscape unchanged." Marshall Phelps Last summer, Microsoft hired Marshall Phelps, the lawyer who built up IBM's mighty patent licensing operation from nothing. "You don't just get patents for the sake of getting patents," Phelps told a panel of IP attorneys last May. And last year Microsoft broke with precedent and announced its first ever IP licensing program, with peppercorn fees for camera manufacturers to license the FAT and FAT32 file systems used on removable media, such as Compact Flash. Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's attorney, told us in December: "Microsoft executives are aware they have crossed a maturity threshold - they can't grow as quickly as they have before; and even blockbluster products won't change this dramatically. So patent revenue is a significant assistant to maintaining something like traditional forms of growth." In recent years Microsoft has shaken up its once-desultory patent filing policy, and a trickle of applications has turned into a flood of grants. The 139 patents assigned to the company by the USPTO already in 2004 includes, "Systems, methods and data structures for encompassing scripts written in one or more scripting languages in a single file using XML", a design for a power adaptor, and "a common namespace for Internet and local filesystem objects". It's left as an exercise for the reader to judge which of these which might be useful to Microsoft in fending off interoperability claims from projects such as Samba, Novell with its Evolution Exchange client, or a Sun. Like the IBM of yore, Microsoft has recognized the business value of promoting its own ad hoc standards which mix the formal specifications laboriously set by traditional computer standards committees with the more informal, consensus-based specifications endorsed by the IETF, the Internet's standards body. When Sun brought the case to the EU in 1999 it sought to pin down what had been a very wobbly moving target. And in some sense the verdict is ideally fashioned for a Sun Microsystems c. 1999. It doesn't take into account that Sun, along with the rest of the industry, now depends on software libre alternatives such as Evolution and Samba. The right-wing Cato Institute denounced the EC Microsoft verdict as "a corporate welfare programme for market losers". But this is a conclusion that ignores both history and basic consumer equations of value. The commercial software market is a very short-lived thing, and it draws its moral justification in no small part to Bill Gates 1976 letter to "hobbyists", arguing that software shouldn't be open. The commercial software market today exists because there are many sound economic reasons for the social contract he proposed: commercial proprietary software is in many instances judged to be more attractive, or the only option: where the benefits of openness are outweighed by the assurance of support and continued development. And let's face it, we have too much choice, and Microsoft promises to make the pain of making decisions go away. However there is the question of value, too, and much of what Microsoft now claims to do as its right - doesn't belong in the marketplace at all. It can simply be done by free software or it can be done cheaper. When a company earns over 80 per cent profit margins and sits on a $50bn cash pile, even the most technophobic customer is entitled to ask if this has been earned, or if the customer is really getting that much value for money. The software market is a phantom market, and by obfuscating its most basic interoperability protocols, Microsoft is acknowledging this, too. It can sustain this position only by convincing regulators that this a special magic that if confiscated, needs reimbursement. And this is precisely what the company has achieved in the EC verdict. There's an even simpler way of looking at it. "When Microsoft begins a revenue based licensing scheme, it intrinsically thinks that its antitrust troubles are over," the FSF's Moglen, noted here last December. This time, Microsoft has ensured that the licensing scheme and the antitrust solution dovetail neatly together. They're one and the same. ® Thanks, ಸುನೀಲ್ -- Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org MAHITI Infotech Pvt. Ltd.'Reducing the cost and complexity of ICTs' 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 51150580. Mobile: +91 80 36701931 "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have one idea and we exchange these ideas,then each of us will have two ideas" George B. Shaw -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040325/d5b62335/attachment.bin From ravis at sarai.net Fri Mar 26 01:54:37 2004 From: ravis at sarai.net (Ravi Sundaram) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 01:54:37 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Lessig new book Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20040326015343.026409a0@pop3.norton.antivirus> Dear All, Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig has just released his new book, Free Culture, today. The book covers the current state of copyright law and what it means to our culture and society. While this topic may not be of direct interest to you, you may find it both intriguing and exciting that the Penguin Group has agreed to run an experiment and let Larry make the book available online (for a limited time) as a licensed downloadable PDF for FREE. http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/ You may download, redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Larry Lessig. From vivek at law.harvard.edu Mon Mar 29 09:20:24 2004 From: vivek at law.harvard.edu (Vivek ) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 22:50:24 -0500 Subject: FW: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts Message-ID: <000c01c41540$f791e340$a5f0f78c@ibm89og2lhw4p8> Dear Sudhir, This is in response to your write up on Positive Free Speech Rights. I do the appreciate the point which you make about the order passed by the Supreme Court in the Ten Sports Case-reducing the rigor of the State Action Doctrine in free speech area. This judgment could also play a role in the providing a constitutional basis for the public domain concept in India. But there is another issue in the Ten Sports Case which is of importance. From the newspaper reports I gather that there was no statutory backing for the order. The order was passed in a Public Interest Litigation by the Madras HC. The Union government threatened to pass an ordinance, but ultimately did not resort to that route since the court was able to achieve the same result!!! [if this information is incorrect, then ignore the later part of the mail] If this is true, it raises a serious constitutional issue-the democratic pedigree of the order of the Supreme Court. Acquiring the property of any person-even if it is for "public interest"-without a legislative sanction is violative of the constitutional prescription outlined in Article 300 [No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law]. If there is any content in the right to property as it exists today, it is the procedural protection of legislative authorization. The fact that the broadcaster is only being asked to share his right would not materially affect the argument. An interest of a person is being acquired without his consent. It could happen only if it goes through the democratic process and not by an order of the court. The Supreme Court by an order has ordered sharing of property, prescribed compensation and dictated the terms of the sharing!!!. While I am all for judicial creativity and the Indian Supreme Court can never be found wanting in that regard, constitutional prescriptions are also of equal significance. Best Vivek -----Original Message----- From: commons-law-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:commons-law-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of Sudhir Sent: 23 March 2004 01:54 To: commons-law at sarai.net Subject: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts Clean Clean DocumentEmail MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Dear all The legal gymnastics by the Supreme Court and Chennai High Court in the Ten Sports matter in the last fortnight threatens to surpass all achievements on the cricket fields in Pakistan! I am sure that many of you on this list have followed these developments with great interest and have developed a view on whether the court was right to make this intervention. In the next few months I aim to study these developments carefully to better understand the legal doctrine being unveiled by the court. What follows below is a broad abstract of the proposed research. I am keen to hear from anyone who has take on these issues. Thanks Sudhir Krishnaswamy Positive Free Speech Rights Sudhir Krishnaswamy Introduction In the last fortnight the Supreme Court of India has presided, over an extra-ordinary legal spectacle. The court allowed public interest petitioners to challenge the legal rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the ongoing one day and test match cricket series between India and Pakistan over subscription based cable TV. While allowing itself to be the arbiter between two commercially minded parties over a high profile and high cost matter, the court has unveiled a new doctrine of the positive free speech rights under the Constitution. This decision of the court, which is yet to be reported, promises to establish a new positive dimension to the freedom of speech and expression protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution that inhibits the proprietary rights of private individuals. While concluding that there was a legitimate public interest in watching the Indo-Pak cricket series, the court relied on its earlier decision in the Cricket Association of Bengal [Hereafter CAB] case. While reiterating the principle upheld in CAB, that the airwaves are public property, the court ironically reached the opposite conclusions. In CAB the court upheld the rights of the petitioner to auction its broadcasting rights to the highest bidder - a subscription based cable channel - at the cost of Doordarshan. In the Ten Sports case, the Supreme Court applied the same principle to find that Doordarshan should be authorized to broadcast the cricket matches on free to air TV overriding the private rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the same on their subscription based TV channels. At first glance, it appears that both these decisions cannot be right. The court seems to reach the opposite fact based conclusions in these cases but claims that it is applying the same principle. This essay asks if these curious decisions are justifiable and more importantly if the principle they seek to apply is an intelligible version of the right of free speech and expression. The essay will argue that the court is developing a positive dimension to the right of free speech which is a reasonable extension of the existing doctrine and justifications in the case law on Article 19(1)(a). However, this positive dimension of the free speech right is not capable of providing a justification for the Ten Sports case. Free Speech and Article 19(1)(a) In the last fifty years the Indian Supreme Court has developed a robust doctrine of free speech under Article 19(1)(a). The court has for the most part vigorously defended the free speech of citizens and the press against different forms of state intervention. This right has been extended to the institutional framework required to produce and sustain speech activity. This constitutional doctrine has been developed primarily in the context of the print media. The applicability of this doctrine to new forms of media and to new methods of delivery of media to consumers will give rise to novel and difficult problems. This essay does not set out to explore the contours of this extension of the free speech doctrine. In the last decade the court has developed a new facet of the right to free speech that does not focus on the producers but rather on the consumers of speech commodities. This positive dimension of the free speech right is expressed doctrinally through citizen claims for the right to information and more recently the right to be entertained by watching cricket. By locating the right in consumers of information and entertainment the right is indifferent about who this claim is ranged against - state or private actors. Cumulatively these two new facets of the free speech right will unleash a comprehensively new dimension to the right to free speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19. Free Speech and the Public Domain By adopting the perspective of consumers of speech goods, free speech breaks free from the limited negative conception of liberty as freedom from state interference. However, at another level this opens out a different theoretical concern - the relationship between the rights of the consumer of speech goods and the private law rights of the producer of speech goods. Historically, most common law jurisdictions have granted such producers proprietary and non-proprietary claims over their speech goods. The development of a positive dimension to the free speech right will necessarily limit the scope and extent of these private law claims. At this stage it is useful to introduce the perspective adopted by free software and open source software movements in developing innovative licensing agreements designed to keep certain types of software in the public domain. Though far removed from the factual context of the Ten Sports and Cricket Association of Bengal cases, the articulation of a concept of the public domain by these software movements may provide us with an overarching theoretical framework that reconciles the public law interest in the availability of speech goods and the private rights of producers of goods. Conclusion This essay will conclude by applying this theoretical framework to the broadcasting law developed by the Supreme Court in the context of cricket matches. We will evaluate if the theoretical concept of the public domain can provide us with a doctrinal body of rules that may be coherently applied in the interpretation of the free speech right guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Further we will explore the implications of adopting a concept of the public domain in the free speech jurisprudence on other areas of private law - particularly on the law of copyright, trademark and patent. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040328/3d13a11e/attachment.html From lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com Tue Mar 30 12:05:00 2004 From: lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com (Lawrence Liang) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 22:35:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Commons-Law] activist cyber "civil society" Message-ID: <20040330063500.32084.qmail@web13606.mail.yahoo.com> hi all this is a bizzare advertsisement posted by naavi, where a private agent provides certificates, conducts 'surprise raids', and all of this is voluntary :); what i find very fascinating about the terms in which the new rules of "cyber society" (its so easy to invet new words , just add a word after the word cuber and it is supposed to sound sexy) are the ways in which they emulate the older languages of cultivating a 'responsible citizen' and 'civil society', wasnt the idea of the internet supposed to be about dislodging and destabliizing some of these great concepts in the first place Lawrence ========== In another pioneering effort aimed at developing a responsible Cyber Society, Cyber Law College will be starting CyLawCom Certification of Cyber Cafes in Chennai on request. Under the scheme, CyLawCom examiners authorized by Cyber Law College will inspect the Cyber Cafe on invitation, conduct an audit and certify the CyLawCom status of the Cyber Cafe. The Certificate will be issued based on the report of the CyLawCom examiner by the Cyber Law College and will be valid for 6 months. It is renewable thereafter. It is also proposed that Cyber Law College would receive public complaints, conduct surprise inspection if required and downgrade ratings if inspection reveals dilution of standards. This is a voluntary Cyber Law Compliance measure recommended to be undertaken by Cyber Cafes and is aimed at developing Law Enforcement Friendly Cyber Cafes. Interested Cyber Cafes may contact naavi. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html From shuddha at xs4all.nl Sat Mar 27 18:24:22 2004 From: shuddha at xs4all.nl (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 20:54:22 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] [Reader-list] VIKALP OPENS! - A Report by Saba Dewan Message-ID: <200403271254.i2RCsMOc005237@imsmq02.netvigator.com> This is to follow up on the announcement on the Reader List of Vikalp, the film festival organized by CAC, the Campaign Against Censorship, in protest against censorship at the MIFF (Mumbai International Film Festival). Here is a report posted by Saba Dewan, of the CAC, of the first day of Vikalp. Cheers, and in the hope that every protest from now on, is also a celebration, and a festival Shuddha ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: VIKALP OPENS! Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 18:55:22 +0500 From: khel at vsnl.com CAMPAIGN AGAINST CENSORSHIP 4/02/04 Dear Friends, The Campaign Against Censorship (CAC) transformed its ongoing protest against the Mumbai International Film Festival into a celebration of diversity, engaged filmmaking, and a refusal to submit before censorship. Starting today Vikalp: Films for Freedom will screen 58 films that deal with a wide range of issues including the Gujarat carnage, communal politics, caste and gender discrimination, sexuality and the politics of development. Many of these films have been widely recognized for their political rigour, integrity and creative excellence. While a large number of these films were `rejecte -------------- next part -------------- ***** NOTE: An attachment named cd writing error.ERR.pif was deleted from this message because it possibly contained a windows executable or other potentially dangerous file type. Contact root at sarai.net for more information. From nikitabandhari at yahoo.co.in Sun Mar 28 05:19:13 2004 From: nikitabandhari at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?nikita=20bandhari?=) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 23:49:13 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] A request Message-ID: <20040327234913.63086.qmail@web8303.mail.in.yahoo.com> Hi Though I am not a part of this collective consciousness yet would like to make a request . I am doing a paper on the conflict of trademarks and domain names and the means to resolve them . I would be very grateful for any leads ..suggestions or brain waves . Thanks Niki Win an evening with the Indian cricket captain: Yahoo! India Promos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040327/45ac76bc/attachment.html From vivek at law.harvard.edu Sun Mar 28 11:45:00 2004 From: vivek at law.harvard.edu (Vivek ) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 01:15:00 -0500 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts In-Reply-To: <001501c410a3$999b9340$c200a8c0@Sudhir> Message-ID: <000001c4148c$0078cbf0$5acbf78c@ibm89og2lhw4p8> Dear Sudhir, This is in response to your write up on Positive Free Speech Rights. I do the appreciate the point which you make about the order passed by the Supreme Court in the Ten Sports Case-reducing the rigor of the State Action Doctrine in free speech area. This judgment could also play a role in the providing a constitutional basis for the public domain concept in India. But there is another issue in the Ten Sports Case which is of importance. From the newspaper reports I gather that there was no statutory backing for the order. The order was passed in a Public Interest Litigation by the Madras HC. The Union government threatened to pass an ordinance, but ultimately did not resort to that route since the court was able to achieve the same result!!! [if this information is incorrect, then ignore the later part of the mail] If this is true, it raises a serious constitutional issue-the democratic pedigree of the order of the Supreme Court. Acquiring the property of any person-even if it is for "public interest"-without a legislative sanction is violative of the constitutional prescription outlined in Article 300 [No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law]. If there is any content in the right to property as it exists today, it is the procedural protection of legislative authorization. The fact that the broadcaster is only being asked to share his right would not materially affect the argument. An interest of a person is being acquired without his consent. It could happen only if it goes through the democratic process and not by an order of the court. The Supreme Court by an order has ordered sharing of property, prescribed compensation and dictated the terms of the sharing!!!. While I am all for judicial creativity and the Indian Supreme Court can never be found wanting in that regard, constitutional prescriptions are also of equal significance. Best Vivek -----Original Message----- From: commons-law-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:commons-law-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of Sudhir Sent: 23 March 2004 01:54 To: commons-law at sarai.net Subject: [Commons-Law] Ten Sports and Positive Free Speech Rts Clean Clean DocumentEmail MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Dear all The legal gymnastics by the Supreme Court and Chennai High Court in the Ten Sports matter in the last fortnight threatens to surpass all achievements on the cricket fields in Pakistan! I am sure that many of you on this list have followed these developments with great interest and have developed a view on whether the court was right to make this intervention. In the next few months I aim to study these developments carefully to better understand the legal doctrine being unveiled by the court. What follows below is a broad abstract of the proposed research. I am keen to hear from anyone who has take on these issues. Thanks Sudhir Krishnaswamy Positive Free Speech Rights Sudhir Krishnaswamy Introduction In the last fortnight the Supreme Court of India has presided, over an extra-ordinary legal spectacle. The court allowed public interest petitioners to challenge the legal rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the ongoing one day and test match cricket series between India and Pakistan over subscription based cable TV. While allowing itself to be the arbiter between two commercially minded parties over a high profile and high cost matter, the court has unveiled a new doctrine of the positive free speech rights under the Constitution. This decision of the court, which is yet to be reported, promises to establish a new positive dimension to the freedom of speech and expression protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution that inhibits the proprietary rights of private individuals. While concluding that there was a legitimate public interest in watching the Indo-Pak cricket series, the court relied on its earlier decision in the Cricket Association of Bengal [Hereafter CAB] case. While reiterating the principle upheld in CAB, that the airwaves are public property, the court ironically reached the opposite conclusions. In CAB the court upheld the rights of the petitioner to auction its broadcasting rights to the highest bidder - a subscription based cable channel - at the cost of Doordarshan. In the Ten Sports case, the Supreme Court applied the same principle to find that Doordarshan should be authorized to broadcast the cricket matches on free to air TV overriding the private rights of Ten Sports to broadcast the same on their subscription based TV channels. At first glance, it appears that both these decisions cannot be right. The court seems to reach the opposite fact based conclusions in these cases but claims that it is applying the same principle. This essay asks if these curious decisions are justifiable and more importantly if the principle they seek to apply is an intelligible version of the right of free speech and expression. The essay will argue that the court is developing a positive dimension to the right of free speech which is a reasonable extension of the existing doctrine and justifications in the case law on Article 19(1)(a). However, this positive dimension of the free speech right is not capable of providing a justification for the Ten Sports case. Free Speech and Article 19(1)(a) In the last fifty years the Indian Supreme Court has developed a robust doctrine of free speech under Article 19(1)(a). The court has for the most part vigorously defended the free speech of citizens and the press against different forms of state intervention. This right has been extended to the institutional framework required to produce and sustain speech activity. This constitutional doctrine has been developed primarily in the context of the print media. The applicability of this doctrine to new forms of media and to new methods of delivery of media to consumers will give rise to novel and difficult problems. This essay does not set out to explore the contours of this extension of the free speech doctrine. In the last decade the court has developed a new facet of the right to free speech that does not focus on the producers but rather on the consumers of speech commodities. This positive dimension of the free speech right is expressed doctrinally through citizen claims for the right to information and more recently the right to be entertained by watching cricket. By locating the right in consumers of information and entertainment the right is indifferent about who this claim is ranged against - state or private actors. Cumulatively these two new facets of the free speech right will unleash a comprehensively new dimension to the right to free speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19. Free Speech and the Public Domain By adopting the perspective of consumers of speech goods, free speech breaks free from the limited negative conception of liberty as freedom from state interference. However, at another level this opens out a different theoretical concern - the relationship between the rights of the consumer of speech goods and the private law rights of the producer of speech goods. Historically, most common law jurisdictions have granted such producers proprietary and non-proprietary claims over their speech goods. The development of a positive dimension to the free speech right will necessarily limit the scope and extent of these private law claims. At this stage it is useful to introduce the perspective adopted by free software and open source software movements in developing innovative licensing agreements designed to keep certain types of software in the public domain. Though far removed from the factual context of the Ten Sports and Cricket Association of Bengal cases, the articulation of a concept of the public domain by these software movements may provide us with an overarching theoretical framework that reconciles the public law interest in the availability of speech goods and the private rights of producers of goods. Conclusion This essay will conclude by applying this theoretical framework to the broadcasting law developed by the Supreme Court in the context of cricket matches. We will evaluate if the theoretical concept of the public domain can provide us with a doctrinal body of rules that may be coherently applied in the interpretation of the free speech right guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Further we will explore the implications of adopting a concept of the public domain in the free speech jurisprudence on other areas of private law - particularly on the law of copyright, trademark and patent. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20040328/2fc144ae/attachment.html From shuddha at nmartproject.net Mon Mar 29 15:06:10 2004 From: shuddha at nmartproject.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 17:36:10 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: [Reader-list] Kashmir Session at WSF Message-ID: <200403290936.i2T9aAkB003735@imsmq06.netvigator.com> Dear Zainab and everyone, Many thanks, Zainab, for filling in a much more vivid and detailed picture of the Kashmir panel that I had mentioned at the WSF. I did not stay right till the end of the panel, and so was not aware of what transpired at the question and answer session. (and I must add that I was also not present at the juncure when a Kashmiri Pandit lady who was present, protested, and who you say was silenced). Of course, my report, was incomplete, and your testimony only points to the fact that there can never be a record of an event that is anything other than what the witness saw, or, more interestingly, perhaps chose to see. I saw, or chose to see, a certain slice of the event, and that is what i have written about, it needs to be qualified and seen in relation to what you saw, and what you reported, that is why this is a discussion list and not a seminar. So thanks for that ! After all, we did sit next to each other for a while when both of us were present. And what would be the point of both of us being on this list, if at least we could not enjoy the fact of complicating each other's narrative, in a Rashomonesque sort of way ! I did notice that while I was there and Yasin Malik was speaking, a gentleman did make some loud interjections, especially when Yasin Malik was speaking about Gandhi, and that the some from amongst the audience counter interjected, saying Yasin Malik should be allowed to speak. I do not think that there is anything wrong about that. However, if that same person, is not allowed their turn to speak at all during a question answer session where the audience is meant to be involved, then I think there is definitely something wrong going on. However, as you say, following the interjection of two ladies sitting in the audience who said "Let him speak! If he does not get a chance to speak at WSF, where else will he speak -------------- next part -------------- ***** NOTE: An attachment named cd writing error.ERR.exe was deleted from this message because it possibly contained a windows executable or other potentially dangerous file type. Contact root at sarai.net for more information.