From pamri.in at gmail.com Tue Nov 1 12:49:42 2005 From: pamri.in at gmail.com (Pamri in) Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 12:49:42 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Implications of RTI act on copyright Message-ID: Hi everyone, As someone with more than a passing interest in Wikipedia, I need some clarifications on some copyright issues we are facing, with respect to using content from Indian government sites. A few months back, one of our users created this copyright tag : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-IndiaGov It basically states: "This image is in the public domain as it comes from an Indian Government site. Information published by Indian government websites are in Public Domain under the Right to Information Act." (For non-wikipedians, a copyright tag is a summary, in plain English, of the license under which an image is uploaded. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ICT for more examples) The wording of the tag was based on our understanding and assumptions stated below: * Chapter II of the RTI act (http://www.persmin.nic.in/RTI/WebActRTI.htm) states: "Without prejudice to the provisions of section 8, a Central Public Information Officer or a State Public Information Officer, as the case may be, may reject a request for information where such a request for providing access would involve an infringement of copyright subsisting in a person other than the State." * The UP governments' website states (http://www.upgov.nic.in/upinfo/upitpolicy2004.htm): "All public domain information like official gazette notifications, acts, rules regulations, circulars, policies and programme documents would be digitised and made available for electronic access on Web." * The Haryana governments' website states (http://haryanait.nic.in/html/it_itand_publicdomain.htm) : "The State Government Departments shall establish departmental intranets and local area networks which will lay the foundation of Centralised Data Repository of public domain information for "Anytime-Anywhere" usage." * Delhi Govt.'s IT policy states(http://delhigovt.nic.in/icetpolicy.pdf) : "Simultaneously, the government will also put on the internet information that ought to be in public domain. This will enable the citizens to play the role of a watchdog and to ensure transparency" * Sebi's website states (http://www.sebi.gov.in/acts/RTIAct2005.html) (1) Acts, Rules, Regulations, Guidelines, Circulars, etc. (2) Orders passed by SEBI (3) Reports of Committees (4) Press Releases (5) Annual Report (6) SEBI Bulletin are in the public domain. We have a few doubts/queries besides: The first one being, whether the wording of the tag is correct. Second, Even if the images are copyrighted, can we use it under a) the RTI act or b) fair use or c) public domain (with attribution) Thirdly, does the use of public domain in the policies stated above mean: "Works without any copyright restrictions" or "copyrighted but available for public use (??)" Fourthly, If we can use the content under the RTI act/somehow, do Indian government sites allow commercial use + derivative use of their content (text/images). Sorry for the long mail, but we were getting quite frustrated in finding unencumbered images about India (especially current events, celebrities,etc.,). Regards, Pramod.R From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Tue Nov 1 22:31:17 2005 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 09:01:17 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Comments on Mossberg: Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities]] Message-ID: <43679F5D.109A2AA0@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> (See Mossberg article at the bottom of this thread. -- Seth) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [IP] more on Summerized -- Mossberg: Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 01:06:56 -0700 From: Seth Johnson To: dave at farber.net The best thing would be to just stop putting policy related to TPMs under the umbrella of copyright policy. Really, what's being attempted with "DRM" and TPM is a weird effort to do something less than actual publishing of information. The theory that controlling public uses of published information is a natural function of copyright, is really, really specious, to put it mildly. It isn't the work, ultimately, that we want out of copyright; it's the shared (published) information, the knowledge and understanding and facts and ideas which promote the progress of science and the useful arts. The information within the work, when we make a distinction from original expression, is free to be used. That this is the case is not a mere legal artifice; it is in the intrinsic nature of publishing any information at all. It's nothing new; it's not a result of the digital revolution; it's a result of the nature of information, regardless of the medium or the form in which it is represented -- and this has always been the case, and will always be the case. Distinguishing copyright and private interest uses of TPMs lets you start sorting things out and begin articulating a sensible policy that lives in the real world. You want to control a transaction, use access control. That's more of a private interest concept than copyright policy is designed to accomplish. You want to set special terms for exactly what sort of transaction is taking place when someone obtains a work from you, then we need to confront those policy implications forthrightly. But what's going on there isn't really copyright: even though TPMs may be strengthened by enforcement under the misnamed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the terms that are imposed in these transactions are not really in principle valid under copyright -- and on the other hand they're often not really good models of valid, consensual contractual arrangements. Now, to look at it from that perspective, contractual arrangements that go beyond transfers of specific exclusive rights that authors hold, are about private interest and they also happen to be consensual; whereas authors may exercise their exclusive rights under copyright even without a consensual contract. There's a deep mismatch there. The rights that we choose to give to authors under a copyright policy appropriate for the digital age have to be considered in this light. The confusion evaporates after you recognize these distinctions between copyright and attempts to impose prior restraints on how others can use the information contained within expressive works. I might add, that clarifying the above is completely inconsistent with a basic purpose behind the various attempts to promulgate the notion of "DRM": the idea being to mix copyright policy with private interest perspectives until something very, very different from valid copyright can be established, and a new precedent can be set, that will hopefully trump traditional jurisprudence. If this cannot be accomplished through laws enacted by representatives directly accountable to their constituencies, then the intention is to do so through international treaties enacted by unelected representatives. Seth Johnson David Farber wrote: > > Begin forwarded message: > > From: TClaburn at cmp.com > Date: October 20, 2005 11:10:25 AM EDT > To: dave at farber.net > Subject: Re: [IP] Summerized -- Mossberg: Media Companies Go Too Far > in Curbing Consumers' Activities > > I agree wholeheartedly with Walter Mossberg, though I believe he > misses the mark > on this point: > > "I believe Congress should rewrite the copyright laws to carve > out a broad exemption for personal, noncommercial use by > consumers, including sharing small numbers of copies among > families." > > While it would be helpful to have fair use codified, consumers > already have these rights in theory. But they cannot exercise > them because of technical protection methods/digital rights > management. > > If the law is to be of assistance here, it needs to limit DRM. > And that's not likely to happen until Congress revisits the > Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the > circumvention of DRM technology. As Lawrence Lessig has > suggested, code is law. > > Thomas Claburn > InformationWeek > http://www.lot49.com > > > > > -------- Original Message -------- > > Subject: [IP] Summerized -- Mossberg: Media Companies Go Too > > Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities > > Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:00:20 -0400 > > From: David Farber > > Reply-To: dave at farber.net > > To: Ip Ip > > References: > > > > > > > > Begin forwarded message: > > > > From: Richard Forno > > Date: October 20, 2005 9:30:41 AM EDT > > To: Infowarrior List > > Cc: Dave Farber > > Subject: Mossberg: Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' > > Activities > > > > > > (Agree 100% with him.....rf) > > > > > > Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities > > > > By WALTER S. MOSSBERG > > http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20051020.html > > They stand for Digital Rights Management, a set of > > technologies for limiting how people can use the music > > and video files they've purchased from legal downloading > > services. DRM is even being used to limit what you can do > > with the music you buy on physical CDs, or the TV shows you > > record with a TiVo or other digital video recorder. > > > > Once mainly known inside the media industries and among > > activists who follow copyright issues, DRM is gradually > > becoming familiar to average consumers, who are > > increasingly bumping up against its limitations. > > > > ...Using a DRM system it invented called FairPlay, Apple > > has rigged its songs, at the insistence of the record > > companies, so that they can be played only on a maximum of > > five computers, and so that you can burn only seven CDs > > containing the same playlist of purchased tracks. > > > > ...Some CD buyers are discovering to their dismay that new > > releases from certain record companies contain DRM code > > that makes it difficult to copy the songs to their > > computers, where millions prefer to keep their music. > > > > ...They believe that once a consumer legally buys a song > > or a video clip, the companies that sold them have no > > right to limit how the consumer uses them, any more than a > > car company should be able to limit what you can do with a > > car you've bought. > > > > ...The companies believe they need DRM technology to block > > the possibility that a song or video can be copied in > > large quantities and distributed over the Internet, thus > > robbing them of legitimate sales. > > > > ...Millions of copies of songs, TV shows and movies are > > being distributed over the Internet by people who have no > > legal right to do so, robbing media companies and artists > > of rightful compensation for their work. > > > > ...On the other hand, I believe that consumers should have > > broad leeway to use legally purchased music and video for > > personal, noncommercial purposes in any way they want -- > > as long as they don't engage in mass distribution. > > > > ...Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from > > copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should > > be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates > > -- people who upload massive quantities of music and > > videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in > > China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs. From prashant at nalsartech.org Tue Nov 1 22:26:38 2005 From: prashant at nalsartech.org (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:26:38 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Implications of RTI act on copyright In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20051101222638.7lxiu6ssvq00c4sk@www.nalsartech.org> Hi, I must say that when I read this email my eyes popped! As one who with a "not-just-passing" interest in wikis myself, this sounded almost too good to believe. I've ferretted around for "the law" on the matter using the leads you've mentioned and also followed some hunches of my own. My provisional conclusions (subject always to challenge by others on this list) run as follows: 1) Under the Indian Copyright Act, the Government is vested with first ownership of copyrights (Sec 17) over all Government Works (Sec 2(k)) prepared under its direction. 2) a) The Right to Information Act enjoins the appropriate Government to provide certain classes of information to the public upon request (or suo motu) either free of cost or at cost. b) Under the RTI Act, the class of acts which a citizen could undertake that would constitute the exercise her "Right to Information" is limited and includes (i) inspection of work, documents, records; (ii) taking notes, extracts or certified copies of documents or records (iii) taking certified samples of material; (iv)obtaining information in the form of diskettes, floppies, tapes, video cassettes or in any other electronic mode or through printouts where such information is stored in a computer or in any other device; This list does *not* include acts such as a) reproducion b) issuing copies to the public c) performance d) adaptations. In other words, the RTI Act does not let a citizen do any of the things, for which the exclusive right to do (or not do. undo?) vests exclusively with the Copyright owner. 3) Following from No.2 above a) The RTI Act does nothing to divest/terminate the copyright of the Government in its works b) Neither does it create a license or assign the copyright in Government works to the public in perpetuity To my mind, these are the only two conceivable ways in which a work may enter the public domain. To the extent to which the RTI Act does neither of the above, the statement of the new copyright notice your user is trying to create appears to be inaccurate 4) Under the Indian Copyright Act, it is "fair dealing" to publish anything which has been published in the Official Gazette. (see Sec 52 generally) This may lend you some assistance, however I cannot imagine instances of the kind you describe where pictures are published in the Gazette. The Official Gazette is a "serious" publication - filled with tender notices, statistical indices, names of government employees and no pictures. 5) I don't know what to make of the rich compendium of "public domain" policy statements you have quoted. As a fellow netizen and a free disemminator of information I rejoice with you at their sight. As a lawyer and as someone who could be hauled up in court, I would be a less sure. When the SEBI website says that all its Acts/statutes/circulars are in the public domain I would wait to see the authority behind that statement. Has it been issued by the officer within SEBI with the proper authority to issue such statements? If yes, there must be a signed physical document somewhere. If not, the statements on the website must be treated as superfluous. Under the Copyright Act, copyright comes to an end upon a) expiry of the term of the copyright or b) when a copyright owner sends written notification of her relinquishment to the Registrar of Copyrights. It is not achieved as simply as by as posting a notice on your website incorporating pithy phrases like "public domain". Arguendo, it would enable you to raise the defence of estoppel - that you were induced by their own statements on their website and therfore they should not sue you. Aside, I would not be too worried about facing suits from government offices on account of copyright. I should imagine they have better business. Personally, I hugely appreciate what wikipedia and similar initiatives are doing. Big fan. Hope this clarifies. I've included below some of the key provisions of the Copyright Act which I've used. Regards, Prashant Text of Right to Information Act at http://www.mit.gov.in/rti-act.pdf Text of Copyright Act at : http://www.naukri.com/lls/copyright/cpwrt.htm The Indian Copyright Act 2(k) "Government work" means a work which is made or published by or under the direction or control of-- 1. the Government or any department of the Government; 2. any Legislature in India; 3. any Court, Tribunal or other judicial authority in India; 17 (d)in the case of a Government work, Government shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright therein; dd. in the case of a work made or first published by or under the direction or control of any public undertaking, such public undertaking shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright therein. 28. Term of copyright in Government works. -- In the case of a Government work, where Government is the first owner of the copyright therein, copyright shall subsist until sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the record is first published. 52(1)The following acts shall not constitute an infringement of copyright namely:- (d) the reprodution or publication of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work in any work prepared by the Secretariat of a Legislature or, where the Legislature consists of two Houses, by the Secretariat of either House of the Legislature, exclusively for the use of the members of that Legislature; (q) the reproduction or publication of-- 1. any matter which has been published in any Official Gazette except an Act of a Legislature; 2. any Act of a Legislature subject to the condition that such Act is reproduced or published together with any commentary thereon or any other original matter; 3. the report of any committee, commission, council, board or other like body appointed by the Legislature, unless the reproduction or publication of such report is prohibited by the Government; 4. any judgment or order of a Court, Tribunal or other judicial authority, unless the reproduction or publication of such judgment or order is prohibited by the Court, the Tribual or other judicial authority, as the case may be; (r) the production or publication of a translation in any Indian language of an Act of a Legislature and of any rules or orders made thereunder -- 1. if no translation of such Act or rules or orders in that language has been produced or published by the Goverment; or 2. where a translation of such Act or rules or orders in that language has been produced or published by the Government, if the translation is not available for sale to the public: Provided that such translation contains a statement at a prominent place to the effect that the translation has not been authorised or accepted as authentic by the Government; if the translation is not available for sale to the public: Quoting Pamri in : > Hi everyone, > As someone with more than a passing interest in Wikipedia, I need some > clarifications on some copyright issues we are facing, with respect to > using content from Indian government sites. > > A few months back, one of our users created this copyright tag : > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-IndiaGov > It basically states: > "This image is in the public domain as it comes from an Indian > Government site. Information published by Indian government websites > are in Public Domain under the Right to Information Act." > > (For non-wikipedians, a copyright tag is a summary, in plain English, > of the license under which an image is uploaded. See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ICT for more examples) > > The wording of the tag was based on our understanding and assumptions > stated below: > * Chapter II of the RTI act > (http://www.persmin.nic.in/RTI/WebActRTI.htm) states: > "Without prejudice to the provisions of section 8, a Central Public > Information Officer or a State Public Information Officer, as the case > may be, may reject a request for information where such a request for > providing access would involve an infringement of copyright subsisting > in a person other than the State." > > * The UP governments' website states > (http://www.upgov.nic.in/upinfo/upitpolicy2004.htm): > "All public domain information like official gazette notifications, > acts, rules regulations, circulars, policies and programme documents > would be digitised and made available for electronic access on Web." > > * The Haryana governments' website states > (http://haryanait.nic.in/html/it_itand_publicdomain.htm) : > "The State Government Departments shall establish departmental > intranets and local area networks which will lay the foundation of > Centralised Data Repository of public domain information for > "Anytime-Anywhere" usage." > > * Delhi Govt.'s IT policy > states(http://delhigovt.nic.in/icetpolicy.pdf) : "Simultaneously, the > government will also put on the internet information that ought to be > in public domain. This will enable the citizens to play the role of a > watchdog and to ensure transparency" > > * Sebi's website states (http://www.sebi.gov.in/acts/RTIAct2005.html) > (1) Acts, Rules, Regulations, Guidelines, Circulars, etc. (2) Orders > passed by SEBI (3) Reports of Committees (4) Press Releases (5) Annual > Report (6) SEBI Bulletin are in the public domain. > > We have a few doubts/queries besides: > The first one being, whether the wording of the tag is correct. > Second, Even if the images are copyrighted, can we use it under a) > the RTI act or b) fair use or c) public domain (with attribution) > Thirdly, does the use of public domain in the policies stated above > mean: "Works without any copyright restrictions" or "copyrighted but > available for public use (??)" > Fourthly, If we can use the content under the RTI act/somehow, do > Indian government sites allow commercial use + derivative use of their > content (text/images). > > Sorry for the long mail, but we were getting quite frustrated in > finding unencumbered images about India (especially current events, > celebrities,etc.,). > > Regards, > Pramod.R > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > From hbs.law at gmail.com Thu Nov 3 22:06:36 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 22:06:36 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Remembering J.C. Bose... Message-ID: <8b60429e0511030836x166514d0u90e17ed7845b9cb6@mail.gmail.com> Hi to each one of everyone, Have you ever thought about how invention is created in first place? that how hard it can be? and whether capturing it in IP or making it public is only secondary to inventing in first place? This wonderful piece: http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html explains just that. The hero of the story is none other than Jagdish Chandra Bose. The inventor of radio transmission, chrestograph and many many other instruments. This site has fantastic pictures of his inventions. Ladies and Gentlemen, please note the place and time of these inventions: India (Calcutta, as it then was) and the approx year 1890! I can only imagine Bose's difficulties: his starting point was just few equations, nothing was known about radio transmission, properties of radio waves unknown, no equipments (he invented the equipment himself). Bose chose to make his work public, unlike Marconi. I cannot help thinking what would have been India's technical progress had Bose aggressively pursued commercialization of his radio, semiconductors and instrumentation inventions. May be Motorola would be Indirola, Qualcomm would be Indicom and so on (these companies have done great research, no offense to their R&D work). Why did this not happen here in India despite of a such a flying start given by J.C. Bose? Regards, Hasit From paivakil at yahoo.co.in Fri Nov 4 11:29:06 2005 From: paivakil at yahoo.co.in (Mahesh T. Pai) Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 11:29:06 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Implications of RTI act on copyright In-Reply-To: <20051101222638.7lxiu6ssvq00c4sk@www.nalsartech.org> References: <20051101222638.7lxiu6ssvq00c4sk@www.nalsartech.org> Message-ID: <20051104055906.GA9712@home.wki> Prashant Iyengar said on Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 10:26:38PM +0530,: > could be hauled up in court, I would be a less sure. When the SEBI > website says that all its Acts/statutes/circulars are in the public > domain I would wait to see the authority behind that statement. Has > it been issued by the officer within SEBI with the proper authority > to issue such statements? If yes, there must be a signed physical > document somewhere. If not, the statements on the website must be > treated as superfluous. SEBI's statement is inaccurate. Verbatim reproduction of what lawyers call ``Bare Acts'' is not allowed under the Copyright Act. I suspect that India is the only country where the sovereign claims copyright over the text of the law. (umm.. England, where the HMSO is the only body which may publish verbatim texts of Statutes (that is, without any ``notes'' does come to my mind; but we do not have an equivalent of the HMSO which actually functions.) > by as posting a notice on your website incorporating pithy phrases > like "public domain". Arguendo, it would enable you to raise the > defence of estoppel - that you were induced by their own statements > on their website and therfore they should not sue you. Estoppel??? Against a statute??? aw!!! cm'on!!! > Aside, I would not be too worried about facing suits from > government offices on account of copyright. I should imagine they > have better business. Heh. FYI, material available from http://in.geocities.com/paivakil/scripts/index2.html violates copyright of the govt. of Kerala. Now, here is some food for thought. X files an application under RTI Act. The govt asks him to pay Rs. 50/- (the amount fixed by the Govt. of Kerala, afaik) for the information, provided to him on a floppy. The information is in a format covered by a patent, and the software which can open the file provided by the government is available only for an exorbitant price. *Right* to Information? -- Mahesh T. Pai Distributing free copies of non-free software is -- -- like advertising drugs. From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Fri Nov 4 19:35:39 2005 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:05:39 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Storyline Patent Application Published Message-ID: <436B6AB3.5644EF1@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> > http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/11/emw303435.htm U.S. Patent Office Publishes the First Patent Application to Claim a Fictional Storyline; Inventor Asserts Provisional Rights Against Hollywood The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will publish history’s first "storyline patent" application today from an application filed in November, 2003. Inventor Andrew Knight will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against the entertainment industry. Falls Church, Virginia (PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first "storyline patent" application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline. Knight, a rocket engine inventor, registered patent agent, and graduate of MIT and Georgetown Law, will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of his published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theaters. According to the official Patent Office website, provisional rights "provide a patentee with the opportunity to obtain a reasonable royalty from a third party that infringes a published application claim provided actual notice is given to the third party by [the] applicant, and a patent issues from the application with a substantially identical claim." Before a patent will issue, however, the application must overcome the hurdles of utility, novelty, and nonobviousness found in U.S. patent laws. According to Knight, the utility requirement addresses whether an invention falls within statutory subject matter, while novelty and nonobviousness address whether the invention is identical to or impermissibly similar to previous inventions. That fictional storylines may be patentable was first suggested in a November, 2004 article in the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, "A Potentially New IP: Storyline Patents." The article argues that binding case law strongly suggests that methods of performing and displaying fictional plots, whether found in motion pictures, novels, television shows, or commercials, are statutory subject matter, like computer software and business methods. Regarding the utility requirement, "The case law of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has established that virtually any subject matter is potentially patentable," explained Jay Thomas, Professor of Law at Georgetown University. Further, "Due to the broad scope of patentable subject matter, novel storylines may fall within the [utility requirement]," said Charles Berman, Co-Chair of the Patent Prosecution Practice at Greenberg Traurig LLP. The real issue? According to Berman, "Non-obviousness probably presents the biggest challenge to patentability" because minor variations on a central theme may generate so many different storylines. Nevertheless, Knight asserts that his claimed storyline meets all statutory requirements, including nonobviousness. The fictitious story, which Knight dubs "The Zombie Stare," tells of an ambitious high school senior, consumed by anticipation of college admission, who prays one night to remain unconscious until receiving his MIT admissions letter. He consciously awakes 30 years later when he finally receives the letter, lost in the mail for so many years, and discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived an apparently normal life. He desperately seeks to regain 30 years’ worth of memories lost as an unconscious philosophical zombie. Will Knight’s claimed storyline pass the rigors of nonobviousness and issue as a U.S. Patent? If so, the stakes are high. According to Thomas, "Given the robust scope of patent protection provided by the Patent Act storyline patents potentially provide their owners with a significant proprietary interest." The U.S. Patent Office will publish subsequent storyline patent applications, also invented by Knight, on November 17 and December 8 and 22. For an information packet, including a copy of the JPTOS article, contact Andrew Knight or visit www.PlotPatents.com. ### -- RIAA is the RISK! Our NET is P2P! http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/ftc DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! New Yorkers for Fair Use http://www.nyfairuse.org [CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights. From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Fri Nov 4 20:06:10 2005 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:36:10 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] PK Testimony on Broadcast Flag Message-ID: <436B71DA.8E53EA10@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> > http://www.publicknowledge.org/news/testimony/20051103-gbsohn-testimony > http://static.publicknowledge.org/pdf/20051103-gbsohn-testimony.pdf Statement of Gigi B. Sohn, President Public Knowledge Before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Oversight Hearing on "Content Protection in the Digital Age: The Broadcast Flag, High-Definition Radio, and the Analog Hole" Washington, DC November 3, 2005 Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Berman and other members of the Subcommittee, my name is Gigi B. Sohn. I am the President of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit public interest organization that addresses the public's stake in the convergence of communications policy and intellectual property law. I want to thank the Subcommittee for inviting me to testify on content protection in the digital age, and to comment on what I hope to be the first of many discussions on three draft pieces of legislation before the subcommittee, the Broadcast Flag Authorization Act (BFAA), the HD Radio Content Protection Act (HDRCPA) and the Analog Content Protection Act (ACPA).1 Introduction and Summary As some of you know, I served as counsel to the nine public interest and library groups that successfully challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) broadcast flag rules in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. My organization financed and coordinated the case, which is titled American Library Association v. FCC, 406 F.3d 689 (D.C. Cir. 2005). I respectfully request that a copy of the court’s decision and a copy of petitioners’ opening brief in the case be placed into the record of this hearing. For Public Knowledge, its members and its public interest allies, the D.C. Circuit’s decision vacating the broadcast flag rules is about much more than the ability of citizens to make non-infringing uses of copyrighted material that they receive over free over-the-air broadcast television. It is about limiting the power of a government agency that, in the court’s own words, has never exercised such "sweeping" power over the design of a broad range of consumer electronics and computer devices. For the past seventy years, Congress has never given the FCC such unbounded authority to control technological design. This has fostered a robust market place for electronic devices that has in turn made this country the leader in their development and manufacture. The broadcast flag scheme would put a government agency in the position of deciding what software and hardware technologies will come to market and which will fail. I urge this subcommittee to think very long and hard before granting the FCC broad power to engage in this kind of industrial policy. Ask yourselves, is it good policy to turn the Federal Communications Commission into the Federal Computer Commission or the Federal Copyright Commission? I am confident that with the opportunity for public input and serious deliberation and an opportunity for public input, you will decide that the marketplace, not the government, is the best arbiter of what technologies succeed or fail, and that Congress, not the FCC, is the correct arbiter of the proper balance between content protection and consumer rights. I similarly urge this subcommittee to weigh the costs to consumers of proposals to mandate content protection for digital satellite and broadcast radio and to mandate content protection to close the analog hole. Efforts to limit what consumers can record over digital radio technologies suffer from many of the same maladies as the TV broadcast flag -- specifically government control over technology design. In addition, the proposed radio content protection legislation permits the FCC extinguishes the long-protected consumer right, guaranteed by the Audio Home Recording Act, to record transmissions for personal use. Furthermore, because the draft bill will impose limits on a new technology -- so called HD Radio – that, unlike digital television, consumers need not adopt, those limits may well kill this fledgling technology. Why would a consumer buy an expensive new digital broadcast radio receiver when it would have less functionality than the current analog receiver? The broad, sweeping draft legislation to close the analog hole suffers from the same problem; it puts the government in the role of making industrial policy, and will severely limit consumers’ ability to make lawful uses of copyrighted content. Like the broadcast flag, the legislation mandates a one-size-fits-all technology that has not been the subject of public or even inter-industry scrutiny. The prohibitions in the legislation would require redesign of a whole range of currently legal consumer devices, including DVD recorders, personal video recorders and camcorders with video inputs. Importantly, the existence of the analog hole has been touted as a "safety valve" for making fair use of digital media products where circumventing the technological locks has been rendered illegal by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Should Congress close that hole without amending the DMCA to protect fair use, consumers' rights to access digital copyrighted works will be eroded even further. There are better alternatives for protecting digital content than the heavy-handed technology mandates proposed here today. Those alternatives are a multi-pronged approach of consumer education, enforcement of copyright laws and use of technological tools developed in the marketplace, not mandated by government. The recent Grokster decision and the passage of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which you spearheaded, Mr. Chairman, are just two of several new tools that the content industry has at its disposal to protect its content. Any Legislation to Reinstate the Broadcast Flag or Impose Radio Copy Protection Should be Considered in Regular Order As a preliminary matter, I would like to address an important procedural issue. If this subcommittee and the Congress ultimately decide to legislate with regard to the broadcast flag and digital radio copy protection, it should do so in regular order, and not as part of a budget resolution or appropriations bill. These matters are not germane to the budget and appropriations processes. Indeed, they are far too important and controversial to be legislated on a spending bill. If Congress ultimately decides that it must try and legislate broadcast flag and radio content protection mandates, it should do so only after considerable debate and public input. There is considerable evidence the public is greatly concerned with the government’s efforts to mandate digital television and radio content protection for digital devices. Over 5000 individual consumer comments were filed in opposition to the flag at the FCC -- where so many consumer comments are rare -- and tens of thousands of citizens have contacted their Congressional representatives over the past 6 months (since the D.C. Circuit’s decision) urging that the TV flag not be reinstated. Clearly, this is an issue that deserves a full and fair hearing, and not to be simply attached to a spending bill.2 An FCC-imposed Broadcast Flag Scheme and/or Radio Content Protection Scheme Will Transform the Federal Communications Commission into the Federal Copyright Commission Despite the FCC’s protestations to the contrary, the broadcast flag scheme and any radio copy protection scheme will necessarily involve the agency in shaping copyright law and the rights of content owners and consumers there under. Making copyright law and policy is not the FCC’s job. It is Congress’ job. Petitioners brief in ALA v. FCC, at 43-50, lays out this argument in great detail. While it is true that the TV broadcast flag scheme does not completely bar a consumer from making a copy of her favorite TV show, it does prevent consumers from engaging in other lawful activities under copyright law. For example, as the D.C. Circuit noted in ALA v. FCC, the broadcast flag would limit the ability of libraries and other educators to use broadcast clips for distance learning via the Internet that is permitted pursuant to the TEACH Act, Pub. L. No. 107-273, 116 Stat. 1758, Title III, Subtitle C, §13301, amending 17 U.S.C. §§ 110, 112 & 882 (2002). See ALA v. FCC, 406 F.2d at 697. This and other examples highlight that while proponents of the flag may justify it as prohibiting only "indiscriminate" redistribution of content over the Internet, it actually prohibits any and all distribution, no matter how limited or legal. For example, if a member of this subcommittee wants to email a snippet of his appearance on the national TV news to his home office, the broadcast flag scheme would prohibit him from doing so. Video bloggers would similarly be unable to post broadcast TV clips on their blogs. Imagine how much different the debate around broadcast decency would have been had bloggers and others not been able to post a clip of the now-infamous Janet Jackson Superbowl halftime performance? The fact that the broadcast flag will limit lawful uses of copyrighted content was detailed in the Congressional Research Service Report entitled Copy Protection of Digital Television: The Broadcast Flag (May 11, 2005). CRS concluded there that While the broadcast flag is intended to "prevent the indiscriminate redistribution of [digital broadcast] content over the Internet or through similar means," the goal of the flag was not to impede a consumer’s ability to copy or use content lawfully in the home, nor was the policy intended to "foreclose use of the Internet to send digital broadcast content where it can be adequately protected from indiscriminate redistribution." However, current technological limitations have the potential to hinder some activities which might normally be considered "fair use" under existing copyright law. For example, a consumer who wished to record a program to watch at a later time, or at a different location (time-shifting, and space-shifting, respectively), might be prevented when otherwise approved technologies do not allow for such activities, or do not integrate well with one another, or with older, "legacy" devices. In addition, future fair or reasonable uses may be precluded by these limitations. For example, a student would be unable to email herself a copy of a project with digital video content because no current secure system exists for email transmission. CRS Report at 5.3 Thus, it strains credulity to say, as the FCC has, that the broadcast flag scheme does not put the agency in the position of determining copyright owners and consumers’ rights under copyright law. It is Congress’ duty, not the FCC’s, to find the proper balance of those rights. The regulatory scheme proposed under the HDRCPA similarly, and perhaps even more directly, places the FCC in the position of determining consumers’ rights under copyright law. Section 101(a) of the draft bill gives the FCC the authority to control the unauthorized copying and redistribution of digital audio content by or over digital reception devices, related equipment, and digital networks, including regulations governing permissible copying and redistribution of such audio content. Under this proposal, the FCC is placed in charge both of 1) determining the extent to which unauthorized copying (which is legal is some circumstances) of digital broadcast and satellite radio content is permitted; and 2) determining what kind of copying and redistribution of audio content is permissible. If this language is not giving the FCC power to set copyright policy, then it is hard to imagine what language would do so. The Broadcast Flag and Radio Content Protection Schemes Would Give the FCC Unprecedented Control over a Wide Variety of Consumer Electronics and Computer Devices The BFAA has been referred to by some as "narrow," because it purports to do nothing more than reinstate the FCC rule vacated by the D.C. Circuit in ALA v. FCC. However, for the reasons discussed below, the FCC rule is anything but narrow. As the D.C. Circuit recognized in ALA v. FCC, the broadcast flag gave the agency unprecedented "sweeping" authority over consumer electronics and computer devices. In a nutshell, it puts the FCC in the position of deciding the ultimate fate of every single device that can demodulate a television signal. Thus, not only must television sets be pre-approved by the FCC, the agency must also pre-approve computer software, digital video recorders, cellphones, game consoles and even iPods if they can receive a digital television signal. Thus, the broadcast flag scheme places the FCC in the position of dictating the marketplace for all kinds of electronics. The agency has neither the resources nor the expertise to engage in this kind of determination. This type of government oversight of technology design will slow the rollout of new technologies and seriously compromise US companies’ competitiveness in the electronics marketplace. Some would argue that the initial certification process worked because all thirteen technologies submitted to the FCC were approved. However, that is a very superficial view of that process. First, it is widely known that several manufacturers removed legal and consumer-friendly features of their devices before submitting them to the FCC, largely at the behest of the movie studios. Second, the changing nature of the FCC and its commissioners is likely to make for widely varying results. Given the fervor of then- Commissioner Martin’s dissent to the Commission’s approval of TiVo-To-Go, it is unlikely that such technology would be certified today under Chairman Martin’s FCC.4 The HDRCPA would similarly place the FCC in the position of mandating the design of new technologies. The plain language of the draft bill gives the FCC the authority to adopt regulations governing all "digital audio receiving devices." In the case of so-called High Definition (or HD) Radio5 this could have the unintended consequence of destroying this new technology at birth. Digital broadcast radio benefits consumers through improved sound quality (particularly for AM radio) and the ability for radio broadcasters to provide additional program streams and metadata. Unlike digital television, however, consumers need not purchase digital broadcast receivers to continue receiving free over the air broadcast radio. Certainly, if digital radio receivers have less functionality than current analog radio receivers, consumers will reject them and the market for HD radio will die. Moreover, because the HDRCPA also applies to digital satellite radio, it has the potential to cripple this increasingly popular, but still nascent, technology. Legislation to Close the Analog Hole is Premature, Unnecessary and Would Further Tip the Copyright Balance Against Consumers The Analog Content Protection Act is a detailed and extremely complicated technology mandate that deserves further consideration by my organization. Preliminarily, I would note that this is the first time in the recent discussion over digital content protection that CGMS-A + VEIL technology have been proposed. While the CGMS-A + VEIL technology was discussed at the Analog Hole Reconversion Discussion Group, it was quickly dismissed as not worthy of further consideration. Thus, unlike the broadcast flag, this technology has not been fully vetted by industry and public interest groups. Accordingly, we are quite surprised that CGMS-A + VEIL is being presented today as a fully formed, mature proposal to Congress. If Congress feels it must do something about the analog hole, it should refer the technology back to industry and public interest groups so CGMS-A+VEIL can be thoroughly analyzed for its impact on consumers and the cost to technology companies. In the complete absence of any such review, the one-sided imposition of such a detailed technology mandated would be unprecedented. Based on a preliminary analysis of the ACPA, I would like to make the following brief substantive points: * The ACPA would impose an inflexible, one size fits all technology mandate that is more intrusive than the broadcast flag: The ACPA mandates that each and every device with an analog connection obey not one, but two copy protection schemes. Thus, while the broadcast flag would put the FCC in charge of design control just for technologies that demodulate a broadcast signal, the ACPA would mandate design for every device with an analog connector, including printers, cellphones, camcorders, etc. Like the broadcast flag, it sets in stone a copy protection technology for technologies that are always changing. * The ACPA would impose a detailed set of encoding rules that would restrict certain lawful uses of content. The proposal’s tiered levels of restriction based on the type of programming (e.g., pay-per-view, video on demand) limit lawful uses in a manner that ignores the four fair use factors of 17 U.S.C. §107. Thus, the draft legislation upsets the balance established in copyright law between the needs of copyright holders and the rights of the public by placing far too much control over lawful uses in the hands of the content producers. * Would eliminate the DMCA’s safety valve. One of the common justifications for limitations on fair use imposed by the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA is that the analog hole is available for individuals who, for example want to make a snippet of a DVD using a video camera held up to the TV screen.6 The ACPA would eliminate that safety valve. * The exception for legacy devices renders the ACPA ineffective. The ACPA exempts from its grasp the millions of legacy devices with analog connectors. It is unlikely that any action to try to close the analog hole will be effective. There are millions of video recording devices in homes that will operate for years and not be covered by this act. At the same time, the ACPA will discourage sales of new products because consumers will realize that the newer technologies will have less functionality than older technologies. * Must be considered in the context of broadcast flag legislation. Without broadcast flag legislation, the ACPA would be an ill-considered technology mandate that will increase costs and limit consumer rights; together with a broadcast flag mandate, the ACPA would allow nearly complete control over what consumers may do with content they have purchased or otherwise received legally. Copyright Law and Marketplace Initiatives are Better Vehicles for Finding the Proper Balance Between Content Protection and Consumer Rights than are Government-imposed Technological Mandates I am often asked the following question: if Public Knowledge opposes the broadcast flag, radio content protection and closing the analog hole, what are better alternatives to protect digital television and radio content from infringing uses? The best approach to protecting rights holders' interests is a multi-pronged approach: by better educating the public, using the legal tools that the content industry already has at its disposal, and the technological tools that are being developed and tested in the marketplace every day. In the past year alone, the content industry has used and won several important new tools to protect content, including: * The Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v. Grokster and its aftermath. The Supreme Court gave content owners a powerful tool against infringement when it held that manufacturers and distributors of technologies that are used to infringe could be held liable for that infringement if they actively encourage illegal activity. The result has been that a number of commercial P2P distributors have gone out of business, moved out of the U.S., or sold their assets to copyright holders. * Lawsuits against mass infringers using P2P networks. Both the RIAA and the MPAA continue to sue individuals who are engaged in massive infringement over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. By their own admission, these lawsuits have had both a deterrent and educative effect. * Passage of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. The FECA gave copyright holders a new cause of action to help limit leaks of pre-release works and made explicit the illegality of bringing a camcorder into a movie theatre. It also provided for the appointment of an intellectual property "czar" to better enforce copyright laws. * Agreements by ISPs to pass on warning notices. It is apparent that the war between Internet Service Providers and content companies has begun to cool. Last month, Verizon and Disney entered into an agreement by which Verizon will warn alleged copyright infringers using its networks, but will not give up their personal information to Disney. * Increased use of copy protection and other digital rights management tools in the marketplace. There are numerous instances of the use of digital rights management tools in the marketplace. iTunes Fairplay DRM is perhaps the most well known, but other services that use DRM include MSN music and video, Napster, Yahoo Music, Wal-mart, Movielink, CinemaNow and MovieFlix. The success of some of these business models are a testament to the fact that if content companies make their catalogues available in an easily accessible manner, with flexibility and at a reasonable price, those models will succeed in the marketplace, without government intervention. These tools are in addition to the strict penalties of current copyright law, including the DMCA. To the extent that the content industries are looking for a "speed bump" to keep "honest people honest," I would contend that many such speed bumps already exist, while more are being developed every day without government technology mandates. Finally, by far the most effective means of preventing piracy is for the content industry to do what it took the music far too long to do7 – satisfy market demand for easy access to content at reasonable prices (which a free market will inevitably produce) that consumers can enjoy fairly and flexibly. DVDs are the best example of the market working. There, a government mandate –the Digital Video Recording Act – was rejected and an industry-agreed upon fairly weak "keep honest people honest" protection system was adopted. Despite the fact that the protection system was defeated long ago, the DVD market has grown at an astounding rate – from zero in 1997 to $25,000,000,000 in sales and rentals last year. As I noted above, new music and movie digital download services are just now emerging in the market. We sincerely believe these efforts, if supported vigorously by the content industry, along with industry-agreed upon protection, will make government intervention in the free market unnecessary. Conclusion The draft bills presented here today reflect a vision of the future where government places itself squarely in the middle of technological design, and where consumers rights to make lawful uses of copyrighted content are determined by a government agency that is tasked with regulating our nation’s communications system. That vision is antithetical to the largely successful and generally balanced system we have now, where the marketplace is the driver of technological innovation, and copyright law, developed by Congress, governs consumers’ rights. Because this vision of the future so radically departs from the present, I urge this subcommittee to proceed slowly, with great deliberation and with input from the public given great weight. I want to again thank Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Berman and the other members of the Subcommittee for holding this hearing to discuss how to balance digital content protection with consumer rights to make lawful uses of copyrighted works. I look forward to answering any questions you may have. 1. I would like to thank Neil Chilson, Public Knowledge’s legal intern, Heidi Wachs, Public Knowledge’s legal fellow, and Fred Von Lohmann and Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for their assistance with this testimony. 2. Moreover, Public Knowledge believes that any debate about technological mandates of the kind proposed here would be incomplete without a thorough consideration of how these mandates, together with the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA, place limits on consumer rights and technological innovation. It has been suggested that H.R. 1201, "The Digital Media Consumers Rights Act" as introduced in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, may provide a proper balance to the legal limitations imposed on consumers and innovators. Clearly this is a debate that deserves full public attention. 3. The equipment incompatibility problems caused by the broadcast flag scheme are myriad, and should be taken into account by this subcommittee as it considers the BFAA. In addition to the compatibility problems discussed in the CRS report (e.g., the inability to make copies on one system and play it on another), for example, none of the 13 different technologies approved by the FCC in its interim certification process are able to work with each other. This means that a consumer who buys one Philips brand flag-compliant device must buy all Philips brand flag compliant devices. This raises consumer costs, and also raises serious questions about competition among and between digital device manufacturers. For a detailed discussion of these issues, see http://www.publicknowledge.org/content/presentations/bflagpff.ppt 4. For a detailed analysis of the flaws of the FCC’s certifications process, see Center for Democracy and Technology, Lessons of the FCC Broadcast Flag Process (2005), found at http://cdt.org/copyright/20050919flaglessons.pdf 5. I say "so called," because calling a digital radio broadcast signal "High Definition" is quite misleading. Whereas in the television context, High Definition connotes a far clearer and sharper picture, an HD radio signal simply raises the quality of AM radio to FM standards, and permits the reception of broadcast radio in places where an analog signal would get cut off, such as in a tunnel or at a traffic light. Indeed, an "HD" quality signal is not even a CD quality signal. See, Ken Kessler, Digital Radio Sucks, it’s Official, found at http://www.stereophile.com/newsletters/. 6. See Testimony of Dean Marks, Senior Counsel Intellectual Property, Time Warner, Inc., and Steve Metalitz, Representing Content Industry Joint Commenters, before the Copyright Office in Rulemaking Hearing: Exemptions From Prohibitions On Circumvention Of Technological Measures That Control Access To Copyrighted Works, May 13, 2003 at 60-61: "I think the best example I can give is the demonstration that Mr. Attaway [MPAA Executive Vice President for Government Relations and Washington General Counsel] gave for you [Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyrights] earlier this month in Washington in which he demonstrated that he used a digital camcorder viewing the screen on which a DVD was playing to make a excerpt from a DVD film and have a digital copy that could then be used for all the fair use purposes ." (Mr. Metaliz at 60.) "I agree with everything Steve has just said about fair use copying or taking clips with digital camcorders and analog camcorders being widely available " (Mr. Marks at 61.) 7. See Keynote Address of Edgar Bronfman, Chairman and CEO of Warner Music at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/pff/050821/agenda.htm. "The Music Industry, like almost every industry faced with massive and rapid transformation first reacted too slowly and moderately, inhibited by an instinctive and reflexive reaction to protect our current business and business models." From hbs.law at gmail.com Fri Nov 4 09:43:38 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 09:43:38 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Breathalyzer source code must be disclosed Message-ID: <8b60429e0511032013g24388bbat1f5ccf1e6f06d71f@mail.gmail.com> Hi, Fascinating confluence of technology, law (IP/Trade Secret, Drunk Driving) and society. Hasit ============================== Breathalyzer source code must be disclosed By Declan McCullagh http://news.com.com/Breathalyzer+source+code+must+be+disclosed/2100-1028_3-5931553.html Story last modified Thu Nov 03 15:10:00 PST 2005 Florida police can't use electronic breathalyzers as courtroom evidence against drivers unless the innards are disclosed, a state court ruled Wednesday. A three-judge panel in Sarasota County said that a defense expert must have access to the source code--the secret step-by-step software instructions--used by the Intoxilyzer 5000. It's a simple computer with 168KB of RAM (random access memory) that's manufactured by CMI of Owensboro, Ky. "Unless the defense can see how the breathalyzer works," the judges wrote, the device amounts to "nothing more than a 'mystical machine' used to establish an accused's guilt." Assessing the threat posed by bird flu The case, one of the first to test whether source code used in such devices will be divulged, could influence the outcome of hundreds of drunk-driving prosecutions in the state. So far, Florida courts have been split on the topic, with some tossing out cases involving breath alcohol tests and others concluding that the information about the machine's workings should remain a trade secret. In one similar 1988 case, Florida defense attorneys discovered that the police had mechanically modified a breath test machine so much that its results were no longer valid and could not be admitted as evidence in a prosecution. The Sarasota judges didn't require the public disclosure of the source code. Rather, they ordered that it must be given to a defense expert who will keep it in confidence and return it when his analysis is complete. That analysis could show bugs or reveal that the code was modified after the Intoxilyzer was certified for use by the state--meaning the device's output could not be used in court. * * * From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Sat Nov 5 18:48:10 2005 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 05:18:10 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fighting Software Patents: European of the Year Message-ID: <436CB112.3F879708@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> (Non-Europeans may vote; the poll closes November 11. -- Seth) > http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27473 Fighting software patents net.wars By Wendy M. Grossman: Saturday 05 November 2005, 07:31 THERE'S only a week left – voting closes November 11 – to vote for the EV50 top Europeans of the Year (http://www.ev50.com/). This year, as The INQ reported in late September (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26408), the nominees for Campaigner of the Year include Florian Mueller, the driving force behind NoSoftwarePatents (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/). Actually, though, there are a couple of other EV50 nominees you can vote for if you want to send a message opposing software patents. Michel Rocard (nominated for MEP of the year) was the European Parliament's rapporteur on this topic, and José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (nominated for Statesman of the Year) represented the only government to vote against the software patents proposal in the European Council. Finally, Dalia Grybauskaite, up for Commissioner of the Year, is the only one in her category that NoSoftwarePatents describes as "a safe choice". NoSoftwarePatents does have this handy voting guide (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/vote.html), though most of its other recommendations are, it says, randomly generated. (You cannot, apparently, vote in only the categories that interest you; for your vote to count you have to vote in all of them; seems sort of silly to me, since it guarantees that anyone who's only interested in one subject will choose people they know nothing about in all the other categories.) You vote separately for European of the Year, which is chosen from all 50 nominees. That an anti-software patents campaigner should be nominated for an award won by the late Pope is a pretty extraordinary thing. In the US, when software patents were first mooted, you saw programmers testifying sedately in front of government officials in locations around the country; in Europe we're seeing people protesting in the streets. The software patents issue is an important fork in the road for US-Europe trade relations. It's not entirely surprising that it should be more controversial in Europe, given that most of the biggest software companies are American. If you regard software patents as creating artificial monopolies, then the logic is perfectly clear: allowing software patents will transfer an increasing amount of economic control to entities with no allegiance to Europe at all. Of course, it's arguable that they haven't got all that much allegiance to the US either; multinational megacorporations tend to behave as though they were nations in their own right. Although unlike nation states, they do not have to worry about taking care of the unemployed. It seems entirely possible that we are on the verge of a split in the computer industry that will mirror the existing situation in the television industry. In the US, television is dominated by commercial interests; what public service broadcasters there are must fight for every dollar they get in funding. In Europe, while public broadcasters do not necessarily dominate, they are far more substantial forces. In the UK in particular, even after a decade or two of changes and cutbacks the BBC casts a long shadow over all of broadcasting. If you think of open source software as computing's equivalent of public service broadcasting, it's easy to think that Europe will embrace open source as both the City of Munich (14,000 desktops) (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39216394,00.htm) and the NHS (800,000 desktops) (http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops/0,39024645,39117233,00.htm) are trying to do while most of the US remains wedded to commercial software, whether that's licensed, as now, or provided as an online service as per Microsoft's Live.com announcement this week (http://www.forbes.com/newsletter/2005/11/04/microsoft-google-yahoo-mr_1104bow.xml.html). People sometimes suggest that open source is at a disadvantage because users don't have an easy path to technical support; in the litigious US, the bigger deterrent to its adoption may be uncertainty over whom to sue. Whatever happens in Europe, software patents, which will almost certainly continue to be granted in the US despite calls to reform the US patent system, could provide some interesting weapons for a trade war. But that's all somewhat distant speculation. At the moment, things are looking promising for the opponents of software patents, and although Florian Mueller is by no means the only or longest-serving of these, he is the most visible, and the hope is clearly that securing him and the other nominees highly publicized awards will send a distinct message to the EU. It will not be enough by itself. If there's one thing we know after ten years of public policy surrounding the Internet, it's that even if software patents fail now in Europe the issue will not go away. There are many avenues software patent proponents can take. They can continue to lobby for the passage of the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive, being squabbled over in the Council and in the European Parliament. They can lobby the national governments of EU member states to get the dissenters to change their policies. And, in a bout of policy laundering, they can push for cross-recognition, so that the US automatically respects EU-issued patents and, more importantly, vice-versa. The people who want software patents will continue trying for them via all these avenues, and any others they can find. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Siemens are not going to suddenly abandon trying to replicate the strategy that has proved lucrative for them in the US. This battle has a long way to go yet. µ Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music (http://www.pelicancrossing.net/), and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series (http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm). She has an intermittent blog (http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg). Readers are welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML. From lawrence at altlawforum.org Sat Nov 5 19:08:37 2005 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 19:08:37 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] World Info City - IP Edition Message-ID: Hi All The Newspaper for World Information City (14th-19th November, Bangalore) is now available online. The publication presents a collection of articles, interviews and essays relating to questions of Intellectual Property and urban transformations. The 30.000 copies of the World-Information City publication will also be distributed in Europe and Asia as well as at events related to the World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis November 2005. http://static.world-information.org/infopaper/wi_ipcityedition.pdf The Paper has contributions from Peter Drahos, Joseph Stiglitz, James Love, Jamie King, Saskia Sassen, Solly Benjamin, Mike Davis, Ronaldo Lemos and many others More news on WIC to Follow Here are some links in the meantime Schedule: http://www.altlawforum.org/WIC_schedule Overall Description of the event: http://world-information.org/wio/program/bangalore2005 Lawrence From paul at waag.org Mon Nov 7 21:10:13 2005 From: paul at waag.org (paul keller) Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 21:10:13 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] AMERICAN INVENTOR Reality TV Show Wants Your Invention In-Reply-To: <20051005171428.21035.qmail@web86103.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> References: <20051005171428.21035.qmail@web86103.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: for some reason i did not have time to really read this when i first came it across. so i flagged the post and now i have finally had the time to revisit it. in the meanwhile the rudimentary bits that i had rememberd from gazing at the post before i flagged it had fermented in another much sicker scenario in my head. having re read the post i am a bit dissapointed that it is not what i had made out of it. this is how the thing looked in my head before i re read it: cheers, paul INDIAN INVENTOR Reality TV Show Wants Your Invention INDIAN INVENTOR is an exciting new primetime reality show for STAR from Simon Cowell and the producers of Idol, FremantleMedia North America and the Amercian Chamber of International Commerce. Set to premiere in March of 2006, the show will undertake the biggest search ever for Indias's best new invention. An embodiment of the ultimate American dream, the show will uncover the hottest new product and make some struggling inventor's dream come true. The show will celebrate the best in homespun Indian ingenuity and will turn one person's idea into the next big thing. INDIAN INVENTOR will visit 8 Indian cities with our panel of expert judges for open casting calls to meet inventors from all over the country. The Auditions are tentatively scheduled for the first 2 weeks of December 2005, and the first 2 weeks of January 2006, so now is the time to get you invention submitted! The judges will then narrow the field down to 9 finalists who will each be given INR 250,000 in seed money and several weeks to develop their ideas. Our contestants will be given guidance from experts, but in the end, it is up to them to decide how to take their product to the next level. Once the judges narrow the field down to the final three, it's up to America to call in and vote on which inventor is worthy of the INR 5.000.000 prize*. To present your invention, sign up now at AMERICAN INVENTOR or call 1-877-255-8009 toll-free for more information. Then tune in to see who wins the INR 5.000.000 Dollar Grand Prize! * NOTE: All patents and other IPR resulting from the invention will rest with the FremantleMedia North America and the Amercian Chamber of International commerce On 5 Oct, 2005, at 22:44, TAHIR AMIN wrote: > AMERICAN INVENTOR Reality TV Show Wants Your Invention > > Tuesday, October 04, 2005 > by: IPFrontline Staff > AMERICAN INVENTOR is an exciting new primetime reality > show for ABC from Simon Cowell and the producers of > American Idol, FremantleMedia North America. Set to > premiere in March of 2006, the show will undertake the > biggest search ever for America's best new invention. > An embodiment of the ultimate American dream, the show > will uncover the hottest new product and make some > struggling inventor's dream come true. The show will > celebrate the best in homespun American ingenuity and > will turn one person's idea into the next big thing. > > > AMERICAN INVENTOR will visit 8 U.S. cities with our > panel of expert judges for open casting calls to meet > inventors from all over the country. > > The Auditions are tentatively scheduled for the first > 2 weeks of December 2005, and the first 2 weeks of > January 2006, so now is the time to get you invention > submitted! > > The judges will then narrow the field down to 9 > finalists who will each be given $50,000 in seed money > and several weeks to develop their ideas. Our > contestants will be given guidance from experts, but > in the end, it is up to them to decide how to take > their product to the next level. Once the judges > narrow the field down to the final three, it's up to > America to call in and vote on which inventor is > worthy of the million-dollar prize. > > To present your invention, sign up now at AMERICAN > INVENTOR or call 1-877-255-8009 toll-free for more > information. > > Then tune in to see who wins the Million Dollar Grand Prize! > > > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide > with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law -- waag society / for old and new media | nieuwmarkt 4 | NL-1012 CR Amsterdam e: paul at waag.org | t: +31 20 557 9898 | f: +31 20 557 9880 From tahir.amin at btopenworld.com Tue Nov 8 12:25:51 2005 From: tahir.amin at btopenworld.com (TAHIR AMIN) Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 06:55:51 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Film file-sharer sent to prison/Grokster shuts downloading site Message-ID: <20051108065551.61601.qmail@web86111.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Film file-sharer sent to prison A Hong Kong man has been jailed for three months for film piracy after he shared movie files over the internet. The authorities say he is the first person in the world to be prosecuted for passing on files using a popular file-sharing program called BitTorrent. It makes the sharing of material easy by breaking a file up into fragments and then distributing them. The film industry says it hopes the sentence handed down to Chan Nai-ming will prove a deterrent to others. Hidden trail Chan, an unemployed man who called himself "Big Crook", was arrested in January for uploading three Hollywood movies - Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality - onto the internet without a licence. He was using a popular file-sharing program called BitTorrent, which allows users to download content from multiple sources. Each source supplies a small part of the whole film or song. When anyone downloads a file it becomes a source for others, making it easy to share or trade music or movies, but very hard to trace who has uploaded or downloaded the material. BitTorrent also has many non-infringing uses as it offers a cost-effective way of distributing large files online. The Motion Pictures Association of America says its members lose $900m dollars in potential revenue to piracy each year in Asia alone. The authorities in Hong Kong hope that Chan's three-month sentence will deter others. But the BBC's Hong Kong correspondent Chris Hogg says that since April when Chan was first charged and his case was widely publicised, there has been no noticeable impact on the number of files being shared over the internet. BitTorrent targeted The other problem is the time it takes to build a successful prosecution, making it almost impossible to carry out a comprehensive crackdown on small-time internet pirates, our correspondent adds. The movie industry started targeting the operators of BitTorrent networks themselves last December. It filed numerous lawsuits against BitTorrent server sites which linked to copyrighted material in order to undermine the ability to swap content. The action resulted in the closure of some high-profile BitTorrent sites. In May, US Federal authorities succeeded in closing a website that was distributing pirated copies of Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith before the film opened in cinemas. ------------------------------------------------------------ Grokster shuts downloading site File-sharing group Grokster has agreed to shut down its website to settle a long-running copyright case launched by the entertainment industry. Under the deal, Grokster is permanently banned from taking part in the theft of copyrighted music and movie files. It will also stop giving away and supporting its file-sharing software as well as pay $50m (£28.7m) in damages. Grokster's website was changed on Monday and now says its existing peer-to-peer (P2P) service was illegal. "The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal," a statement on its website said. This settlement brings to a close an incredibly significant chapter in the story of digital music Mitch Bainwol, Recording Industry Association of America "Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorised peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners," it added. Piracy charges The decision means that Grokster has become the latest casualty of a US Supreme Court ruling that file-sharing services can be held liable for actions of their users. In Junes, justices ruled that the entertainment industry could file piracy lawsuits against technology companies caught encouraging customers to steal music and films over the internet. "This settlement brings to a close an incredibly significant chapter in the story of digital music," Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a statement. "This is a chapter that ends on a high note for the recording industry, the tech community and music fans and consumers everywhere." Brand survival However the settlement, submitted at a Los Angeles court, will not mean an end to its P2P service as the deal is not expected to affect people who already use its software to download music and movies online. Its co-defendant in the long-running case - Streamcast Networks - has also vowed to continue fighting the lawsuit launched by major US record companies, film studios and music publishers. Meanwhile, the Grokster brand is expected to survive - a statement on its site says it "hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon". Reports suggest the group is in the process of being sold to legal downloading site Mashboxx, and a legal fee-charging Grokster service could be available within 60 days. Mashboxx, which signed a licensing deal with music giant Sony BMG in June, is partly headed by former Grokster president Wayne Rosso. ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com From lawrence at altlawforum.org Tue Nov 8 20:11:46 2005 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:11:46 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Grokster quits file-sharing fight In-Reply-To: <20051108_141134_024254.vishwas123@gmail.com> Message-ID: File-sharing group Grokster shuts its service as part of a landmark settlement with the entertainment industry. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/technology/4416484.stm > Grokster quits file-sharing fight Grokster website Grokster has vowed to return with a legal downloading service File-sharing group Grokster has agreed to halt distributing its software to settle a long-running copyright case launched by the entertainment industry. Under the deal, Grokster is permanently banned from taking part in the spread of copyrighted music and movie files. It agreed to stop activity that leads to copyright infringement, as well as paying $50m (£28.7m) in damages. Grokster's decision has been seen as a victory for the entertainment industry's fight against online piracy. Grokster's website was changed on Monday and now says its existing peer-to-peer (P2P) service was illegal. "The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal," a statement on its website said. This settlement brings to a close an incredibly significant chapter in the story of digital music Mitch Bainwol, Recording Industry Association of America "Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorised peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners," it added. Piracy charges The decision comes four months after a US Supreme Court ruling that file-sharing services can be held liable for actions of their users. In June, justices ruled that the entertainment industry could file piracy lawsuits against technology companies caught encouraging customers to steal music and films over the internet. "This settlement brings to a close an incredibly significant chapter in the story of digital music," Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a statement. "This is a chapter that ends on a high note for the recording industry, the tech community and music fans and consumers everywhere." Brand survival However the settlement, submitted at a Los Angeles court, will not mean an end to illegal file-sharing using Grokster software. Grokster users will still be able to copy music, movies and software directly from each others' hard drives, as the decentralised nature of most peer-to-peer software makes it impossible to control once it is released on the internet. And the sharing of copyrighted material shows few signs of slowing down. An average of 9.2 million users were logged on to peer-to-peer networks in October, up from 6.3 million a year ago, according to online analysts BigChampagne. Its co-defendant in the long-running case - Streamcast Networks - has also vowed to continue fighting the lawsuit launched by major US record companies, film studios and music publishers. The Grokster brand is expected to survive. A statement on its site says it "hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon". Reports suggest the group is in the process of being sold to legal downloading site Mashboxx, and a legal fee-charging Grokster service could be available within 60 days. Mashboxx, which signed a licensing deal with music giant Sony BMG in June, is partly headed by former Grokster president Wayne Rosso. From lawrence at altlawforum.org Thu Nov 10 10:07:25 2005 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:07:25 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Final programme and Schedule of World Information City Message-ID: Hi All This coming week, we are collaborating with Public Netbase, Sarai and Mahiti to organize a weeklong event in Bangalore Called “World Information City” between the 14th- 19th of November. The idea is to explore issues of information politics in conjunction with changing urban landscapes. The programme brings together researchers, artists and activists from Europe and South Asia. It consists of a conference, workshops, a newmedia and public art exhibition exhibition, a public campaign, and a series of guided tours. I am including a programme sheet, do spread the word, since we are relying on word of mouth communication. We have also brought out two newspapers that will be distributed during the event, and they can also be downloaded from the web. They are available at http://www.netbase.org/wio/downloads/bangalore/wi_bangalore_web.pdf http://static.world-information.org/infopaper/wi_ipcityedition.pdf We are also looking for volunteers, so interested people can write to namita at altlawforum.org and lawrence at altlawforum.org, there will be a stipend for all volunteers Lawrence ===== World-Information City Global Information Landscapes and Urban Transformations World-Information City is a one-week programme of events addressing global issues of intellectual property and technology in conjunction with changing urban landscapes. Held at India's IT metropolis Bangalore, World-Information City is a cooperative project of the Institute of New Culture Technologies/t0 (Vienna), Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam), ALF (Bangalore), Mahiti (Bangalore) and local partners. The programme brings together researchers, artists and activists from Europe and South Asia. It consists of a conference, workshops, an exhibition, a public campaign, and a series of musical and art events based on electronic media, and has been produced with the financial assistance of the EU's EU-India Cross Cultural Programme. For more details, see http://world-information.org/wio WORLD-INFORMATION CITY CONFERENCE Dates: 17 – 18 November, 2005 Venue: Cubbon Park Auditorium The conference segment of World Information City brings together panels, discursive and research based presentations and conversations on “Information” and the “City” as societal and political realities, with a particular emphasis on their interrelationships. We hope by doing so we are able to speak not only to the broad themes of information, society, politics and history but also to the concrete realities of “World Information Cities” such as Bangalore. Information - by which we mean the gamut of practices and processes of knowing and making known the world - can also be seen as that constellation of embodied intellectual labour, accumulated cultural capital and evolving knowledge systems that play a key part in the maintenance of the fabric of contemporary existence. In particular, the increasing importance of information in all its social expressions is becoming manifest in physical environments, and above all, in the shaping of urban spaces. The power structures that shape information as “intellectual property” are impacting more and more on the design of urban environments, often unhinging notions of social equality and giving rise to practices of disobedience. But while information and its interaction with urban environments are part of everyday experience, it remains a grossly under-theorized category. World-Information City and the conference that is placed at its culmination is an effort on our part to inaugurate a set of discussions that we hope will inform future work in this area as well as contribute to debates within the public domain. The conference aims to initiate reflections on the histories of different information regimes and on the transformations of urban spaces in the emerging global information economy. It looks at the realities of intellectual property, surveillance and censorship and at efforts to counter them, and discusses the founding and sustaining of the “commons” of information, considering ways in which practices of knowledge uphold, transgress or subvert governing protocols of social, cultural and political life. Conference Schedule Thursday, 17 November 10:15 – 11:15 Welcome – Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) Statement of Partnership – Paul Keller (Waag Society, Amsterdam) World-Information.Org (Introduction) – Konrad Becker (Institute for New Culture Technologies, Vienna) Official Opening – Thetis Tsitidou (EU-India Programme) Faultlines Considering Fissures in Information and Society. Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Researcher-Practitioner, Artist, Writer, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Keynote Presentation 11.15 - 11.30 Tea break Global Information Landscapes and Urban Transformations in Asia 11.30 - 13.00 Title. Solly Benjamin (Urbanist, CASSUM, Bangalore) – Presentation 13.00 - 14.00 Lunch break 14.00 - 16.00 Cyborgs and Cyber Cities How City Space and Labouring get inflected by Information in Bangalore and Delhi. Nishanth Shah (Research Scholar, CSCS, Bangalore), Iram Ghufran (Researcher-Practitioner, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Panel 16:00 - 16.30 Tea break Implications of IP on Knowledge / Culture Production 16: 30 - 18.00 The Organization of Knowledge and Culture Production. Felix Stalder (Media Theorist, Vienna/Zurich) – Presentation Urban Agents – Hybrid Spaces. Eric Kluitenberg (Media Theorist, De Balie, Amsterdam) –Presentation 18:00 - 19:30 Trouble in the Archives. Shahid Amin (Historian, Delhi University), Shuddabrata Sengupta and Ravikant (Sarai-CSDS) – Conversation Friday, 18 November 10.30 - 12:00 Underground Raids and Multiplex Screenings The Turbulent World of Entertainment, IP, Regulations and Real Estate in Delhi. Jawahar Raja (Legal Practitioner and Researcher, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi), Anand Vivek Taneja (Researcher-Practitioner, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Panel 12:00 -12:15 Tea break Technologies of Information Control 12:15 - 13:45 Surveillance, Security and Social Sorting in the City. David Lyon (Historian, International Surveillance Project, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario) – Keynote Speech 13:45 - 14:30 Lunch Break 14:30 - 16:00 News you can use Toward Political and Personal Ecologies of Information in Society. Subramanya Sastry (Software Programmer, Open Source Activist, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi), Taha Mahmoud (Researcher-Practitioner, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Panel 16:00 - 16:45 The Scanner at the Border. Florian Schneider (Media Activist, ‘No Borders Campaign’ / ‘No One is Illegal’, Munich), Felix Stalder, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta – Conversation 16:45 - 17:00 Tea break 17:00 - 18:30 The Collateral Damage of Breaking News. Arundhati Roy (Writer, Delhi), Lawrence Liang and Shuddhabrata Sengupta – Closing Conversation Conference Editors: Konrad Becker (t0 – Institute for New Culture Technologies, Vienna), Lawrence Liang (ALF, Bangalore) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) Conference live streams: Netbase, Vienna http://www.netbase.org/t0) Point Ephémère, Paris (http://e-ngo.org) World-Information City Exhibitions 1. World-Infostructure Exhibition World-Infostructure Exhibition and Guided Tours World-Infostructure visualizes subject matter linked to various aspects of the information society based on research by World-Information.Org on global communication networks, the global media market, global content channels, global brain ware, global data bodies, global info rights and digital security. Numerous information displays illustrate issues associated with the development of digital media, new communication tools, and sophisticated technical instruments e.g. the increasing use of biometric devices. Special displays will be developed relating to local issues of the World-Information City Bangalore. Date: 14 – 19 November Opening hours: 09:00 – 18:00 Venue: Cubbon Park Huts Opening Date: 14 November Time: 17:00 – 21:00 Venue: Cubbon Park Huts 2. World-Information City Exhibition The exhibition is a dispersed show across different sites from Russell Market in Shivajinagar through Tasker Town to Cunningham Road. It is designed in such a way as to facilitate site-specific works, but also to allow for interaction with different publics. The exhibition is also stretched between these three points in the city (Russell Market, Cunningham road, Cubbon Park) so that the experiences, sights, sounds and smells along the way are part of the show, it is thus simultaneously being informed and broadened by the media and art projects. Guided Tours through the exhibition offered on demand. Date: 15 – 19 November Time: 11:00 – 20:00 Venue: Dispersed between Russell Market in Shivajinagar through Tasker Town to Cunningham Rd. Opening Date:14 November Time: 18:00 Venue: Centre for Film and Drama, 5th Floor, Sona Towers, 71, Millers Road Projects: Centre for film and drama 5th Floor, Sona Towers, 71, Millers Road · Age/Sex/Location - Raqs Media Collective · Now Showing the Cinematograph Act, Alternative Law Forum · No_des, Sarai Media Lab · Rhizome(working title), Sarai Media Lab · Why I am so blaise, Rahima Begum · Dancing on Glass, Ram Ganesh (8:00 pm, 18th November) Colab Art and Architecture Gallery, 202, Shah Sultana, Cunningham Road · "Down the road" (Sheela Gowda) · "Melrose, Bangalore" (Christoph Schäfer, sponsored by Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore) Lady Jehangair Kothari Memorial Hall, Queen's Circle (Queens Road and Cunningham Road intersection) · "Makrolab – Electronic Media monitoring" (Marko Peljhan) · “On voice culture and automatisme” (Navin Thomas) Lawyer's Collective, 1st Floor, No. 4A, MAH Road, Off Park Road. Tasker Town, Shivajinagar · "World Info City TV" (Shaina Anand) Elgin Talkies, Shivaji Road · "Electricity as network" (Ashok Sukumaran) Location · "Straigth 8 - Film Tales Part I" (Ayisha Abraham) · “The square and the round god – an idea for a universal trajectory (in the manner of a proposal for 12 German pop songs)" (Hilary Koob-Sassen) · "Untempered – a soundscape installation" (Rajivan Ayyappan) Theatre Play “Dancing On Glass” Date: 18 November Time: 20:00 Venue: Centre for Film and Drama "Melrose, Bangalore" Christoph Schäfer (sponsored by Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore) Exhibition Curators: Ayisha Abraham, Namita Malhotra, Kiran Subbaiah "Revolution Non Stop" (German with English subtitles) Christoph Schäfer (Cinema-room at Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore) World-Information City Campaign Projects Dates: 14 – 20 November Venue: Public Space – Bangalore Streets Billboard Designs, Posters and Stickers in the Public Sphere: Along the lines of the overall topic “What do stricter intellectual property laws mean for the public, for digital ecology, accessibility of knowledge, and also for the future of urban spaces?” World-Information.Org will be presenting the following projects: “Delinquents” by Ullrike Brückner (Berlin): Portraits of “delinquents” accused of digital crimes point at the twofold character of intellectual and cultural property. (Website: http://www.musterfirma.org) “Good questions” by Sebastian Luetgert (Berlin): 9 Questions central to the problematic character of digital property. (Website: http://www.textz.com) “Drawings” by Elffriede (Vienna): A series of drawings combined with text questioning the viewers about their point of view or making them conscious about questions referring to the theme. (Website: http://www.elffriede.net) “You are free” by Paula Roush (London) This project consists of invading the everyday space of advertising, whose production and consumption cycle is dominated by a regime of intellectual property known as ‘copyright’ with an infiltration from the parallel production regime of copyleft. (Website: http://www.msdm.org.uk) “Who owns your knowledge?” by Dominik Hruza (Vienna): … and who benefits from the information you produce? “United We Stand” by 0100101110101101.ORG: A band of media artists, 0100101110101101.ORG use non-conventional communication tactics to obtain the largest visibility with the minimal effort. Past works include staging a hoax involving a complete made-up artist, ripping off the Holy See, and spreading a computer virus as a work of art. (Website: http://0100101110101101.org) World-Information City Guided Tours "Community-Radio Project Number 20" with Ashish Sen Date: 15 November Time: 08:30 – 17:30 Location: Villages in Karnataka This radio project started it’s work in Budikote (Kolar district, Karnataka) in 1999 with a needs assessment study, findings of which revealed that the community did want an information centre, which would give them timely and locally relevant information, through audio, a medium which they were comfortable with. With this end in mind began a spate of training sessions for volunteers conducted by experts from All India Radio on programming techniques. As an outcome of these training sessions volunteers began to make programmes on topics such as sericulture, organic farming techniques, child and reproductive health, insurance etc. In Partnership with VOICES (http://www.voicesforall.org) Web site: http://www.voicesforall.org/communityradio/namma_dhwani.htm “Cities within Cities: an intellectual turbulence within a global ideal” with Solly Benjamin Date/time: 16 November Time: 08:00 – 15:00 (Departure: Cubbon Park – Mahadevpura) Location: Bangalore A travel through several contested landscapes in Bangalore. Some of these, in Bangalore’s eastern periphery, will be huge territories serviced with high grade infrastructure dedicated to IT companies. Their adjoining areas are both residential and home based manufacturing but contrast in the very low levels of infrastructure and services. Such marginality is only surfacial as deeper lie complex political contestation in the way of day to day “encroachments” as urbanization engulfs. Attendance limited – advance registration at projects at mahiti.org Workshops Economy of the commons With Felix Stalder Date: 19 November Time: 16:00 – 18:00 Venue: Cubbon Park Auditorium This workshop will focus on the heterogeneity of commons-based peer production. Taking software production as a starting point, we will examine the different actors – commercial companies, NGOs, academics and students, as well as individuals – who are able to sustain a common project (the development of a particular code base) despite the diverging, and possibly even conflicting, agendas they pursue by doing so. Participants of this workshop will gain insight into the emerging economy of the commons, helping them to better devise strategies to act within it. Participants are encouraged to contribute their own experiences as actors on open source projects as the empirical reference points for the workshop. Connected-Programme (Presentation, Waag Society) With Floor Van Spaendonck Date: 19 November Time: 15:00 – 16:00 Venue: Cubbon Park Auditorium Website: http://spresearch.waag.org The presentation will focus on the Connected! LiveArt programme wherein Waag Society worked with several artists and communities on networked (connected) art. In the programme the collaboration and communities-building aspect was emphasized and also represented part of the research. The programme had four nested components: Projects, Artists-in-Residence, Sentient Creatures Lecture Series and Anatomic, a weekly gathering of young media artists interested in networked composition. Open sound workshops Date: 15 – 18 November Time: 09:00 – 18:00 1. Full disclosure and digital art – why programming matters With Chris Kummerer This workshop will demonstrate and introduce free software programmes. Some of them were designed specially for the demands of musicians and video-artists, whereas others – though highly useful for artistic production – weren't developed with the digital/media artist in mind. The aim of this workshop is to show that in many cases open-source – in contrast to its commercial counterparts – is more useful when it comes to combining the potentialities of different programmes. We will further concentrate on technical skills, working with source code, communicating special demands to programmers, and especially on the implications of licensed software on the creative use of programmes. Participants will be able to gather experience and skills with the introduced tools in a performance during the Closing Event of World-Information City. Additionally, a project developed in the workshop will be presented in the Closing Event. 2. Interactive digital audio workshop With Ralf Traunsteiner In the centre of interest is “Pure Data” (Pd), oriented along the lines of graphics and objects, as means for the production of interactive audiovisuals in real time. Pd is an open-source software and will be provided on different platforms (Linux, OS-X, Win). Pd is a real time signal processing system with many extensions and interfaces thus supporting networking and interaction, which makes it an useful tool for experimental audio, multimedia and installation artists. Participants from India will be provided with a first overview on graphical DSP-Programming with Pd. After a short introduction to the basics of digital audio-signal-processing we will concentrate on the practice-oriented intermediation of production, improvisation and live presentation of electronic music. Participants in the workshop will gather experience and skills in the field of networked multimedia performances during a joint “Pd-Network-Jam” presented in the Closing Event of World-Information City. Additionally a project developed in the workshop will be presented during the Closing Event. 3. FOSS With Parag Goel, Dinesh, Abhas and Edward Crompton Dates: 14/15 November Time: 9:00 – 18:00 Venue: Mahiti The workshop has four main sessions. 1. FOSS for Desktops. Parag Goel who manages the Evolution and OpenOffice projects at Novell, India, will be conducting this session. 2. FOSS for Management Information Systems. Dinesh from Servelots (http://servelots.com/ ) will conduct this session. 3. FOSS for Servers. Abhas from DeeprootLinux (http://www.deeproot.co.in/ ) will conduct this session. 4. FOSS for Open Publishing. Edward Crompton from Mahiti will conduct this session. 4. Electronic Media Monitoring With Marko Peljhan Date: 15 November Time: 18:00 – 20:00 Venue: Jehangir Kothari Hall Electronic Media Monitoring captures and analyses signals of global communication streams. The basic setup of the electronic media monitoring unit provides an all purpose scanning and electronic interception environment covering various bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electronic Media Monitoring targets satellite based media on the widest possible geographical basis, satellite based media programming, rx operations in UHF and L-band comsat areas, satellite tracking, VHF satellite rx-tx, video KU-band reception and analysis, experimental satcom project development and other forms of electronic communication. Closing Event Date/time: 19 November, 2005, 18:00 Venue: Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan World-Information City, a week-long transnational programme of events related to issues of the information society, is wound up in this closing event that features various forms of artistic and social engagement with information, including electronic music, open source projects, and the shortfilm showcase "Thought Thieves". ♣ Electronic Music Performance Ish/dbase Chris Kummerer TronStoner ♣ Presentation of Open Sound Workshop Results ♣ Thought Thieves: Presentation of Winner Projects Thought Thieves is a short film showcase about corporate appropriation of knowledge, culture, and creativity. It is a grassroots response to the Micro$oft propaganda competition of the same name. www.thought-thieves.org ♣ Signal Sever With Marko Peljhan Signal Sever is the sensor array and processing unit conceptualized by pact systems which maps the electromagnetic spectrum, processes, transforms it and sends it back into the ether in many different directions and forms Venues and locations Jawahar Bal Bhavan Auditorium, Cubbon Park, Bangalore 560001 Mahiti, #314/1, 2nd Floor, VijayKiran Building, 7th cross, Domlur Layout, Bangalore 560 071 Alternative Law Forum (ALF), No 4 Ground Floor, 3rd Cross, Vasanthnagar, Bangalore 560052 Jehangir Kothari Hall, Queens Road, Bangalore Centre for Film and Drama, Sona Towers, 71 Millers Road, Bangalore Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, No. 716, C.M.H. Road, Indiranagar 1st Stage, Bangalore 560 038 PARTNERS EU-India Partners: - Waag - Sarai - t0 Local Partners: - ALF - Mahiti - Goethe Institute - Voices SUPPORTERS 1. ECCP 2. EU + disclaimer! 3. Wien Kultur 4. Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore 5. BMAA 6. OSI 7. Österreichische Komission für die UNESCO From vishwas123 at gmail.com Tue Nov 8 19:41:34 2005 From: vishwas123 at gmail.com (vishwas) Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:11:34 +0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] BBC E-mail: Grokster quits file-sharing fight Message-ID: <20051108_141134_066706.vishwas123@gmail.com> vishwas saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you should see it. ** Grokster quits file-sharing fight ** File-sharing group Grokster shuts its service as part of a landmark settlement with the entertainment industry. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/technology/4416484.stm > ** BBC Daily E-mail ** Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all in one daily e-mail < http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ > ** Disclaimer ** The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified. If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm From venky at redhat.com Thu Nov 10 17:52:17 2005 From: venky at redhat.com (Venkatesh Hariharan) Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:52:17 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Open Invention Network Message-ID: <1131625337.3474.61.camel@localhost.localdomain> OPEN INVENTION NETWORK FORMED TO PROMOTE LINUX AND SPUR INNOVATION GLOBALLY THROUGH ACCESS TO KEY PATENTS - - - Investors Include IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony New York (November, 10, 2005) – Open Invention Network (OIN), a company that has and will acquire patents and offer them royalty-free to promote Linux and spur innovation globally, was launched today with financial support from IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. The company, believed to be the first of its kind, is creating a new model where patents are openly shared in a collaborative environment and used to facilitate the advancement of applications for, and components of, the Linux operating system. “Open collaboration is critical for driving innovation, which fuels global economic growth. Impediments to collaboration on the Linux operating system seriously jeopardize innovation. A new model of intellectual property management for Linux must be established to maintain advances in software innovation – regardless of the size or type of business or organization,” said Jerry Rosenthal, chief executive officer at Open Invention Network. The company will foster an open, collaborative environment that stimulates advances in Linux – helping ensure the continuation of global innovation that has benefited software vendors, customers, emerging markets and investors, among others. Patents owned by Open Invention Network will be available on a royalty- free basis to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against others who have signed a license with OIN, for their use or distribution of certain Linux-related software. Open Invention Network believes that creating a new system to manage and ensure access to key patents for the Linux operating system will have a significant economic impact. According to International Data Corporation, the worldwide Linux business is expected to grow 25.9 percent annually, doubling from $20 billion in 2005 to more than $40 billion in 2008. “Open Invention Network is not focused on income or profit generation with our patents, but on using them to promote a positive, fertile ecosystem for the Linux operating system and to drive innovation and choice into the marketplace,” said Mr. Jerry Rosenthal. “We intend to spur innovation in IT and across industries by helping software developers focus on what they do best – developing great Linux-related software with greater assurance about intellectual property issues.” Among Open Invention Network's initial patent holdings is a set of business-to-business electronic commerce patents that were purchased from Commerce One by JGR, a subsidiary of Novell. Investor Statements IBM “The formation of Open Invention Network signals a growing movement where companies today are looking beyond their own organizational boundaries,” said Jim Stallings, vice president of intellectual property and open standards at IBM. “They are strategically sharing their intellectual property and building broader industry partnerships in order to accelerate innovation and drive new economic growth.” Novell “We are proud to be a founding member of the Open Invention Network,” said Jack Messman, CEO of Novell. “While Novell has been a major contributor to the open source community and has shown its commitment to promoting and fostering the adoption of open source and open standards, this initiative raises our leadership to the highest level. With this new initiative, users of open source software will have access to a broad set of technologies that will help foster an even more robust community of developers, customers, business partners and investors. This is a breakthrough idea whose time has come.” Philips “Philips is actively involved in the creation and funding of Open Invention Network because we believe that OIN will make the Linux platform more attractive for users. This will stimulate developers to focus their resources on creating high-value, innovative software on this open platform,” said Ruud Peters, chief executive officer of Philips Intellectual Property & Standards. “We believe that this initiative will widely boost the use of the Linux platform and its applications.” Red Hat "By providing this unique collaborative framework, Open Invention Network will set open source developers free to do what they do best— innovate,” said Mark Webbink, senior vice president at Red Hat. “At the same time, Open Invention Network extends to distributors and users of open source software freedom from concern about software patents." Sony “Linux is clearly an important technology for Sony and the global community in general,” said Yoshihide Nakamura, SVP, Corporate Executive of Sony Corporation. “We believe Linux and open standards will provide companies with more options for the development of innovative products. We have and will continue to support initiatives like Open Invention Network that promote a positive environment for these developments.” -0- From tahir.amin at btopenworld.com Thu Nov 10 18:34:15 2005 From: tahir.amin at btopenworld.com (TAHIR AMIN) Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:04:15 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Sony sued over copy-protected CDs Message-ID: <20051110130415.13817.qmail@web86104.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Why would anyone want to copy Celine Dion :)) Sony sued over copy-protected CDs Sony BMG is facing three lawsuits over its controversial anti-piracy software. Revealed in late October by Windows expert Mark Russinovich, the software copy protection system hides using virus-like techniques. One class-action lawsuit has already been filed in California and another is expected in New York. Digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is also gathering information from users to see if a case can be brought. Court claim The row erupted following Mark Russinovich's discovery that Sony BMG in America was using a so-called "root kit" to conceal the program used to stop some of its CDs being copied. "Root kits" are being increasingly used by virus makers to hide their malicious wares deep inside the Windows operating system. Sony BMG used a program called XCP created by UK firm First 4 Internet that employed similar cloaking systems to hide the proprietary media player used to play tracks on 20 CDs made by the music giant and sold in the US. But since Mr Russinovich wrote about his discovery the row has snowballed and now has led to lawsuits being filed against Sony BMG. XCP PROTECTED CDS Trey Anastasio - Shine Celine Dion - On ne Change Pas Neil Diamond - 12 Songs Our Lady Peace - Healthy in Paranoid Times Chris Botti - To Love Again Van Zant - Get Right with the Man Switchfoot - Nothing is Sound The Coral - The Invisible Invasion Acceptance - Phantoms Susie Suh - Susie Suh Amerie - Touch Life of Agony - Broken Valley Horace Silver Quintet - Silver's Blue Gerry Mulligan - Jeru Dexter Gordon - Manhattan Symphonie The Bad Plus - Suspicious Activity The Dead 60s - The Dead 60s Dion - The Essential Dion Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten Ricky Martin - Life One filed in Los Angeles by Californian attorney Alan Himmelfarb wants to stop Sony BMG selling more CDs protected by anti-copying software and seeks damages for Californians that have bought any albums protected this way. According to a report in the Washington Post the lawsuit alleges that Sony BMG has broken three Californian laws. At the same time New York lawyer Scott Kamber is planning a class-action lawsuit for all Americans affected. The EFF is also gathering stories from buyers of Sony BMG CDs protected with XCP. In a statement the organisation said: "We're considering whether the effect on the public, or on EFF members, is sufficiently serious to merit a lawsuit". At the same time the Italian digital rights group, Electronic Frontiers Italy, has asked the nation's government to investigate Sony over its use of anti-piracy software. A weblog documenting the unfolding controversy and calling for a boycott of Sony products has also been created. When contacted a representative for Sony BMG in the UK referred all calls to its corporate headquarters in New York. A call to a spokesman in that office has yet to be returned. Artist list The EFF also released a partial list of all the CDs protected with XCP. The list includes popular artists such as Natasha Bedingfield, Celine Dion and Amerie. It also gave advice for ways to spot if a CD is XCP protected. So far Sony BMG has not released a list of how many CDs are protected or how many have been sold. It has only said that "about 20" titles are protected with the controversial program. However, the row does not appear to be denting interest in one of the CDs protected by XCP because at the time of writing Neil Diamond's 12 Songs album was the top seller on the Amazon.com website. Anti-virus companies are starting to release software that can spot the XCP files. Symantec said it had made tools that can find the files but will not remove them. Computer Associates said that it would be releasing a tool to completely uninstall the XCP program. At the same time anti-virus firm Kaspersky Labs branded the XCP program spyware because it hides itself, could compromise security and can slow machines down. Mr Russinovich has continued his investigation of the XCP software and has confirmed that when installed it can make a Windows computer more unreliable. He also criticised Sony BMG for making it difficult to get hold of software that can uninstall XCP. ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com From gnthej at gmail.com Fri Nov 11 12:50:30 2005 From: gnthej at gmail.com (Thejesh GN) Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 12:50:30 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] EFF india In-Reply-To: <1131691909.952453.20320@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com> References: <1131691909.952453.20320@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com> Message-ID: <4b0dd710511102320t5e1cf655g9ce0162765c4a715@mail.gmail.com> Hello All, I have created the group for discussion related to EFF in India. http://groups.google.com/group/efforgin Please join the list to continue the discussion. Please see the article below for more discussion http://www.techmag.biz/time_for_eff_india Previuous mails regarding this Lawrence view: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/2004-April/001713.html Badri and Mahesh's view: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/2004-April/001715.html Let me know if you have any questions. And sorry for mailing multiple list. Its just that I don't want to miss anybody interested. To: Cibot Yes it was created for the same reason. Thanks, Thejesh GN www.techmag.biz On 11/11/05, Cibot wrote: > > I have been following up lot of posts to group about starting an EFF > like organization in india. And i couldnt find any action on that. > Is this the group created for that? > > Regards, > Cibot > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20051111/3e5af029/attachment.html From hbs.law at gmail.com Fri Nov 11 16:54:28 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 16:54:28 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: Open Invention Network (Venkatesh Hariharan) Message-ID: <8b60429e0511110324r557ffe56t9601b9c5b396461d@mail.gmail.com> This is good news. I wish they did the same for their hardware patents too! I don't think anyone has any remote news on IBM, Novell, Philips, and Sony being so chartiable about their hardware portfolio. Hasit > > OPEN INVENTION NETWORK FORMED TO PROMOTE LINUX > > AND SPUR INNOVATION GLOBALLY THROUGH ACCESS TO KEY PATENTS > > - - - > > Investors Include IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony > From monica at sarai.net Sat Nov 12 12:45:02 2005 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:45:02 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: Open Invention Network (Venkatesh Hariharan) In-Reply-To: <8b60429e0511110324r557ffe56t9601b9c5b396461d@mail.gmail.com> References: <8b60429e0511110324r557ffe56t9601b9c5b396461d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: circles within circles though: Jerry Rosenthal is the newly appointed Open Invention Network CEO, was previously the vice president of IBM's intellectual property and licensing business. From eweek.com: <> Full article at: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1885293,00.asp The site's at: http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/ with just a press release at present. Rosenthal's quoted as saying: "Open Invention Network is not focused on income or profit generation with our patents, but on using them to promote a positive, fertile ecosystem for the Linux operating system and to drive innovation and choice into the marketplace," said Mr. Rosenthal. "We intend to spur innovation in IT and across industries by helping software developers focus on what they do best - developing great Linux-related software with greater assurance about intellectual property issues." On 11-Nov-05, at 4:54 PM, Hasit seth wrote: > This is good news. I wish they did the same for their hardware patents > too! I don't think anyone has any remote news on IBM, Novell, Philips, > and Sony being so chartiable about their hardware portfolio. > > Hasit > > >> >> OPEN INVENTION NETWORK FORMED TO PROMOTE LINUX >> >> AND SPUR INNOVATION GLOBALLY THROUGH ACCESS TO KEY PATENTS >> >> - - - >> >> Investors Include IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony >> >> > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > Monica Narula Raqs Media Collective Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110 054 From skjha at iitb.ac.in Sun Nov 13 14:14:29 2005 From: skjha at iitb.ac.in (Shishir K Jha) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 14:14:29 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-Law] RE: Creative Commons Discussion Group Message-ID: <1242.10.127.133.110.1131871469.squirrel@gpo.iitb.ac.in> Hello, A Creative Commons Discussion group is being launched for the India chapter. I invite you to join the discussion for planning future activities of the Indian creative commons chapter. IIT Bombay has signed a MOU with CC. The planning for the formal launching of CC India will commence once the Legal Code for CC India has been refined and accepted by the legal group. In the interim a discussion is required to generate ideas for mobilising various groups, associations, institutions and cultural organization to support CC activities in India. Details: Subscribe: ccindia_general-subscribe at yahoogroups.com List owner: ccindia_general-owner at yahoogroups.com Eagerly awaiting your participation. Shishir K. Jha IIT Bombay From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Nov 14 01:08:10 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 01:08:10 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? Message-ID: <8b60429e0511131138y169aba87l7a0a27224f237e43@mail.gmail.com> Hi, Just a restatement of what invention is all about. A person with an new and sufficiently new idea. Invention seems to have strong roots in individualsim and freedom, both of which are core of a free society. Hence, can we link invention and existence of free societies as symbiotic elements? or is a "commune or community" model of invention more effective? which one is more "natural" than other? what model of invention has succeded in practice? is the choice between models an "either-or" or "both"? The article below is just news, but has seeds of bigger questions. Another aspect is that American commitment to invention as a signficant part of national life has been emotional all the time, and materially supported spasmodically during times of wars and crises alone. Best, Hasit ============= NY TIMES November 13, 2005 Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN Baltimore WHEN James E. West was 8 years old, he propped himself on his bed's brass footboard one afternoon and stretched to plug the cord of a radio he had repaired into a ceiling outlet. It was one of his first experiments. Mr. West's hand sealed to the light socket as 120 volts of electricity shimmied through his body, freezing him in place until his brother knocked him from the footboard and onto the floor. Like more storied inventors who preceded him, he was quickly hooked on the juice - even as he lay shivering from that first encounter. "I became fascinated by electricity after that, just completely fascinated," recalled Mr. West, now 74 and an award-winning research professor at Johns Hopkins University. "I needed to learn everything I could about it." Over the past several decades, he has secured 50 domestic and more than 200 foreign patents on inventions relating to his pioneering explorations of electrically charged materials and recording devices. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, an organization in Akron, Ohio, that counts Mr. West among its inductees, about 90 percent of all microphones used today in devices like cellphones, acoustic equipment and toys derive from electronic transducers that he helped to develop in the early 1960's. Inventors have always held a special place in American history and business lore, embodying innovation and economic progress in a country that has long prized individual creativity and the power of great ideas. In recent decades, tinkerers and researchers have given society microchips, personal computers, the Internet, balloon catheters, bar codes, fiber optics, e-mail systems, hearing aids, air bags and automated teller machines, among a bevy of other devices. Mr. West stands firmly in this tradition - a tradition that he said may soon be upended. He fears that corporate and public nurturing of inventors and scientific research is faltering and that America will pay a serious economic and intellectual penalty for this lapse. A larger pool of Mr. West's colleagues echoes his concerns. "The scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength," the National Academy of Sciences observed in a report released last month. "Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world. We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost - and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all." A COMMITTEE of leading scientists, corporate executives and educators oversaw the drafting of the report, entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future." To spur American innovation, it recommends enhanced math and science education in grade school and high school, a more hospitable environment for scientific research and training at the college and graduate levels, an increase in federal funds for basic scientific research and a mix of tax incentives and other measures to foster high-paying jobs in groundbreaking industries. The report cites China and India among a number of economically promising countries that may be poised to usurp America's leadership in innovation and job growth. "For the first time in generations, the nation's children could face poorer prospects than their parents and grandparents did," the report said. "We owe our current prosperity, security and good health to the investments of past generations, and we are obliged to renew those commitments." The Industrial Research Institute, an organization in Arlington, Va., that represents some of the nation's largest corporations, is also concerned that the academic and financial support for scientific innovation is lagging in the United States. The group's most recent data indicate that from 1986 to 2001, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan all awarded more doctoral degrees in science and engineering than did the United States. Between 1991 and 2003, research and development spending in America trailed that of China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan - in China's case by billions of dollars. Mr. West's personal journey has involved overcoming school segregation and racism, a reading disability and the downsizing of Bell Labs, the legendary New Jersey research center where he once worked, and he fantasizes about a day when children hold inventors and scientists in higher esteem than hip-hop stars and professional athletes. "We need to bring the view back in this country that we're willing to make investments for the future because everything that's in the cellphone and the iPod today was known 20 years ago," he said. "I think scientists and inventors are a very peculiar breed in that we're not in it for the money - we're in it for the knowledge." IT all begins with a tingle of curiosity. "If I had a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, anything that could be opened was in danger," Mr. West recalled of his childhood. "I had this need to know what was inside." That need links Mr. West to a rich tradition in American life and civilization. Benjamin Franklin, his kite lofted into the sky to coax electricity from the clouds, is the totemic American inventor whose financial acumen gave him time to ponder and then spout a series of inventions that included a stove, catheter, glass harmonica, bifocals and, of course, the lightning rod - which he declined to patent so it would be freely available to the public. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln regarded the patent system, and the protections it offered for what he called the "fire of genius," as one of history's signature achievements. Shortly after President Lincoln's death, Thomas Alva Edison filed a patent for his first invention, an electric vote recorder. Edison became widely heralded not only as the creator of a longer-lasting light bulb and the phonograph but also as the inventor of the invention factory. When the conglomerate that eventually became General Electric began buying out Mr. Edison's operations in the 1890's, it represented the beginning of the corporate absorption of the inventive act. "Edison marks the end of the individual inventor and the precorporate phase of invention," said Randall E. Stross, a contributor to The New York Times who is also working on an Edison biography titled "The Wizard," which Crown Publishing plans to release in 2007. In 1932, a year after Edison died, corporations secured more patents than individuals for the first time, and a year later the Census Bureau eliminated "inventor" as a job class, according to Technology Review, a trade publication. During the golden era of corporate research and development that followed Edison's death, G.E., DuPont, AT&T and eventually Lockheed, Eli Lilly, Intel and other corporate giants came to dominate innovation. And as that happened, some tensions arose between corporations and independent inventors and researchers. While tipping their hats to the scores of breakthroughs that have emerged from corporate labs, inventors also say they are concerned that bottom-line pressures at many companies may cause pure research to be eclipsed by innovation tied to rapid commercialization - leading to routine refinements of existing products rather than to breathtaking advances. A tug of war has emerged between individual inventors and corporations over proposed legislative changes in patent laws, with the inventors arguing that possible revisions would benefit the business giants. Corporations have argued that the system is equitable but flawed. Dean Kamen, an inventor whose creations include the wearable insulin pump and the Segway transporter, recently testified before Congress, calling for changes in the patent system that also preserve protections for individual inventors. Despite those tussles, Mr. Stross says he believes that recent technological advancements have helped to move innovation out of the corporate sphere and to "give the lone inventor access to inexpensive tools and resources to once again be master of one's own lab." Robert S. Langer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a biotechnology pioneer, says that he shares the concerns raised in the National Academy of Sciences report but that he remains confident about the country's prospects. "While I think we can always do better, I am optimistic about the spirit of innovation in this country," he said. "I think we hold a lead, but no lead is unassailable." For Mr. West, whose career has spanned stretches in creative havens like Bell Labs, inventing has meant brainstorming sessions with fellow tinkerers and long hours walking the corridors of his own mind. "I spend a great deal of the hours that I'm awake within myself," he said. "You never want to stop doing it, especially when it's a pleasure. It's vital to my existence and I couldn't live if I wasn't an inventor." Ilene Busch-Vishniac, a Johns Hopkins professor and inventor who has collaborated with Mr. West for more than two decades, most recently on acoustical research, called him the quintessential explorer. "For an inventor to be successful they have to think outside of the box and propose things that are wildly different," she said. "Secondly, you need to be able to figure out how to do the tests that evaluate whether something is plausible. Jim is great at both of those things, but especially at figuring out the tests." Mr. West began testing his limits at an early age, defying his family's wishes that he become a dentist and setting his sights on a doctorate in physics. To dissuade him, his father introduced him to other African-American friends with doctorates - all of whom had failed to land university posts and held blue-collar jobs instead. Still, Mr. West pressed on, coached by a series of mentors, memorizing text and numbers to mask his reading problems, building on his mathematical gifts and eventually enrolling as an undergraduate in physics at Temple University. AFTER a summer internship at Bell Labs, he invented a pair of headphones; enthralled by his lab work, he decided to forgo his physics studies and to stay on at Bell Labs, where he developed microphone technologies and explored a range of interests in acoustics. When Bell Labs became part of Lucent after AT&T reorganized, the scope of its research operations shifted, and Mr. West eventually moved on as well. At Ms. Busch-Vishniac's invitation, he joined Johns Hopkins in 2000. Although he walks with a slight limp caused by a series of lower back surgeries, Mr. West looks much younger than his age. Like all inspired inventors whose fertile imaginations make them both researchers and artists, Mr. West also still manages to bring a Zen-like focus to his endeavors. "If I'm concerned about what an electron does in an amorphous mass then I become an electron," he allowed. "I try to have that picture in my mind and to behave like an electron, looking at the problem in all its dimensions and scales." He and Ms. Busch-Vishniac are currently analyzing solutions to noise problems in hospitals, and they are mentoring two local high school students and a Johns Hopkins graduate student who have joined their team as young inventors. The graduate student, Emily Nalven, 22, said she decided to join Mr. West after taking classes with him. "Even on the days he didn't lecture, he came to class, sat in the front row, took notes and spent his time after class answering student questions," she said in an e-mail message. "One day, I asked him something about sound waves and he answered my question, then came back the next day with an even more detailed explanation to ensure that I truly understood." The seeds of future inventions are sown in these kinds of interactions, but the possible erosion of fertile academic and financial soil in America concerns Mr. West and many others in science. "The inventiveness of individuals depends on the context, including sociopolitical, economic, cultural and institutional factors," said Merton C. Flemings, a professor emeritus at M.I.T. who holds 28 patents and oversees the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program for inventors. "We remain one of the most inventive countries in the world. But all the signs suggest that we won't retain that pre-eminence much longer. The future is very bleak, I'm afraid." Mr. Flemings said that private and public capital was not being adequately funneled to the kinds of projects and people that foster invention. The study of science is not valued in enough homes, he observed, and science education in grade school and high school is sorely lacking. But quantitative goals, he said, are not enough. Singapore posts high national scores in mathematics, he said, but does not have a reputation for churning out new inventions. In fact, he added, researchers from Singapore have studied school systems in America to try to glean the source of something ineffable and not really quantifiable: creativity. "In addition to openness, tolerance is essential in an inventive modern society," a report sponsored by the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program said last year. "Creative people, whether artists or inventive engineers, are often nonconformists and rebels. Indeed, invention itself can be perceived as an act of rebellion against the status quo." THOSE who keep an eye on corporate behavior say they think that sober-minded risk taking - and the support of daring research for research's sake - also needs to be on the strategic menus of more companies. "When inventors work independently, the invention itself is seen as an opportunity, whereas in the corporate world accidents are seen as failures," said Peter Arnell, a marketing consultant who coaches companies about innovation. "When people exist outside of the corporate model and have vision and passion, then accidents and getting lost are beautiful things." Nathan Myhrvold, part of Microsoft's early brain trust and the former head of its heavily endowed research arm, founded Intellectual Ventures, a fund that he says spends "millions of dollars" annually to support individual inventors in long-term projects. Mr. Myhrvold started his fund about five years ago after he retired from Microsoft; he now backs about 20 inventors in such fields as nanotechnology, optics, computing, biotechnology and medical devices. "As far as we know, we're the only people who are doing this - which means we're either incredibly smart or incredibly dumb," Mr. Myhrvold said. "There's a network of venture capitalists for start-ups that have created thousands and thousands of businesses, but very little for inventors." Mr. Myhrvold says that most public and academic grants are for investigating well-defined research problems - and not for backing, as he does, "an invention before it exists." His staff of about 50 people files about 25 patent applications a month on behalf of inventors and his fund. He and his staff also help inventors refine ideas, pay for their time and labor and share ownership stakes in projects with them. "We all love the goose that lays the golden eggs but somehow we've forgotten about the goose," Mr. Myhrvold said. "This decade I'm hoping will be the decade of the invention." Whether or not a new inventive age is coming in America, Mr. West says he plans to continue doing what he's always done. He and Ms. Busch-Vishniac debate, regularly and vociferously, the merits of their respective ideas. But both say their debates are authentic exchanges of viewpoints, not games of one-upmanship. "You can't have a big ego and be a great inventor," Mr. West said. "You constantly have to be listening and evaluating." Even though he is halfway through his eighth decade, he is pursuing other new projects - collaborating with a colleague at Georgia Tech, for example, to explore improved methods of teleconferencing. Inventing, he says, is the intellectual bicycle that he rides each day. Looking back over the years, Mr. West says he has often gone down the wrong intellectual path. But, he says, that's just how inventors do their thing. "I think I've had more failures than successes, but I don't see the failures as mistakes because I always learned something from those experiences," Mr. West said. "I see them as having not achieved the initial goal, nothing more than that." ============= From aarathi_c at hotmail.com Tue Nov 15 07:05:21 2005 From: aarathi_c at hotmail.com (aarathi_c at hotmail.com) Date: 15 Nov 05 07:05:21 Subject: [Commons-Law] Hacking the consumer Message-ID: <20051115050525.5712528D975@mail.sarai.net> iafrica.com ____________________________________________________________ This story excerpt from iafrica.com has been sent to you by aarathi_c at hotmail.com MESSAGE FROM THE SENDER: DRM v. Consumer Rights ARTICLE: Hacking the consumer SonyBMG has caused outrage by configuring some of its CDs to install anti-piracy software ? using techniques straight out of the hackers' guidebook. James Francis investigates. The full story can be found at: http://cooltech.iafrica.com/features/551716.htm ____________________________________________________________ Visit http://iafrica.com. From iram at sarai.net Tue Nov 15 23:08:03 2005 From: iram at sarai.net (Iram Ghufran) Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:08:03 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ectropy Index Message-ID: <437A1CFB.8040302@sarai.net> Ectropy Index Produced at the Sarai Media Lab A hyperlinked, multimedia CD to be exhibited and distributed at World - Information City event, Bangalore. 14th - 19th November, 2005 The word "ectropy" means a general increase in organization. It appears to have been developed by Willard V. Quine, a philosopher and mathematician in the course of a series of discussions about information in 1969. It is now understood as an antonym of "entropy", If entropy is the net increase in the tendency towards chaos within a system, then ectropy being its opposite, suggests a congealing and thickening of information from a mass of things known, half known and unknown. While imagining ectropy it helps to think of a circle, that denotes a neutral state. Any inward collapse of the circle in a cardioid fashion denotes the loss of the order. or entropy, and the outward radiation of the circle, leading to an increase in it's circumferential arc , is ectropy. An ectropic index then would be the measure of the increase of information, or of order, in a given system. 'Ectropic Index' takes these meanings to create its own tension between entropic and ectropic impulses, between forces that tend to increase and decrease the levels of order and systematization (as opposed to randomness) within a system. Interestingly, ectropy is also a disease of the eyelid, which especially afflicts hyper-thoroughbred (or inbred) hunting dogs and people who have artificial eyes. In this disease, the eyelids do not close satisfactorily, leading especially to a slackening of the muscles of the lower eyelid, so that the orbit of the eye comes loose, and portrudes, ectropically, from its socket. Eyes that do not blink, or sleep, or never shut to occasionally 'not see' something, tend towards ectropy. The eye that wants to be all seeing, that wants everything in order, all the time, better beware of ectropy. It is said that we live today in a social realm increasingly marked by activities that have to do with information. Identity cards and identity theft, fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance cameras and shadows , data bodies and data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to define significant features of the topography of contemporaneity. Here, in this zone falls the glare of the searchlight, surrounded by the thickening fog of the unknowable. A host of everyday practices, ways of make do and make believe provoke the anxieties of agencies deeply invested in knowing all that can be known. And all that can be known takes recourse and refuge in the unknowable. This is the ground that this work walks through. Here you can find logs of ongoing research at Sarai on information and society, and a random harvest of images and fragments of information, from the world wide web, from the street nearby, from far away shores, and from right under our noses. Welcome, enter, and take your own measure of the ectropy index. Ectropy Index is the third part of an 'Infoface' which also includes, 'The Global Village Health Manual' (2000) and 'The Network of No_Des' (2004). Credits: Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS by Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Raqs Media Collective and Iram Ghufran with research notes by Taha Mahmood. (November, 2005) With support from the European Union- India Economic Cross Cultural Programme From silvan at bitflux.ch Wed Nov 16 04:34:12 2005 From: silvan at bitflux.ch (Silvan Zurbruegg) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:04:12 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] relay Message-ID: <437A696C.8020903@bitflux.ch> Dear List Im a lurker on this list for quite a while now, but i really appreciate to read the postings. Since the mails are rather long and tend to dissappear somewhere in my mailbox, i thought it would be nice to have an rss feed from the commons-law mailing list. I therefore subscribed a blog to the list that relays all postings and additionally (or primarily ) provides an rss feed. And to have the blog as such isn't probably a bad thing anyway ... Please see http://commonslaw.freeflux.net for the blog, or just point your rss reader to http://commonslaw.freeflux.net/blog/rss.xml. This is an experiment so far, and i hope you are fine with this sort of relaying. Any suggestions etc. are most welcome. Greetings silvan From hbs.law at gmail.com Wed Nov 16 17:07:44 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:07:44 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: relay (Silvan Zurbruegg) Message-ID: <8b60429e0511160337y208eb0d1tc81f273a1aca1d3@mail.gmail.com> Silvan, A big public "Thank you" for making the RSS feed so easy for reading this list. Hasit On 11/16/05, commons-law-request at sarai.net wrote: > Send commons-law mailing list submissions to > commons-law at sarai.net > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > commons-law-request at sarai.net > > You can reach the person managing the list at > commons-law-owner at sarai.net > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of commons-law digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. relay (Silvan Zurbruegg) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:04:12 +0100 > From: Silvan Zurbruegg > Subject: [Commons-Law] relay > To: commons-law at sarai.net > Message-ID: <437A696C.8020903 at bitflux.ch> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-15"; format=flowed > > Dear List > > Im a lurker on this list for quite a while now, > but i really appreciate to read the postings. > Since the mails are rather long and tend to > dissappear somewhere in my mailbox, i thought > it would be nice to have an rss feed from the > commons-law mailing list. > I therefore subscribed a blog to the list > that relays all postings and additionally (or primarily ) > provides an rss feed. And to have the blog as such > isn't probably a bad thing anyway ... > > Please see http://commonslaw.freeflux.net for the > blog, or just point your rss reader to > http://commonslaw.freeflux.net/blog/rss.xml. > > This is an experiment so far, and i hope you are fine > with this sort of relaying. Any suggestions etc. > are most welcome. > > > Greetings > silvan > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > > > End of commons-law Digest, Vol 28, Issue 15 > ******************************************* > From tahir.amin at btopenworld.com Wed Nov 16 17:22:34 2005 From: tahir.amin at btopenworld.com (TAHIR AMIN) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:52:34 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Tamiflu firms in licensing deal Message-ID: <20051116115234.93135.qmail@web86107.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Tamiflu firms in licensing deal Drug firms Roche and Gilead have set aside their differences and struck a deal over the production of Tamiflu, the main weapon against a flu pandemic. The two companies have been in arbitration after Tamiflu inventor Gilead moved to break up a 1996 licensing agreement earlier this year. Roche will pay Gilead $62.5m (£36m) and royalties of between 14% and 22%. Concerns about the spread of bird flu and the speed with which governments need to prepare have prompted the deal. 'Global threat' "We have ended our dispute with Roche in an effort to work together, with the utmost diligence, to address this global public health need," said Gilead chief executive John Martin. "The global threat of a potential avian flu pandemic has challenged governments, public health officials and the pharmaceutical industry to join together in partnership for the purpose of establishing a comprehensive plan to combat this deadly disease." The money is not a great deal Claude Zehnder, ZKB Governments have been stepping up their efforts to stop the spread of bird flu and have been looking at ways of protecting their populations. Roche has been discussing licensing the production of the drug to other firms and nations in an effort to ensure that enough of the medicine is available should it be needed. In the UK, the Department of Health has placed an order for 14.6 million courses of Tamiflu to cover a quarter of the population in the event of a flu pandemic Sales of Tamiflu are expected to top the $1bn mark. Better deal As part of the new agreement, Gilead will have more say in how production of Tamiflu is boosted, and will pay a smaller share of manufacturing costs. The row broke out because Gilead felt that Roche had not done enough to market Tamiflu in the US, and had failed to sell it as a seasonal flu treatment in other markets. Gilead will now have a greater role in how and where Tamiflu is marketed. "The money is not a great deal," said Claude Zehnder, an analyst at Swiss bank ZKB. "But it is certainly a good thing that they have agreed this amicably." ___________________________________________________________ WIN ONE OF THREE YAHOO! VESPAS - Enter now! - http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/features/competitions/vespa.html From hbs.law at gmail.com Sat Nov 19 07:07:46 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 07:07:46 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Weekend Dose of Insights...from Bob Cringely... Message-ID: <8b60429e0511181737p38cd4348tb18ee3a85eccfbdd@mail.gmail.com> Hi All, Why is this article forwarded to you? Good Question! Google is doing something so fundamental that the Internet and WWW will change forever in years to come. While all the open source advocates are busy cloning commerical applications and deriding Microsoft as a monster, they will not know what stole away the Internet freedoms that they were so jealously guarding - until it's too late. This unknown but BIG-BANG change will affect ALL opinions in the marketplace of ideas - copyright, patents, society, freedom....you name it. And this BIG-BANG change will all be done keeping the narrow open source arguments in picture - freedom to modify code. Why so? Since software will essentially become a service. Software is not going to remain code but will be a service. Since the commerical world has been unable to make software into a model of revenues as stable as selling cars (goods) and credit-cards (services), this was bound to happen - sooner than later. We pay for credit-card as a service, so it will be much easier to convince us to pay-up for a software service than it has been to pay for software as a piece of code. Google wants to do that. Microsoft failed to create a revenue model for software, instead they created hate for software, which ultimately led to rise of open source - make the code free. Free as in Fruit-juice counts more for most users, not free as in freedom, which is a rhetorical engine to support a mass-movement based chiefly on indignation. This and the insanely cheap telecommunication costs have created ideal conditions for converting software into services. How will this conversion of code into service will be done? Read Bob Cringely's superb prose and insight in the article below to understand just how will that happen and more precisely how will Google make it happen. Have a nice weekend :-) Hasit ----------------------------------------------------------- Google-Mart Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did By Robert X. Cringely Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing. Google's strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I'm not saying they aren't doing that (I simply don't know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn't play to any of the company's traditional strengths. The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings. So why buy-up all that fiber, then? The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide. Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google. Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it. As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app. And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using. This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware. There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal. All this is based, of course, on Google's proven network and hardware expertise. Have you seen Google's Search Appliance? They ship you a 1U prebuilt server. You connect it to your network, fill out a simple configuration screen, and it scans and indexes your web site (or sites) for you. Google monitors and manages it remotely, and sucks up the data and adds it to theirs. You just plug the thing in and turn it on. It just works. You need do nothing else to keep it running. Google understands how to do this stuff. Microsoft definitely does not. And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match. But that doesn't mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage. Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google. Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year. Game over. And yet next week I'll take it one more step. All (c) acknowleged. ----------------------------------------------------------- From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Sun Nov 20 11:53:29 2005 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 22:23:29 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Guardian Op Ed on "Intellectual Property" Message-ID: <43801661.481C5686@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> > http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1646125,00.html Owning ideas The boom in the intellectual property market will not reap rewards for us all Andrew Brown Saturday November 19, 2005 The Guardian The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea - so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms. Ideas such as one-click shopping, getting customer reviews on a website or even putting classified ads on the internet are now patented, which is to say that somebody owns them - Amazon.com the first two, Google, the classified ad patent - and anybody else who wants to make use of them must pay a rent to the owner. Last week, Amazon was also granted a patent that covers getting shoppers to review the things they have bought on its website. BT has tried to patent the hyperlink, Microsoft is trying to patent XML, a way of writing computer files that is fundamental to the operation of modern business. The fight over the human genome and its patenting - and over the patenting of drugs - is another, and perhaps more familiar front in the war. Ideas are codified as intellectual property and regarded as among the most important assets a company can own. As where things are made becomes less important in the formerly industrialised nations of the west, the real value comes in the licence to allow others to make them. Even facts about the world can, in some cases, become the property of commercial companies. It was the promise of gaining patents on the human genome that lured investors into the private consortium that attempted to sequence it in competition with the public effort. Laboratory animals have already been patented, starting with the OncoMouse, an animal whose genome has been manipulated to ensure that it develops cancer. Science was one of the first fields in which the confusion of ideas with things became apparent and damaging. It has always been one in which ideas and techniques were freely shared. You might say that any scientific experiment is worthless until it has been copied - if it can't be repeated, it isn't scientific. Scientific papers, too, measure their influence by how often they are copied or quoted in others. But as the practice of science has grown more expensive, and more commercial, so has the pressure to patent everything. The public project that sequenced the human genome, led by Sir John Sulston and Bob Waterston, defined itself as in opposition to patenting data. This wasn't just an idealistic stance. They were convinced that without freely available data the work would flow less swiftly, if at all, and that the results would be very much less useful. In fact, the so-called private project run by Craig Ventner used a method that relied on the availability of publicly sequenced data as a springboard for the short cuts it took. Sulston now, after his Nobel prize, spends much of his time campaigning for public access to scientific knowledge and its fruits. In a world where material goods are so unevenly distributed, the effort to lock up ideas and intellectual riches as well seems to him quite monstrous. The struggle over patents in science and technology is usually presented as one between rich countries and poor ones, with big pharmaceuticals on the one side and almost everybody in the world on the other. It is certainly true that the governments, the peoples and the industries of poor countries have fewer drugs than they might otherwise have because of international patent law. But so do the big companies themselves. It is not just the results of scientific inquiry, like drugs, that are controlled as intellectual property. It is, increasingly, the knowledge needed to make them or to understand how they are made. Where scientists once worked over a safety net composed of other scientists' experiments, they can now have the impression that they are working over a minefield composed of other companies' patents. In this world, size is no protection. It just makes you a more succulent target for enemy lawyers. It is the biggest and most enterprising firms, whose work is likely to make use of the greatest bodies of knowledge, that are most at risk. Naturally, this has a chilling effect on the work that is done. Big pharmaceuticals must patent everything, if only to be certain the competition does not do it first. They may, of course, later exchange patents with their rivals. But that simply helps to confine invention to the very largest companies, as the smaller ones have little to trade with. This is even more true in the software industry. The law of copyright - and of patents - long precedes computers, which fit very uneasily into the old frameworks. Neither copyright nor patent law is satisfactory here, but patents on software threaten to have the most disastrous effect on the future of programming, since only programmers can break it. In the beginning, computer software was neither patented nor copyright. For so long as the machines had no users, only programmers, this made sense. But in the mid-1970s, people started to see they could make money out of software. This is not easy or obvious, because when I make a copy of your program, you still have the original, which works just as well as it ever did. Equally, when you make a copy and sell it to me, it has cost you nothing, so why should you charge me for it as if it were a limited resource? There is no answer from justice to these questions. The only answer that makes sense is that certain arrangements of copyright promote a flourishing market in software, which is in society's general interest, so it should legislate for them. Without it there would be no commercial software industry, or any way to ensure that free software stays free. Bill Gates first came to the attention of other hackers when he objected to their taking his earliest Basic programming language and copying it, as they were used to doing. He won, and Microsoft's riches rest on copyright law. But they also depend on its constant violation. Around every legitimate, full-priced piece of software hangs a penumbra of pirated versions. Most of these will be converted, at some time, into legitimate purchases. But the fact that you can use most MS software for free has been an important factor in spreading the habit of using it and in killing competition. The companies that make most fuss about "software piracy" know perfectly well that if it were entirely abolished, they would be less well off. Software patents came along later, and are much more damaging, because they can be enforced. Copyright protects only particular program code. It does not - crucially - protect the way that it looks and works. Nor does it protect the clever ideas contained within it. In a world where software is only protected by copyright, competition works like evolution - by incremental improvement. Patenting software could stop all that. Because patents are meant to protect inventions, they apply to ways of doing things in software. This can be discussed as if it were real machinery, but in fact it's an idea, or an arrangement of ideas. The final problem with software patents is that they can be taken out on business processes, such as Amazon's one-click buying. Here, what is protected is not even a trick to writing programs. It is a way of dealing with customers. That is the kind of innovation the market is meant to spread more quickly than any other mechanism. Patents on business processes obviously deliberately slow this process down, and if clever business ideas can be patented, why not other ideas? There is a man in California trying to patent movie plots. US venture capitalists now refuse to back a company until it has applied for a patent on its business practice, which they will keep if it fails, as most startups must. If this practice continues, the chilling effect for the future is obvious. The first company into almost any field will fail. But if it leaves enough patents behind it, these may strangle all its successors. Patenting ideas rewards failure and makes success more difficult. You can't argue that they are needed as incentives. Bill Gates made his fortune in a world without software patents - and if that's not big enough to act as an incentive, nothing is. There is some evidence that patenting has not slowed down research into genomes, simply because researchers ignore them. But they are impossible to ignore in software, partly because the laws governing infringement are so drastic. The directors and board members of any company found guilty of patent infringement are liable to triple damages, personally as well as corporately. So companies that may infringe patents simply can't be sold until the patent holders are bought off, and this is almost always easier and cheaper than fighting the patent, no matter how worthless. This gives the holders of patents tremendous powers of extortion. The only defence is for everybody to do it, which still further clogs up the system. For most people these concerns may seem abstract - at least until they listen to music, where arguments about ownership are fought over all the time in the courts and, increasingly, inside the gadgets that we use. Only last week, Sony was forced to withdraw software concealed on some of its CDs that installs itself - without the owner's knowledge or informed consent - on a computer, prevents copies being made and breaks the machine if an attempt is made to remove it. At least 47 recent CDs have been infected in this way, and one recent survey suggests that they in turn have infected half a million PCs during the last three months. Any PC thus infected can be attacked by more obviously malevolent hackers who can use the Sony technology to install their own programs on the victims' PCs. But whether it is Sony or some Russian mafia gang that ends up working through these security holes, it won't be you, the poor sap who thought he/she owned the computer and had bought the music. Legally, of course, we don't buy music, any more than we buy software. We agree to buy certain, limited rights, which vary from country to country but which have all been routinely disregarded until very recently. In the US, for instance, it is illegal to copy your own CDs on to your own iPod. Obviously, this is a law that is broken all the time, or nobody there would ever buy an iPod. The 60GB model sells for $350 (£200); to fill it up with freshly downloaded content from the Apple store could easily cost another $25,000. Just as with computer software, the legal market has broken down because there is no obligation for buyer and seller to agree on a price, or even on what is being sold. Computers have made it possible for both sides to cheat on their agreements. Buyers can use some forms of file sharing and sellers can write ever more restrictive licence agreements to make it clear they are not selling anything, merely renting it out. There are some download services where the music you have already downloaded will no longer play if you stop your subscription. The obvious answer is to pay for it with money similarly protected - special digital rights money, which would vanish, like fairy gold, when you stopped playing with the new toy. Nobody would accept payment on those terms. Why are there companies which think the opposite is fair? The answer is that they are operating in a climate where intellectual property seems to guarantee an endless, effortless stream of money to its owners. The big content owners have been determining the world's intellectual property regimes for the last few decades. By clever lobbying at extraordinarily boring conferences, they had managed by the late 90s to commit governments, through the world trade talks, to a draconian programme of laws extending the notion of intellectual property to the point where a Norwegian teenager can be threatened with jail when he writes a clever programme to let him watch DVDs on his own computer - because he is said to be providing tools to steal intellectual property. This is madness. Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that. Intellectual property - treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded - is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us. -- RIAA is the RISK! Our NET is P2P! http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/ftc DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! New Yorkers for Fair Use http://www.nyfairuse.org [CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights. From kalisaroj at rediffmail.com Tue Nov 22 15:20:54 2005 From: kalisaroj at rediffmail.com (avinash jha) Date: 22 Nov 2005 09:50:54 -0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? Message-ID: <20051122095054.16228.qmail@webmail55.rediffmail.com>   On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 Hasit seth wrote : >Hi, > >Just a restatement of what invention is all about. A person with an >new and sufficiently new idea. Invention seems to have strong roots >in individualsim and freedom, both of which are core of a free >society. Hence, can we link invention and existence of free societies >as symbiotic elements? or is a "commune or community" model of >invention more effective? which one is more "natural" than other? what >model of invention has succeded in practice? is the choice between >models an "either-or" or "both"? Here is a response: INVENTION, INNOVATION, AND FREEDOM ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ Yearning for freedom in a situation, which seems closed, we come up with inventions. When we are up against a problem or a dilemma and all available solutions are either unacceptable or unworkable, the necessity of finding a new solution often inspires an invention. Freedom is not a condition of invention. It is rather a consequence of invention. Is this the reason that a large number of technological developments of the post Second World War era are rooted in the inventions made during the war in the industrial world? Even the desire of an elite of a country to conceive of a possible nuclear war and work for a communication system that would survive such war, their desire for that relative degree of freedom in the case of a nuclear showdown between two superpowers and their allies equipped with vast arsenals of what are now selectively called weapons of mass destruction, desire of this elite for such freedom can lead to the invention of the Internet. Maybe it is because of this intrinsic quality of inventions, that they embody an yearning for freedom, maybe it is for this reason that any invention however evil ends they might have been invented for, there is a possibility of their being used for other ends. We can use Internet technology for a variety of ends. But such a thing may not be possible for all inventions. I doubt whether the invention of nuclear bomb can be used for any end other than war, unless in an unlikely situation when an asteroid is hurtling towards the earth and we send a missile with a nuclear warhead to explode and scatter it. But it nuclear bombs were to be used for this purpose, they would be administered by astronomers, engineers through a transparent mechanism. Innovations as the sphere of applications of invention: Innovation is based on established inventions. We innovate when we produce variations in the process of applying it in different contexts for different purposes. We play around with invention, we try changing it in different ways, reverse it, and so on. Take electronic mailing lists as a neat innovation to carry out dialogue among many. Of course, it could also be used merely as a reporting mechanism. It is based on other inventions. Invention of the letter-form (I mean the letters that we write and post and reply to) which was translated upon invention of the Internet into email. Mailing list combines this with the idea of a public meeting, consultation or debate. We need not absolutise the distinction between invention and innovation. Because innovations are, in ultimate analysis, little inventions. But these little inventions are made when the background is already ripe for such inventions. Sooner or later, someone or the other, is going to stumble upon it. These inventions have virtually arrived before they are actually made. Discoveries (or inventions) of science also result from a necessity which is generated conceptually or experimentally during scientific practice. An anomaly appears which begins to grow and a gulp opens up in the understanding. Then a new understanding dawns. In the industrial economy, scientific discoveries led to inventions which were then made into innovative products by the business. Innovations and the dynamic of global knowledge economy: In the global knowledge economy of the Internet age, inventions are drawn from a wider pool. Then the process of innovation begins – of converting them into capital, products, and then into brands. The global economy seems to be based on appropriation of inventions combined with the dynamic of innovations. The Internet referred to here is not the Internet infrastructure but that realm of virtuality- the connected world. War, finance, knowledge, media are all reconstituted in this world and they are meshed together. Inventions of the public sphere are taken and the power of capital and organization are put into it to produce innovations. There is a competition in innovations. By public sphere is simply meant the sphere outside the control of big capital. We can also call it the independent sector. When innovations of the virtual sector are taken by the independent sector and further innovations are produced – like the thriving gray market of media products in India and several other countries, the so-called copy culture – it is called ‘piracy’. Intellectual property regime is to protect the innovations by the big capital and to contain and kill the innovative culture of the independent sector. This is obvious from the fact that the same big capital is not keen to apply intellectual property ownership to the inventions of natural knowledge traditions in many parts of the world. The appropriation of this knowledge has been termed ‘biopiracy’ in a counter move. This is often termed the question of traditional knowledge, or TK, in the intellectual property debates. The main obstruction in providing intellectual ownership rights for this kind of knowledge and inventions is supposed to be the fact that this knowledge does not belong to individuals, but to communities. Corporations are treated as legal personalities, i.e., as individuals in some sense in the matters of property, but it has proved difficult to treat communities as individuals. Knowledge systems of the people: The fact remains that with each new wave of technology coming, for whatever geopolitical and national compulsions, a kind of knowledge and variety of skills developed to assimilate it, to adapt it and to innovate upon it. Farmers in India did not use the tools of modern agriculture in the way prescribed by the accredited experts. They developed their own ways in conditions where odds were against them and the degree of freedom quite restricted. The use of pepsicola as pesticide has been cited as a recent example of farmers’ innovation. But I am sure this is only the most dramatic one. Unlike the gray market of media products these innovations in agriculture were not in the form of products with their markets. They were producing food in a system where both market forces and state were not favorable to them, because they were producing food for the national population and not just for themselves. Despite the onset of modern agriculture, a great deal of indigenous seed economy, seed science, and seed sociality continued to thrive and modern seeds were part of this complex. This knowledge of modern seeds and their use could be very different from the conclusions of agricultural experts. Intellectual property regime intervenes here to stop the exchange and production of seeds as is taking place and restructure the seed sector. Similarly many other knowledge traditions of non-modern origins are surviving. We are all familiar with medical knowledge traditions, much beyond the few well-known systems like Ayurveda, Siddha and Yunani. In fact, there are a myriad of knowledge traditions of different kinds undergoing change, development, transformations and producing hybrid traditions. These myriad of knowledge systems that have survived in different forms did not do so because of any advocacy to save traditional knowledge, or because of the recognition they were accorded. As a matter of fact, the normative framework of modern science which was the dominant knowledge system of last two centuries had little place for these knowledge systems, if any. These knowledge systems survived because the people, whose knowledge systems these were, survived. With the slow crumbling of the authority of Science to institute knowledge organization in the society, there is a greater recognition now for these knowledge systems. But what framework of knowledge is being constituted now in the age of the Internet? Have we escaped the devil only to find a precipice on the other side? Maybe the answer lies in exploring how knowledge is being reconstituted in the virtual world. Software is central to this, both in itself and as a means of reconstituting knowledge. In Conclusion: In the light of the above, I believe that statements like "Invention seems to have strong roots in individualsim and freedom, both of which are core of a free society.", by their apparent commonsense, serve to conceal the actual dynamics of society. Moreover, the terms in which the issue of knowledge, and of intellectual property, is framed whether in terms of 'traditional knowledge' or in terms of community ownership of knowledge, is inadequate to address the dynamics of knowledge and domination in our times. At least, that is the argument offered here. Avinash Jha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20051122/6cced13c/attachment.html From hbs.law at gmail.com Wed Nov 23 16:37:52 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:37:52 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Hollywood studios make deal with [Bram Cohen] BitTorrent creator Message-ID: <8b60429e0511230307k3fdea854h682eaeac4ddd376f@mail.gmail.com> Guardian Online (c) Acknowledged. Hollywood studios make deal with BitTorrent creator Staff and agencies Wednesday November 23, 2005 In a deal aimed at reducing illegal internet traffic in pirated films, Hollywood reached an agreement yesterday with the creator of the popular file-sharing software BitTorrent. The agreement requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to prevent his website, bittorrent.com, from linking to pirated versions of popular movies available online, effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films. BitTorrent must remove web links leading to illegal content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America. The BitTorrent technology pioneered by Cohen - and used by an estimated 45 million people - assembles digital movies and other computer files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the internet. Its decentralised nature makes downloading more efficient but also frustrates the entertainment industry's efforts to find and identify movie pirates. The agreement represents the latest effort by the entertainment industry to discourage illegal internet downloads. It also demonstrates Cohen's sensitivity toward Hollywood's piracy problems, making him potentially more attractive to studios for future deals related to movie downloads. Cohen disclosed in September his company had raised $8.75m (£5m) in venture funding to develop commercial distribution tools for media companies. The agreement with Cohen would not prevent determined surfers from finding movies or other materials using tools or websites other than Cohen's, but it removes one of the most convenient methods people have used so far. From k70 at mac.com Fri Nov 25 21:58:48 2005 From: k70 at mac.com (k70 at mac.com) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 01:28:48 +0900 Subject: [Commons-Law] Press release from the wipo Message-ID: Hi- I'm a long-time lurker ... Just saw this on a WSIS mailing list. May interest you - to rip into :-) also has WIPO contact e-mail & ph numbers. G -----------------------  From: publicinf at wipo.int Organization: WIPO Reply-To: publicinf at wipo.int Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:38:55 +0100 (CET) To: pressinfo-en at lists.wipo.int Subject: Press Release 430 : WIPO Member States Consider how to Facilitate Access to Educational Materials Press Release 430 Geneva, November 22, 2005  WIPO MEMBER STATES CONSIDER HOW TO FACILITATE ACCESS TO EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS Member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) examined on Monday, the impact of the copyright system on the use of protected works for educational purposes in both the analog and digital environments, particularly in developing countries. The meeting took place at the beginning of deliberations by the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) which is being held in Geneva from November 21 to 23, 2005. Copyright law, like other forms of intellectual property law, recognizes that restrictions or limitations in the rights granted to authors and holders of other related rights are justified in certain cases that do not conflict with the normal exploitation of the protected material and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rightholders. In relation to education, certain permitted uses are defined which remove liability that would otherwise arise. Digital technology has revolutionized the way in which creative works, including educational materials, are made, delivered and used with important implications for copyright. The information meeting provided an opportunity to examine the varying perspectives of the different stakeholders and served as a forum for delegates to discuss and exchange experiences on the opportunities and challenges presented by the copyright system within the context of education, especially within developing countries. "The digital environment presents enormous opportunities and challenges in terms of delivering educational materials in a sustainable manner, said Mrs. Rita Hayes, WIPO Deputy Director General in charge of copyright issues. "Today’s meeting was an excellent opportunity to look at the dissemination of teaching materials through balanced and effective copyright systems that meet the needs of all stakeholders; authors, publishers, libraries and educational services", she added. The program included presentations from a group of high-level experts from academia, libraries, collective management societies and the publishing sectors. Presentations covered a range of issues, including, the challenges facing educators and libraries particularly in developing countries; the need to foster development of the indigenous publishing sector in developing countries; the role of reproduction rights organizations; licensing mechanisms, including alternative licensing systems (such as the creative commons and open access models) to facilitate the flow of educational materials in developing countries; and the national experiences of Chile and Canada in devising copyright exceptions for education. Details of the program are available at: http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/details.jsp?meeting_id=9462 . Presentations and audiofiles will be available from http://www.wipo.int in the near future. The SCCR will continue discussion of other copyright related issues. The program and documents are available at http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/details.jsp?meeting_id=9289 . For further information, please contact the Media Relations and Public Affairs Section at WIPO: Tel: (+41 22) - 338 81 61 or 338 95 47 Fax: (+41 22) - 338 82 80 Email: publicinf at wipo.int . From skatyal at law.fordham.edu Sun Nov 27 01:55:33 2005 From: skatyal at law.fordham.edu (Sonia Katyal) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:25:33 -0500 Subject: [Commons-Law] cyberlaw professor in India Message-ID: Hello--I hope all of you are well. My name is Sonia Katyal, and I am a South Asian law professor who specializes in intellectual property and civil rights with a focus on new media at Fordham Law School in New York City. I am writing- first of all to say hello, and second, because I am planning a trip to India in December, specifically to Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, and would love to meet up with cyberlaw/tech/creative commons oriented folks on this list serve. Because of my background, we are particularly interested in developing a closer relationship with law students and lawyers in South Asia, and would love to bring more tech folks to Fordham who are interested in the issues surrounding intellectual property law, civil/human rights and technology. I really admire the work of Sarai, and would love to develop closer relationships between those of us in the US who work on similar issues. Anyway, I should be in India throughout December, and would welcome the opportunity to meet and speak with folks on any other intellectual property issue that might be of interest. My own scholarly work concentrates on the relationship between copyright, trademark and civil rights protections like privacy and freedom of expression, and I would be happy to chat with folks about doing workshops or talks that may be of interest to them while I am in India. A bunch of law professors in the States are really interested in developing more relationships with cyberlaw folks in South Asia, and I'd love to hear more about some of the issues facing tech folks today. Please feel free to take a look at my faculty web site at Fordham Law School (http://law.fordham.edu); you'll see that a lot of my work concentrates on cyberlaw surveillance and art law. Please feel free to contact me individually if I can be of service to you--I would really be thrilled to meet up with folks while I am there. I'm planning to go to the Information Technology and Society meeting in hyderabad in December and hope maybe some folks from this list will also be there. Finally, if you are interested, here is our web site on Fordham's one year program on intellectual property/information technology: http://www.llm-guide.com/university/287. It is a wonderful school, and a great program. thanks so much, and hope everyone is well, best, skk Sonia K. Katyal Associate Professor of Law Fordham Law School 140 W. 62nd St. New York, NY 10023 skatyal at law.fordham.edu From mayur.suresh at gmail.com Sun Nov 27 05:30:47 2005 From: mayur.suresh at gmail.com (Mayur) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:00:47 -0500 Subject: [Commons-Law] Anti terror laws and piracy Message-ID: <4def3c470511261600t499782e8w6d1ef0da6a90d58f@mail.gmail.com> *Music industry seeks access to private data to fight piracy* *· *Plea to Europe to widen scope of anti-terror laws *· *Civil rights fears over phone and email records *Bobbie Johnson Saturday November 26, 2005 The Guardian * The music and film industries are demanding that the European parliament extends the scope of proposed anti-terror laws to help them prosecute illegal downloaders. In an open letter to MEPs, companies including Sony BMG, Disney and EMI have asked to be given access to communications data - records of phone calls, emails and internet surfing - in order to take legal action against pirates and filesharers. Current proposals restrict use of such information to cases of terrorism and organised crime. Article continues ------------------------------ ------------------------------ "The scope of the proposal should be extended to all criminal offences," says a letter to European representatives from the Creative and Media Business Alliance, an informal lobby group representing media companies. "The possibility for law enforcement authorities to use data in other cases ... is essential." The attempt to pressure MEPs comes as they prepare to vote on an extension to the period for which data must be held by telephone networks and internet service providers. The plans, championed by the British government, would harmonise and extend the broad range of policies across the continent. The Home Office says such moves are necessary in order to assist proper investigation of suspected terrorist activity. But if successful, it would mean communications companies would be obliged to keep information on phone calls, emails and internet use for as long as three years. "It is not for us to get involved in the wider issue of national security," said a spokesman for international music industry association IFPI, parent body of the CBMA. If the demands were met by European legislators, it would open use of such private information across any number of criminal cases. "Even the Bush administration is not proposing such a ludicrous policy, despite lobbying from Hollywood," said Gus Hosein, a senior fellow at Privacy International. The music industry has already pursued a large number of cases against illegal downloaders, but the letter claims that wider access to private information would be an "effective instrument in the fight against piracy" and help secure more legal actions. Critics say it is simply a case of litigious industries attempting to gain access to protected data by the back door. The proposals, to be put to the vote on December 13, have already faced censure. More privacy-conscious nations such as Germany have voiced concerns about long-term data retention, and telecoms companies say they cannot afford to keep more information about their customers. "The passing of the data retention directive would be a disaster not just for civil liberties and human rights in Europe," said Suw Charman, director of digital rights campaigners, Open Rights Group. The music industry has been waging war against illegal filesharing for some time, with film companies closely behind. An Australian court this week ordered Kazaa, one of the biggest file-swapping services, to filter out copyrighted music from its systems or face closure. Last week the British Phonographic Industry announced its latest batch of cases against illegal downloaders, taking the total number of UK actions to over 150. Such prosecutions already rely on voluntary data supplied by internet providers, but the music industry would like it made compulsory. At the same time, the legitimate digital download industry continues to grow at a startling pace. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20051126/fb7571ae/attachment.html From supreet.sethi at gmail.com Sun Nov 27 22:56:52 2005 From: supreet.sethi at gmail.com (s|s) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:26:52 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ectropy Index In-Reply-To: <437A1CFB.8040302@sarai.net> References: <437A1CFB.8040302@sarai.net> Message-ID: To err is entropic .......... With due respect to artists who have worked hard to conceptualize and execute a project on such important subject as surveillance and databases, one still feels the need to point at neglect on understanding what term entropy means, or rather so called "antonym" of entropy means. One will not hear anti-temperature, or anti-time. Likewise is the case with entropy. http://www.google.com/search?q=define:entropy for further details. Further reading: Chaos, highly accessible read on the concept regards Supreet From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Nov 28 15:07:52 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:07:52 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade - NYTIMES Message-ID: <8b60429e0511280137v6e2c2492p39f15b15dbce19cf@mail.gmail.com> ===== Comment ===== Software's future is going to be a networked and hosted service more than standalone PC based software. This is going to raise a phenomenal number of issues and of course means a virtual end of "software development" as it is known today - open or closed source. Here is a piece about how Google's massive database of personalized and trackable information is a sitting target that not many have notice. Cheers, Hasit ================== NY TIMES - Editorial Observer What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade By ADAM COHEN Published: November 28, 2005 At a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial this month, prosecutors announced an unusual piece of evidence: Google searches allegedly done by the defendant that included the words "neck" and "snap." The data were taken from the defendant's computer, prosecutors say. But it might have come directly from Google, which - unbeknownst to many users - keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals. Google is rolling out revolutionary new features at a blistering rate, most recently Google Base, which could evolve into a classified ad service, and the Google Book Search Library Project, which aims to put a vast number of books online. Google's stock recently soared past $400 a share, putting its market capitalization ahead of Time Warner and Gannett combined, and the personal fortunes of its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, above $14 billion. Google is the subject of a new book, "The Google Story," by David Vise and Mark Malseed, that tracks the company's rise from a student project at Stanford through its success in outmaneuvering Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and other behemoths for Internet dominance. Google has long presented itself as the anti-Microsoft, a company that the digerati regard as a force for good in the technology world. In many ways, it has lived up to that reputation. But if it wants to hold on to its corporate halo, Google should do a better job of including users in decisions about how their personal information is collected, stored, and shared. Google has succeeded so extraordinarily because its founders were able to see the future of the Internet more clearly than the rest of Silicon Valley. At a time when "Web portals" - sites that directed users to online services - were seen as the future, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page were convinced Internet searches would be pivotal. They developed technology that was far better than other search engines at sifting through the galaxy of information online. They slapped a typo of a name on their project - a misspelling of "googol," the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes - got venture capital, and quickly built a company. Mr. Brin and Mr. Page believed companies should not be able to get better placement on the results page by paying money, something their competitors allowed. Google strictly separated out "sponsored" results, or ads, from search results, and gave up untold millions of dollars in revenue by keeping Google's home page ad free. The company has taken other idealistic positions over its short lifetime, including conducting its initial public offering by a "Dutch auction," so Wall Street would not control it. Google operates according to two core principles. One is its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The other is its motto, "Don't be evil," which Mr. Brin and Mr. Page take so seriously that they included it in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. As Google grows and spreads into new areas, these two principles are turning out to be in tension. Google's book search, for example, aims to make books universally accessible in a way some authors regard as dismissive of their rights and illegal. The biggest area where Google's principles are likely to conflict is privacy. Google has been aggressive about collecting information about its users' activities online. It stores their search data, possibly forever, and puts "cookies" on their computers that make it possible to track those searches in a personally identifiable way - cookies that do not expire until 2038. Its e-mail system, Gmail, scans the content of e-mail messages so relevant ads can be posted. Google's written privacy policy reserves the right to pool what it learns about users from their searches with what it learns from their e-mail messages, though Google says it won't do so. It also warns that users' personal information may be processed on computers located in other countries. The government can gain access to Google's data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages. If the federal government announced plans to directly collect the sort of data Google does, there would be an uproar - in fact there was in 2003, when the Pentagon announced its Total Information Awareness program, which was quickly shut down. In the early days of the Internet, privacy advocates argued that data should be collected on individuals only if they affirmatively agreed. But businesses like Google have largely succeeded in reversing the presumption. There is a privacy policy on the site, but many people don't read privacy policies. It is hard to believe most Google users know they have a cookie that expires in 2038, or have thought much about the government's ability to read their search history and stored e-mail messages without them knowing it. Google says it needs the data it keeps to improve its technology, but it is doubtful it needs so much personally identifiable information. Of course, this sort of data is enormously valuable for marketing. The whole idea of "Don't be evil," though, is resisting lucrative business opportunities when they are wrong. Google should develop an overarching privacy theory that is as bold as its mission to make the world's information accessible - one that can become a model for the online world. Google is not necessarily worse than other Internet companies when it comes to privacy. But it should be doing better. (c) Acknowledged. From iram at sarai.net Tue Nov 29 01:12:19 2005 From: iram at sarai.net (Iram Ghufran) Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 01:12:19 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ectropy Index In-Reply-To: References: <437A1CFB.8040302@sarai.net> Message-ID: <438B5D9B.9050702@sarai.net> Dear Supreet, Thanks for the observation. However let me assure you that there is no neglect on understanding either entropy or ectropy. Entropy is one metaphor to describe the universe and we use ectropy as another. For more Info, incase you havent already seen this, checkout http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Ectropy I hope you enjoyed excavating the index of ectropy. Best regards Iram s|s wrote: >To err is entropic .......... > >With due respect to artists who have worked hard to conceptualize and >execute a project on such important subject as surveillance and >databases, one still feels the need to point at neglect on >understanding what term entropy means, or rather so called "antonym" >of entropy means. > >One will not hear anti-temperature, or anti-time. Likewise is the case >with entropy. > >http://www.google.com/search?q=define:entropy for further details. > >Further reading: Chaos, highly accessible read on the concept > >regards > >Supreet >_______________________________________________ >commons-law mailing list >commons-law at sarai.net >https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > > From supreet.sethi at gmail.com Mon Nov 28 20:37:25 2005 From: supreet.sethi at gmail.com (s|s) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:37:25 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ectropy Index In-Reply-To: <438B5D9B.9050702@sarai.net> References: <437A1CFB.8040302@sarai.net> <438B5D9B.9050702@sarai.net> Message-ID: For quoting, I would have preferred using more authoritative web resources like wikipedia.org. Sadly wikipedia.org doesn't have ectropy enlisted in any section. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=ectropy&go=Go returns 1 result. that too is "The Engrailed (Ectropis crepuscularia)" which is completely unrelated to thermo dynamics in my humble opinion. Good idea would be to update the wikipedia page on ectropy. regards Supreet PS: time in negative is still time. time in inverse also turns out to be time. Probably I am not using the right prism to see the watch. From supreet.sethi at gmail.com Mon Nov 28 21:55:13 2005 From: supreet.sethi at gmail.com (s|s) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 08:25:13 -0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Ectropy Index In-Reply-To: References: <437A1CFB.8040302@sarai.net> <438B5D9B.9050702@sarai.net> Message-ID: Or maybe I am all wrong. From hbs.law at gmail.com Tue Nov 29 11:06:41 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 11:06:41 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] =?windows-1252?q?=91Patent=2C_Publish_and_Prosper?= =?windows-1252?q?=92?= Message-ID: <8b60429e0511282136j3de2de5an8da218814ecdb524@mail.gmail.com> =========== Comment =================== Hi All, I like Shekhar Gupta's walk-the-talk interviews transcripts in indianexpress.com. Below is one with R.A.Mashelkar, CSIR chief. See how a personal story of hardship, education, science meshes up with a nation's quest to become an innovation powerhouse. I like it best when people who do science and invention speak about patents and innovation, so here is one of such person speaking. Regards, Hasit ====================================== INDIAN EXPRESS Tuesday, November 29, 2005 On the record Dr. R A Mashelkar, Director-General Chemist CSIR 'Patent, Publish and Prosper' This man rose from humble origins to be one of India's leading scientists and science administrators. Dr. R.A.Mashelkar, Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, speaks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24x7's Walk the Talk programme about his difficult childhood, his return to India as a newly-qualified researcher in the late 1970s, and his meteoric rise to positions of leadership in the scientific community since then. • In a hundred and forty two years, only eight Indians have been elected as fellows of America's National Academy of Sciences. It's an honour considered second only to the Nobel Prize, and in 2005, after many decades of hard work, it was given to Dr. Raghunath Anand Mashelkar. Today, Dr. Mashelkar leads what is perhaps one of the largest government scientific establishments in the world with more than 16,000 scientists and technicians. Dr. Mashelkar, you're an inspiring presence and it's a very special privilege to welcome you on Walk the Talk, and that too in your alma mater, the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here in this lab. I came here in 1976, almost three decades ago, as a young man. It's wonderful to be standing here today. • I believe you still keep coming back here, whenever you find the time, to continue with your research. Yes. Science is my first love and although I'm in Delhi, I do come here on the weekends to spend time with my students and with my colleagues. I keep active — it's extremely important for me. • Dr. Mashelkar, before we get into your life in your labs, let me take you back to your childhood. You've had very humble beginnings; you've written very touchingly about your tough childhood, the death of your father when you were six, the trouble your mother had bringing you up, even the fact that she had to borrow money from a housemaid to pay for your education. Yes. It was Rs 21 that we needed and we had to go to a housemaid who was working at Chowpatty in Bombay to get it so I could get admission in school. You know, very importantly, that was her saving and she gave it to us, telling my mother that your son must study. It was an amazing time. • I think opportunities have got a bit better now for children from humble backgrounds. India has changed. Indeed. I am very proud to say that I went to a municipal school, a Marathi high school. Primary education would have been impossible if it was not free. Scores of such children today get an opportunity. I actually had a scholarship from the Tatas, just Rs. 60 a month, which allowed me to go to college after I did my SSC. • But life has become more of a level playing field for people like us, people I describe as HMTs, the Hindi Medium Types. (laughs) Yes; I was an MMT — a Marathi Medium Type — but that's true, yes. • In fact, I was speaking at a function at Infosys and on impulse I asked the audience, which had Infosys engineers, that how many of them came from English medium schools. It was pleasantly surprising to see how few hands went up. It means real India, or Bharat, is doing alright. Absolutely. I believe that really is an area we need to worry about. I mean, 50 per cent of the children go to school, about 30 per cent of them go up to class X, 40 per cent of those pass. We are talking about six per cent children who go beyond Class X. It's the tip of the iceberg — the rest of the iceberg is submerged. I think our biggest challenge is how to lift that iceberg, where Mashelkars resided at one point of time. • And to give them an environment where it's not so vital any more that your parents should have done very well in life. Indeed. And you see scores of such examples of young people coming up who have been given an opportunity. I think the essential issue, Shekhar, is an opportunity in life to go ahead, like the scholarship I got or the subsequent opportunities I had. Even when I went abroad, for example, the way I was brought back is very interesting. • Mrs. Gandhi, I believe, told Dr Nayaduma to search for somebody and he found you and he said: "No application, no certificates, just come with me." Yes, it was an unbelievable time. In fact, Mrs. Gandhi was really concerned that Hargobind Khurana, who got the Nobel Prize, actually came here and could not get a job. So she said to Dr Nayaduma, who was my predecessor, the director general, "Just go, spot the brightest, and offer them a job on the spot." That was how I was brought back. • I didn't know that she was spurred to this by Hargobind Khurana's Nobel. Yes. At that time, there was a lot of discussion over why young people have to struggle, basically, with all these applications and waiting and interviews. • So Mrs. Gandhi in 1974, who at that time was beginning to swear by Socialism, was willing to short circuit all the rules to spot talent. Indeed. And she trusted Dr. Nayaduma and his judgement. I remember his coming to the Savoy Hotel in London; I went, talked to him for half an hour and he filled me with the dream of a new India. I accepted his offer on the spot somehow, I am a very intuitive person, I think from my heart and in the evening, I phoned up my wife and said: "The nation is calling us, let's go back." I came here on a salary of Rs. 2100. Times were very tough then, Shekhar, in 1976. I still remember coming here, to this lab, and struggling to get a gas cylinder; my wife used to cook on a kerosene stove. I remember applying for a Bajaj scooter which cost Rs. 3500. I waited for it about five to six years. • And this lab produces more chemistry Ph.D.s than any place in the world, I believe. Absolutely. There are more than 450 research scholars who do their Ph.Ds here in the National Chemical Laboratory. But, going back to those times, those times and now it's very different. I remember, at that point of time, if one talked about 128K, it was a big memory for a computer. Today we talk about gigaflops and teraflops. The library you see, I remember the journals used to come here by sea mail. It used to take four months for them to arrive. Today, I have 3,000 e-journals for our students. • But, Dr. Mashelkar, on the flip side, there are many universities in India, particularly agricultural universities, which spend 110, 120 per cent of their budget just on salaries and establishment, and have no money for journals or research. In fact, in many cases you would find that their subscription for journals has lapsed. I believe that our university system is in dire trouble, particularly the state universities; the central universities are doing reasonably okay. There is hardly any money for development. I do believe that unless our universities are resurrected, in a major way, India has no hope. • You've been working on some of that. I think you've been associated with some work on the ICAR; Sharad Pawar set up a committee to look into it. Yes, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. We thought agriculture is very critical for India. You know the good work that they have done in the past, but we found that that the system needed huge reforms, so there was a committee under my chairmanship. • It had become hugely bureaucratic. It has. We have suggested a large number of reforms. Why should there be a director-general and a director, and in between, so many deputy directors-generals and additional directors-general and so on? I believe that Mr. Sharad Pawar is looking at this report to see how that entire system can be reformed. • Tell me a bit about when you took over CSIR. I believe it was as bad as ICAR. Well, to be very honest, we were in trouble. We had 40 laboratories and they behaved like 40. There was nothing like Team CSIR. Strong trade unions, my director of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute would phone me up and say: "Sir, there are a hundred people in my room, speak to them." We would have laboratories where directors would be locked up, practically, not even be allowed to go to the washroom. • I believe you had meetings in boardrooms which had slogans painted inside on the walls. Absolutely. All that is gone because we now have a very transparent, open system. We see a new, vibrant CSIR. And most importantly, I believe, what has happened is that CSIR has become Team CSIR: 40 labs working together. • You've called patents as a 'wealth creator'. Explain that to me a little bit. Well, it's like this. I remember Robert May, the president of the Royal Society, used to say that the UK is great in coming up with new ideas, and lots of wealth is made, not in the UK, but in Europe and the US. It was the same thing for India. We would generate new ideas but we would not patent them, others would. So we've changed the paradigm. In this laboratory, we've changed the paradigm. We've said it's not 'publish or perish', but 'patent, publish and prosper' because there is a wealth creation potential. • 'Patent, Publish and Prosper' — these are your three Ps of scientific research, like the three Ps of marketing. Absolutely. Even Nobel laureates have patented; Einstein had patents, 34 of them. This entire issue in India has been, very frankly, Saraswati on the one hand and Lakshmi on the other, we have kept them apart. Whereas that part of the world discovered the route from Saraswati to Lakshmi. Today, I am very happy to say that when we talk about India as a global research design and development platform, with companies like General Electric setting up their R&D centres in this country, its beginning was here. • I believe you sold them a patent, in fact, one of your first patent sales, wasn't it? In fact, General Electric had a 40 per cent share of polycarbonate. Polycarbonates are plastic materials from which we make CDs, among other things are made. And on polycarbonate, in this laboratory, we had a breakthrough. At that point of time, rather than publishing it, what we made sure of was that we had a US patent. • Because if you had just published it, somebody else would have picked up the idea. Oh, wealth would have been created by others. We wanted to create wealth here. I remember going to the General Electric R&D centre in Schenectady and actually marketing. Basically, they shook hands with us with mutual respect because they saw a flag on their territory which came on the basis of an idea. I have always said, it's not the big budget, it's the big idea that matters. Our partnership with GE flowered from there and one day Jack Welch said: "If they are so good, why are we not there?" And that is how the General Electric R&D centre came up here and today we talk about 150 such centres coming up. That's why when we talk about India as a global innovation hub, its beginnings can be seen now. • So you are a globaliser at heart? Very much so. I don't believe in national boundaries. In fact, in 1989, when I took over this laboratory, I went into this whole issue of globalisation for a very simple reason. Any time we develop something and bring it to Indian industry, they would say: "Have they done it?" — meaning have the US or Europe or Japan done it? I said: "What do we do? Am I going to be copying US engineering all my life?" That is where we opened up and we said our markets would be global. That did something special. It raised the benchmark for us. • What happens in India — it's a theme I've been working on for some time — we wrap bad science in the tricolour and say: "This may not be cutting-edge internationally, but it is indigenous." There's nothing indigenous about science; science is global. Absolutely, by definition. Technology can be local, to meet local needs. For example, a product can be local. But science is global. I think there is only one benchmark by which we should be judged and that is global. • There is a problem in our country. When Pokharan I and II happened, they were confused in the public mind with a scientific breakthrough. I was appalled when the BJP government hailed Pokharan II with the slogan of 'Jai Vigyan' — a nuclear test is not a triumph of cutting-edge science. It is 1950s science being replicated and re-engineered. When science gets politicised like that, don't you think it causes a problem? It does indeed. When one talks about India becoming a knowledge society, it's not only about becoming a knowledge society, but an enlightened one, which understands all this. • Dr. Mashelkar, let me take you back to your origins, because that is really so fascinating for a vast majority of Indians. So, tell me, what did your mother say when she first saw your success? My mother is with me even today. It's very interesting — she was illiterate herself, you see; she did menial work to bring me up. But she understood the value of education, and, Shekhar, I myself do not know why she insisted on education. She had gone in search of a job in Congress House in Bombay. She stood in the queue and returned without a job. You know why? Because the minimum qualification was third standard. So when she was returning she said: "My God. This has happened to me; I don't want this to happen to my son. He must have the highest possibility." So, when I did my masters in chemical engineering, she said: "There is something further"; she made sure I did my Ph.D. And when I finished my Ph.D., she had found out that there is post-doctoral research to be done too. • This is what makes Indian society special — the great store it lays by education. Education is the only real gift a parent can give. • I believe 67 per cent of the graduates who are unemployed are science graduates. Indeed. You know, I am currently the president of the Indian National Science Academy. Just last, month we brought out the India Science Report and it shows these statistics. The National Council of Applied Economic Research has done a field study and this is true. Why is there this unemployment? It is simple. First of all, the bulk of the time, you are looking for jobs in the government. Government jobs are restricted. Universities today are in such a state that they have vacancies but they can't fill them. • In fact, I remember in my reporting years, I had once gone there to cover a strike and one of the faculty members told me: "We have a very limited curriculum here now. It's called Brahmin, Thakur, Bhumihar, eastern UP, Western Bihar." My goodness! The other thing is that there must be a demand on science in society, in industry, for example. Our industries were so protected that they hardly bothered about science or innovation. But it's no longer so. I find that there is a demand which is coming up after 1991, after opening up, liberalisation, competition has come in. You know, what has happened with the drugs and pharmaceuticals industry? Their R&D spending has gone up by a factor of five in the last four years; new R&D centres are coming up, they are looking for hundreds of Ph.Ds. • I remember you writing some where, complimenting the Tatas for spending Rs. 1700 crore on developing the Indica — I think the largest project you ever got was Rs 150 crore? Absolutely. If you look at the way the Tatas did it — Ratan Tata, I must say — hats off to him. He put in 700 engineers who had never designed a car in their lives and risked Rs 1760 crore. And today we talk about the Indica. • To steal your words, he built that wall for his engineers to paint on. In that article you wrote for the India Empowered series in The Indian Express, you talked of scientists as painters. You said that Michelangelo became a great painter because somebody gave him a wall to paint on and you said that the US gave you your wall to paint on. Who's going to build these walls for other Indian scientists? What are the bricks that will make these walls, who are the best masons, architects; what's happening? I think this is where new institutions, institutions like this, the National Chemical Laboratory, become important. You mentioned my National Academy of Sciences honour — it is one of the highest honours, yes, that is true. But, as a matter of fact, I did that work right here. And it is true that I am only the eighth Indian in 140 years. But that wall did come to me, so as to say, and it was given to me by a visionary, backing up a 32-year old man, and saying: "Invest in him; he has potential." I believe that we require new institutions which will do that. That is why I am very happy that, just on this campus, we have given a hundred acres of land to create a new institute of science. It's a shame that for a country of a billion, we had just one institute of science, and that too built by the Tatas. I am very happy that the government is building two institutes of sciences, one of them will come up right here. • Pune has the potential of becoming the new science capital of India. Absolutely. We have the National Chemical Laboratory here, we'll have that institute of science, we have the Pune University. In fact, if you take a compass and draw a circle of one-and-a-half kilometres, we have 14 top class institutions here. Just imagine what it could be. It's amazing. URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=82884 From tahir.amin at btopenworld.com Wed Nov 30 14:47:43 2005 From: tahir.amin at btopenworld.com (TAHIR AMIN) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:17:43 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] This may hurt Indian drug firms Message-ID: <20051130091743.29704.qmail@web86104.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> This may hurt Indian drug firms Bhuma Shrivastava in New Delhi | November 28, 2005 11:23 IST In what could be a major blow to Indian pharmaceutical companies, the government may choose to define new chemical entities (NCE) in a way that would include all derivatives of a molecule. Thus, data protection would bring into its fold derivatives like salts, esters, polymorphs, combinations or novel drug delivery systems (NDDS). The matter is under consideration of the committee on data protection appointed by the ministry of chemicals and fertilisers. Headed by the secretary, ministry of chemicals and petrochemicals, the committee is expected to come out with its report in a month's time. Local pharmaceutical companies have argued for long that the Big Pharma has used this ploy for "evergreening" their patents. "This is a violation of the definition of patentability. This will undo the specifications in para 3 (d) of the revised Patent Act. Why should one grant data protection to something that cannot be patented?" said a top functionary of an association representing Indian companies. Para 3 (d) defines whatever cannot be patented in India and includes all forms of incremental innovation which can be collectively called "derivatives" of a drug. Even though Indian drug makers have traditionally specialised in developing derivatives and NDDS, they may not be able to leverage this advantage as the innovators, with their research work ready, are best suited to file for derivatives of the original product, explained an industry analyst. Sources said data protection could be extended to both patented and non-patented drugs. Patented drugs are also proposed to get data protection cover for six years, running concurrently with its 20-year patent life, while it would be three years for non-patented ones. "We are considering whether it would be for both patented and non-patented drugs or only the former. Whether we should stick to the definition of patentability as per the patent law or go beyond and look at all drugs that are 'new.' We are in the final stages of these deliberations," said a chemical and petro-chemical ministry official. The executive authority for drugs would be the Drug Controller General of India and that for agrochemicals would be the agriculture department, said the ministry official. An industry analyst said, "This patented and non-patented drugs distinction is very ambiguous as the DCGI doesn't have the databases to check the patent status of everything that's submitted to him." The ministry official conceded that this might throw up a lot of disputes and hence the matter was under the scrutiny of the committee. At the time of drug approval, the DCGI, under Schedule Y of Drugs and Cosmetics Act, demands exhaustive data from the first applicant of an NCE, ranging from animal pharmacology & toxicity data, pharmacokinetic data and pharmacological actions to reports on various stages of clinical trials. It is protection of this data that has been a long-standing demand of multinational pharma companies which claim that developing an NCE takes anything from $800 million to $1 billion. ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com From amicusjuris at gmail.com Tue Nov 22 18:45:52 2005 From: amicusjuris at gmail.com (amicus juris) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:45:52 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Abu Salem's Extradition Message-ID: <60b2d0be0511220515r6c1052a3l@mail.gmail.com> * THE EXTRADITION OF ABU SALEM Are Indian Courts bound by Undertakings given to Portugal ? by SYED SAIF MAHMOOD Will the Indian Court trying Abu Salem for offences under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987 be bound by the undertakings tendered by the Government of India to the Government of Portugal as a prerequisite to the don's extradition ? This question has drawn much media attention in the last week. India and Portugal do not have a bilateral extradition treaty. Portugal has extradited Abu Salem to India under the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, 2000 to which both countries are signatories and which both have ratified. As a prerequisite to the extradition, the Government of India (the "Requesting State") assured the Government of Portugal (the "Requested State") that it would not sentence Salem, if convicted, to death or imprisonment exceeding 25 years, and undertook to guarantee him a fair treatment and trial in conformity with international law. These assurances and undertakings themselves beget two questions : Whether they are valid under the Indian law ? and if they are, whether they can be enforced in India ? When the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) produced Abu Salem before the Special TADA Court in Mumbai on 11 November, the Presiding Judge asked the prosecution whether an accused could be produced in court with preconditions regarding his punishment. In other words, could an Indian Court be bound to honour an undertaking given by the Government of India to a foreign counterpart. The prosecutor did not have an answer. Perhaps, he did not expect a Constitutional issue to be raised in a criminal trial. Home Minister Shivraj Patil had an ingenuous answer which. He said, "the government cannot interfere with the judicial process and ask the courts not to award him capital punishment. But it has the power under the statute to commute a case of death sentence". What did the Minister forget ? That the power to commute is a soverign power of the President or, the larger issue, that commutation of a death sentence planned by the Home Ministry even before the beginning of a trial may militate against the Constitutional mandate of Article 72. Definitely, both. The answer to the question put by the Special TADA Judge, however, is found in that very law under which the accused has been extradited, namely, the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, 2000. Article 11 of the said Convention unequivocally provides that extradition under this Convention "shall be subject to the other conditions provided by the law of the requested State". What follows is that the "Requested State" may attach a condition to the proposed extradition and as long as the condition so imposed is consonant to the law of the "Requested State", it will be a valid condition to subject the extradition to. The "Requesting State" shall be bound to follow it and its non-observance shall render nugatory the extradition itself. In Salem's case, in accordance with its law, Portugal – the "Requested State" – imposed a condition that the extradited accused, if convicted, shall not be sentenced to death or imprisonment exceeding 25 years. The Potuguese law does not provide for death sentence or a sentence exceeding 25 years. The condition, therefore, is valid without a glitch. Insofar as fair treatment and trial are concerned, Indian law is one both with the Portuguese as well as the International law in this regard. The requirement of a free and fair trial meeting international principles of human rights is at the heart and quintescence of Indian criminal jurisprudence. The only issue, therefore, is whether the condition that the accused shall not be sentenced to death or imprisonment exceeding 25 years, is enforceable or binding upon the Indian court. The International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, 2000 was ratified by India in 2003. An International Convention may either be ratified by the Executive itself or it may be referred to Parliament. Article 73 of the Constitution of India provides that the executive power of the Union shall extend to the matters with respect to which Parliament has power to make laws and it has been held by the Supreme Court that, premised on this Constitutional provision, the executive power of the Union is available till Parliament enacts legislation. Thus, even a conventional ratification by the executive, acting through the President of India, is enough for a Convention to be enforced. However, in this case, the Terrorism Convention was not ratified by a routine executive act ; the ratification was pursuant to a legislative approval of Parliament. Article 253 read with the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution expressly recognizes the unbridled power of Parliament to enforce India's international commitments to other states. Thus, even though, no domestic enactment has been specially passed for this purpose, on account of such Parliamentary ratification, the Convention must be deemed to be incorporated in the domestic law of India and enforced as such. Even in the absence of such ratification, the Constitution of India specifcally recognizes the importance of honouring International Conventions. Article 51 of the Constitution titled "Promotion of international peace and security" directs the State to "foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another". Contrary to its earlier view on the subject, the Supreme Court of India has, of late, read the provisions of international documents into domestic law. In Visakha vs. State of Rajasthan (1997), the apex court, enforcing in India the provisions of the the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), ruled that "in the absence of domestic law occupying the field . . . . the contents of international conventions and norms are significant for the purpose of interpretation of the guarantee of gender equality, right to work with human dignity in the Constitution. . . . . . . Any international convention not inconsistent with the fundamental rights and in harmony with its spirit must be read into these provisions to enlarge the meaning and content thereof, to promote the object of the constitutional guarantee". The Terrorism Convention is not only a document consistent and in harmony with the Indian law but a document which has, by implication, become a part of the Indian statute book. A conjoint understanding of these solemn principles of law and judicial pronouncements lead to the unescapable conclusion that the provisions of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, 2000 are to be enforced in Indian courts like any other domestic law. Needless to add then, that undertakings and assurances given under it will be binding upon and enforceable against the Government of India in Indian Courts. The Indian judiciary must also not loose sight of the fact that observance of international undertakings is an unquestionable, absolute and solemn requirement in International relations. This is because, despite the fact that no State may be restricted in the exercise of its jurisdiction, which is one of the attributes of its sovereignty, every state is bound by its own express decisions related to its international relations. Another aspect of these assurances given by the Government of India deserves to be looked into. The assurances, which the Special Judge in Mumbai has now questioned, were not merely in the nature of diplomatic assurances given by one state to another. These assurances were given during the course of judicial proceedings by the Government of India as a party to a litigation, and have been recorded in the successive orders of the High Court, Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court. The assurances have, therefore, merged into judicial orders, including of the highest court of Portugal. Indian courts must respect such judicial orders as much as they would want their orders to be honoured. Indian Courts ought to take judicial notice of all these facts and uphold, rather insist upon, the observance of India's solemn commitment to Portugal and its judiciary – instiutions which sincerely and diligently met their international commitments to India. The author is Advocate, Supreme Court of India and Executive Councillor, Asia Pacific Jurist Association *-- SYED SAIF MAHMOOD Advocate - Senior Partner Amicus Juris Lawyers B-113/114, Triveni Apartments Sheikh Sarai - I New Delhi - 110 017 __________________________________________________________________________________________________ This email may contain confidential attorney -client communication, If you are not its addressee, please send it back to us. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20051122/10c9d28d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Abu Salem.doc Type: application/msword Size: 31232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20051122/10c9d28d/attachment.doc