From patrice at xs4all.nl Mon Jul 4 18:38:36 2011 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 15:08:36 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] Spain: 'Evil' SGAE - the copyrights 'Gestapo' - raided, executives under arrest on corruption charges... Message-ID: <82a51d7c3c85943e1567bf5370ea8d93.squirrel@webmail.xs4all.nl> SGAE, and especially its president, were the pet hatred of many activists in Spain, who resented its unbelievable high-handedness and use of near-terroristic methods to stamp out 'IP crime' ... http://www.thereader.es/local-business-a-finance/6752-spains-performing-rights-organisation-sgae-raided-by-anticorruption-police.html (http://ur1.ca/4mr3k) Spain's performing rights organisation SGAE raided by anticorruption police Friday, 01 July 2011 The Guardia Civil (National Police) today raided the headquarters of the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) in Madrid as part of an investigation into embezzlement and misappropriation in an operation ordered by the anti-corruption prosecutor, who has announced that it has spent the last two years investigating a series of alleged crimes at the powerful artists recording rights organisation. Police say that "so far" there have been no arrests, although the Police had orders to detain the president of the SGAE, Teddy Bautista, and two others senior executives. It is also possible that the operation will be extended to other offices of the Company throughout Spain. [see 2nd article however, and by latest report, upto 8 SGAE executives are now in police lock-up -PR] However, a SGAE spokesman speaking to reporters this morning denied any police search and told reporters that there has been no arrests. "[President] Teddy Bautista is meeting with the head of communications analyzing the election results. It is a mornings work like every morning in our offices," reporters were told. The Headquarters of the SGAE is, however, closed and barred to the public, and guarded by Guardia Civil officers. Three Civil Guard vehicles are located at the confluence of streets Fernando VI y Pelayo and numerous journalists have gathered outside the historic building, the Palacio de Longoria. Early in the morning, officers sealed the building to the public. At 12 o'clock, they permitted some workers to leave the building to go home. For now, the Civil Guard has seized all computers and company owed mobile phones in the building, and issued instructions to workers to hand over their company laptops. According to sources, the investigation is looking into how the SGAE was raising money by way of copyright among those artists residing outside of Spain. These artists did not receive their fair share of the money, and it is alleged that those involved were diverting the money to personal accounts in Switzerland. Alleged diversion of funds, fraud and embezzlement The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor has filed in the High Court a complaint directed against the SGAE for alleged misappropriation of funds in their activities, according to Europa Press legal sources. The brief of the Public Ministry, which was presented a few weeks ago to Dean of the High Court, requested the opening of a preliminary investigation by the department following a complaint filed in November 2007 by the Association of Internet Users, the Spanish Association of Small Business Computing and New Technologies (APEMIT) and the Spanish Association of Innkeepers Victims of the Canon (VACHE). The complaint, which was seen by Europa Press, was based on the appearance in various media of several "alleged illegalities committed in the economic management of the resources of the SGAE." The citizens complained that the directors of the body had formed a web of subsidiaries around the Digital Society of Authors and Publishers (SDAE) in which the amounts collected in respect of copyright management were invested in income-generating activities for them instead of going to the correct sources. Under these partnerships, the entity reported breach in this way, "the legal mandate that requires that the distribution of the fees collected be made equally among the owners of the works or productions, allegedly allocated such revenue in the running of their own private enterprises, or those of their partners, which also involved the generating of a profit [which they then kept], something expressly prohibited by law. " In their view, these activities may constitute the crime of misappropriation, embezzlement and fraud, crimes that would be attributable to the heads of the companies that have carried out the "misuse" of their economic resources and, additionally, to Ministry of Culture, as "chief auditor of such associations. -------- http://www.spainreview.net/index.php/2011/07/02/civil-guard-has-arrested-sgae-president-teddy-bautista/ (http://ur1.ca/4mr4q) Civil Guard has arrested SGAE president Teddy Bautista Posted on 02. Jul, 2011 in Incidents Civil Guard has arrested SGAE president Teddy Bautista Civil Guard has been acting on an arrest order for Teddy Bautista, today Friday. He’s the President of the performing rights and copyright organisation, SGAE, and agents have also been searching the Madrid offices in an investigation into allegations of the diversion of funds and misappropriation. Civil Guard have confirmed they hold warrants for his arrest and for two others, while the SGAE was claiming on Friday morning that Bautista was in his office as normal. Reports indicate that the operation which was ordered by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, has been two years in the planning. The partners of the SGAE have issued a statement meanwhile backing the management of Bautista, re-electing the team in recent voting, and taking their mandate to 2015. The story quickly became a trending topic on Twitter in Spain, with the SGAE one of the least popular organisations, following cases of them trying to charge for music at many charity events, and their fight against music downloads. Lawyer, Josep Jover, has said that 400 million € has vanished from the SGAE, and the Ministry for Culture has simply looked the other way. From pranesh at cis-india.org Tue Jul 5 23:47:07 2011 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 23:47:07 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: [Ip-health] $1 BN? A lethal lie Message-ID: <4E135523.9070405@cis-india.org> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Ip-health] $1 BN? A lethal lie Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:26:18 -0400 From: George Carter To: research_working_group at googlegroups.com CC: Ip-health Here is an article that puts it all in perspective. Add to this the US Trade Representative and the EU demanding an end to generic drugs so they can keep the profits rolling in. Even if it means increased prices--which they KNOW will result in global suffering and death on an incomprehensible scale--that is GOING ON NOW AS YOU READ THIS. This is what I refer to as economic genocide. George M. Carter http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/06/20116297573191484.html The great billion dollar drug scam Part one of a two-part series examining methods used by multinational drug corporations to control markets - and lives. Khadija Sharife Last Modified: 29 Jun 2011 18:26 Drug corporations such as Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline have stated that companies producing generic drugs - often Indian - are able to bypass costs, and sell their 'copied' drugs for a fraction of the price of the patented product [EPA] Alongside pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis and pneumonia, rotavirus-related diarrhoea is a primary childhood killer in developing countries, thought to snuff out the lives of 500,000 children each and every year. An overwhelming 85 per cent of these children are African and Asian. The need for medical miracles is as great as ever, but corporate mispricing generates huge profits, while driving up the price of life saving medicines. British-based drug corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) recently offered a five-year deal to supply poor nations with 125 million doses of the rotavirus vaccine - Rotarix - at $2.50 a dose, just five per cent of the current going price in Western markets. Through the GAVI group, the international vaccine agency financed by developed nations such as the UK, it is hoped that GSK and pharmaceutical multinational Merck - who, between them, dominate the rotavirus vaccine market - will provide a secure line of low-cost drugs for as many as forty countries in the near future. But is it really a discount, and if so, who is paying the cost? The financing mechanism subsidising the vaccine is named the Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a pot created by the G8, as well as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation, as a "pull" incentive for drug multinationals to consider developing countries' long-term markets for pharmaceutical "public goods", such as vaccines. Rotarix has taken off well: Since 2007, some 50 million children - through 100 million doses - have already benefited from Rotarix; by 2009, global Rotarix sales reached $440 million - increasing by 50 per cent from 2008, and Merck's Rotateq reach $564 million in sales. GSK Chief executive Andrew Witty described the pricing structure as, "neither a gimmick nor a one-off philanthropic gesture", but rather "part of a concerted strategy to change our business model" - designed to combine "commercial success with long-term sustainable contributions". Pricing structures and profits Drug companies such as GSK have often claimed that the high cost of "innovation" ie: research and development (R&D) is between $1bn and $1.7bn to bring a new drug to market. The AMC and GAVI - collecting some $4.3bn to finance purchase of vaccinations, were designed with the premise that the high cost of drug multinationals' R&D must be met. During the past several decades, the pharmaceutical industry in the US - more than half of which comprises European-based companies - has largely been the most profitable industry in the nation's economy, thanks to mechanisms such as the lack of a government-imposed pricing structure. "Free pricing and fast approval secure rapid access to innovation without rationing," said Daniel Vasella, the former head of (Swiss-based) Novartis, of the advantages of doing business in the US. Drug multinationals claim that US consumers are forced to fund the necessary research and development in order to keep global innovation going. In Australia, Europe, as well as Canada - the source of much prescription drug "re-importing" by US citizens, where drugs sometimes sell for half the going US price - governments ensure pricing structures render patented drugs affordable. While drug multinationals generate considerable profits from these countries, about 50 per cent of global drug industry profits are generated in the US. In 2006, for instance, global prescription drug sales totalled more than $640bn - of which almost $300bn were US-generated sales. But the real deception is less the Machiavellian tactics used by Big Pharma to Botox the bottom line than the terrible myth behind the "true" price of innovation: the $1bn pill. From 1996-2005, Big Pharma firms spent $739bn on marketing and administration (M&A): "Administration" costs here include accounting, executive salaries (including bonuses, stock options etc) - as well as human resources expenditure. "Marketing", meanwhile, consists of direct-to-consumer advertising, sales pitches and free samples to doctors, alongside advertising in medical journals. A closer look at drug cost During the same 1996-2005 period, drug companies invested $288bn in R&D and $43bn in property and equipment, while generating $558bn in profit. >From the outset, it is possible to see that R&D ranks second to last in terms of expenses. But the breakdown of R&D itself is opaque: companies do not list actual expenses for the development of a particular drug, claiming that information comprises proprietary and/or confidential commercial secrets. Yet, according to the Harvard Business Review: "The cost per new approved drug has increased more than 800 per cent since 1987, or 11 per cent per year for almost two decades." Drug corporations such as Novartis and GSK state that companies producing generic drugs - often Indian - are able to bypass such costs, and sell their "copied" drugs for a fraction of the price of the patented product - often undercutting the intercontinental firms by as much as 65-99 per cent. The "$1bn cost" is derived from a 2003 study [PDF] published in the Journal of Health Economics by Joe DiMasi et al from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The authors and their organisation claimed that the study was unbiased, despite the fact that the Tufts Center is itself some 65 per cent financed by drug companies. Though the findings have been normalised as factual by the media, the facts have long since been debunked by independent specialists. The authors surveyed ten large pharmaceutical corporations (between them responsible for 42 per cent of R&D expenditure in the US, where the bulk of such work is carried out), examining the R&D costs of 68 randomly selected drugs, and determined the cost of the development of each at $802 million (elevated to $1bn when adjusted for inflation). As the data was submitted confidentially by the drug companies to the authors, there is no way to verify the quality of the information, nor was there any accounting for the potential volume of intra-company corporate mispricing. The names of the firms were not mentioned; nor were the names of the drugs, the type of drugs; or the status - whether a priority drug, comprising advanced treatment, or a "me too" drug - ie: a variation of products already on the market. 'Demythologising' the costs For starters, the $802 million figure failed to take into account the opaque and strange manner of accounting involved, beginning with "capitalised costs". According to the authors, R&D expenditures, "must be capitalised at an appropriate discount rate - the expected return that investors forego during development when they invest in pharmaceutical R&D instead of an equally risky portfolio of financial securities". As Marcia Angell, US physician, former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, stated: "The Tufts consultants simply tacked it on to the industry's out-of-pocket costs. That accounting manoeuvre nearly doubled the $403 million to $802 million." So, when taking into account updated costs by PhRMA (2006), increasing overall R&D to $1.32bn, more than $650 million has just been included as "research and development" by drug companies claiming mythical profits that might have been generated, had they invested in, say, Wall Street - and not the scientific "innovation" used to justify gross profits from exclusive patents. In the journal BioSocieties, sociologist Donald Light and economist Rebecca Warburton "demythologise" the costs of R&D drug development by also analysing the tax breaks involved in R&D costs. The US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) revealed: "The net cost of every dollar spent on research must be reduced by the amount of tax avoided by that expenditure." The authors used data from official sources such as the Tax Policy Center, to reveal additional tax savings of 39 per cent. Cumulatively, taxpayer subsidies and credits reduced the overall costs from $403 million to $201 million. Tax secrecy Moreover, as this Ernst & Young "Tax Planning" article explains, R&D costs are usually shifted to high tax jurisdictions to offset costs. Meanwhile, profits generated by patents are often "re-located" to low-tax jurisdictions. Pharmaceutical companies prefer to generate R&D "expenses" in high-tax jurisdictions such as the US in order to offset the costs against taxable income. Yet the cost of R&D does not included "avoided" tax. Not surprisingly, most pharmaceutical companies are also based in low-tax secrecy jurisdictions such as Delaware in the US, where profits can be shifted into passive profit and intellectual holding companies. In an article [originally printed in the New Age newspaper, published online here] I wrote with John Christensen, the founder of the Tax Justice Network and a former economic advisor to Jersey, one of the UK's top tax havens, we revealed how tax secrecy and intellectual property (IP) was being exploited to profit drug corporations, rather than serving the needs of vulnerable people. "Pfizer, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline - as well as over 60 per cent of Fortune 500 multinationals, all maintain entities in Delaware, taking full advantage of legal and financial opacity tools. In addition to banking secrecy and zero disclosure of beneficial owners, Delaware allows for parent companies to establish holding companies within two days, producing nothing, conducting no economic activity in the state, and generally hosting just one shareholder (the parent company). Such entities, allowing the parent company to pay the newly created entity a "fee" for use of IP, serves as a passive conduit converting taxable income to passive non-taxable profit. The entity's sole purpose is to own and 'manage' laundered income generated from IP." The gigantic legal expenses incurred by specialists for developing patents, legal defence, sourcing the tax havens and other IP-related issues constitute more costs - included as R&D. This tax optimisation strategy closely resembles that of "high-tech" companies depending on intangible capital for the bulk of their wealth. According to Forbes magazine, by 1999, three of the four richest people in the world made their fortune from intellectual property rights. They owed their fortune, said Michael Perelman, to "Microsoft, one of the major holders of intellectual property rights, befitting the so-called New Economy in which 'DOS Capital' has supplanted Das Kapital". Profits from AIDS treatment Intellectual property rights management can be a lucrative business indeed. The first HIV/AIDS treatment, azidothymidine [AZT], sold under the brand name Retrovir, was manufactured by the company Burroughs Wellcome, later incorporated into GSK. In 1983, two years after AIDS was first reported, the US National Institutes of Health and the Pasteur Institute in Paris identified its cause - the HIV retrovirus. In that same year, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (an NIH branch), established a global team to screen antiviral tools, including the AZT molecule discovered by the Michigan Cancer Foundation, subsequently acquired by Burroughs Wellcome. Broder's NIH-NCI team, alongside scholars at Duke University, discovered the effectiveness of AZT against the AIDS virus and conducted early clinical trials in 1985. As Marcia Angell explained in her illustrative book, The Truth About Drug Companies, Burroughs Wellcome immediately patented the drug and "carried out the later trials that enabled it to receive FDA approval in 1987" after a review of only a few months. The corporation charged patients upwards of $10,000 per year for treatment and heavily congratulated themselves on the achievement of life-saving medicine. After one such self-congratulatory letter by Burroughs Wellcome's CEO to the New York Times, Broder and his colleagues from the NCI and Duke University responded angrily, stating: "The Company specifically did not develop or provide the first application of the technology for determining whether a drug like AZT can suppress live AIDS virus in human cells, nor did it develop the technology to determine at what concentration such an effect might be achieved in humans. Moreover, it was not first to administer AZT to a human being with AIDS, nor did it perform the first clinical pharmacology studies in patients. It also did not perform the immunological and virological studies necessary to infer that the drug might work, and was therefore worth pursuing in further studies. All of these were accomplished by the staff of the NCI working with the staff of Duke University." Driving the point home, they added: "Indeed, one of the obstacles to the development of AZT was that Burroughs Wellcome did not work with live AIDS virus, nor wish to receive samples from AIDS patients." Killer tactics Paradoxically, the drug Retrovir was classified by the company as an "orphan drug" ie: a drug where there exists a market of fewer than 200,000 people - and therefore not likely to be commercially profitable. This was done to claim 50 per cent credit from the government for the costs of clinical trials. In 2005, GSK was accused of artificially boosting their short-term profit by not increasing production to meet drastically increasing demand - thus creating "scarcity" for their patented product. This was seen as a last bid attempt to milk the patent which was to expire in September 2005. Shortly thereafter, the US government approved generic versions of the drug. When Ghanaian distributor Healthcare Ltd imported a generic version of the drug (a combination of AZT and 3TC - known as Combivir) from an Indian drug company named CIPLA, providing it at an affordable Indian price (90c per pill), rather than the patented US price ($10 per pill), GSK threatened the distributor with court, prompting Healthcare Ltd to cease sales. Yet even as GSK accused CIPLA of violating patent rights, GSK did not own the "rights" to Combivir in the West Africa regional patent office. AZT and other AIDS treatment remained blockbuster drugs for GlaxoSmithKline, generating $2.4bn profits in the first six months of 1997, thanks in particular, to AZT and 3TC. By 1998, AIDS was being referred to as a "world-wide health crisis", considered by many as, "an epidemic". GSK subsequently made billions of dollars from a patent, controlled a market, and affected the lives of billions of people worldwide, for something they did not invent. They did claim, however, that they conceived of it working. This notion was enough to exclude the NCI scientists, including Broder, from being listed as inventors. But is this a one-off example? Part two of 'The great billion drug scam' will be published later this week. Khadija Sharife is a journalist and visiting scholar at the Center for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa, and a contributor to the Tax Justice Network. She is the Southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report magazine, assistant editor of the Harvard "World Poverty and Human Rights" journal and author of "Tax Us If You Can Africa". The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. _______________________________________________ Ip-health mailing list Ip-health at lists.keionline.org http://lists.keionline.org/mailman/listinfo/ip-health_lists.keionline.org From pranesh at cis-india.org Thu Jul 7 05:27:30 2011 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 05:27:30 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] UNAIDS statement praising India's refusal to give up on generics Message-ID: <4E14F66A.2050403@cis-india.org> http://goo.gl/2NcUO India’s Commerce Minister pledges continued availability of high quality generic drugs Use of TRIPS flexibilities, including compulsory licensing and rejection of data exclusivity clauses, in trade agreements by India to ensure sustained access to life-saving medicines for people living with HIV NEW DELHI/GENEVA, 6 July 2011—UNAIDS welcomes the assurance given by India’s Commerce Minister, Mr Anand Sharma, that India will reject any efforts to include ‘data exclusivity’ clauses in bilateral trade agreements. This assurance came at a meeting between Mr Sharma and UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé, held today at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. “We reject data exclusivity clauses in free trade agreements,” said Mr Sharma. Welcoming the Minister’s assurance, Mr Sidibé said: “Millions of people will die if India cannot produce generic antiretroviral drugs, and Africa will be the most affected. For me, it is an issue of life or death.” India’s pharmaceutical industry produces more than 85% of the first-line antiretroviral drugs used to treat people living with HIV. The cost of the least expensive first generation treatment regimen has dropped to less than US$ 86 per patient per year. But as increasing numbers of people move towards more efficacious and tolerable first-line treatment, drug prices could double compared to first-generation regimens. In addition, as patients develop drug resistance and require more expensive and patent-protected second- and third-line antiretroviral medicines, some projections indicate treatment costs escalating by as much as twenty-fold. “The Government of India reaffirms its full commitment to ensure that quality generic medicines, including antiretroviral drugs, are seamlessly available, and to make them available to all countries,” said Mr Sharma. “India will also use the flexibilities allowed under TRIPS, including the use of compulsory licensing, to ensure that people living with HIV have access to all life-saving medicines,” Mr Sharma added. “India, together with Brazil, South Africa, China and Russia, must forge an alliance with other high-income countries to ensure that no single person in the world dies because they could not afford to buy life-saving medicines or health care,” Mr Sidibé said. An estimated 15 million people are eligible for antiretroviral treatment in low- and middle-income countries, and about 6.6 million people have access to HIV treatment. The Government of India provides free antiretroviral treatment to more than 420 000 people living with HIV in India. Current treatment approaches are not sufficient to provide access to all who need it. UNAIDS and other partners advocate for Treatment 2.0—a framework that seeks to simplify the way treatment is currently provided. For this approach to succeed, TRIPS flexibilities as well as innovation and protection of intellectual property rights will play an important role for treatment access in the future. -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 262 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From patrice at xs4all.nl Sat Jul 16 02:51:05 2011 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 23:21:05 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] Frederick Noronha: Copyright, copyleft and everything in between Message-ID: <20110715212105.GA24990@xs4all.nl> bwo Bytes4all list Copyright, copyleft and everything in between By Frederick Noronha Filmmaker Paromita Vohra talks about her new film *Partners in Crime*, which explores issues around copyright, copyleft, culture and markets, and suggests that we might need a hybrid notion of copyright in which many forms coexist, just as we may need many markets based on many different ideas of exchange *From urban Indian streets where young men furtively sell porn to folk musicians who find their ideas stolen, from corporate boardrooms to students who seek new ways of sharing music… Paromita Vohra covers these and more in her latest film *Partners in Crime*.* *She describes it as “a rollicking trip through the grey worlds of copyright, art, and the market in a story about love, money and crime”.* *Mumbai-based Vohra has earned praise for her interesting documentaries and her innovative ways of distribution.* *Her earlier works include an audio documentary *(On Being Cool)*, and touches on a range of themes, including sexual harassment *(Do You Know How We Feel? Aaaaaaargh!)*, life in the city as a young woman *(A Short Film About Time)*, a women’s cooperative *(Annapurna/Goddess of Food)*, gender equality*(A Woman’s Place)*, the World Social Forum *(Work in Progress: At the WSF 2004)*, feminism in contemporary urban India *(Unlimited Girls)*, divisions of language, class, memory and food in Mumbai *(Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City)*, the minority Christian girl in Mumbai *(Where’s Sandra)*, toilets and the lack of facilities in the city *(Q2P)*, and the complex dynamics reflected in breaking news *(Morality TV Aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani)*.* *Excerpts from an interview.* *What prompted you to make this film?* Magic Lantern Foundation asked me to make the film a while ago. But I declined because I thought it was kind of a boring subject -- and also a lot of the stuff around copyleft discussion, vis-à-vis art, was not very compelling. I mean obviously the free software and open source movement and the like are inspiring, but there didn’t seem to be anything new I could say about that and I didn’t want to rehash some politically correct line. Around that time, however, I went to Punjab to do research on another film and discovered this very interesting music world there. Also, I had begun doing some work in a more mainstream space -- let’s say the edges of Bollywood and such like. And I began coming up against the unfair ideas of copyright and, more than that, the feudal sense of power that underlies how copyright is used in various ways. And so, perhaps having a more ground-level political engagement with the idea instead of a sort of theoretical one, I felt this was something I did want to talk about -- in fact it’s at the heart of a lot of things in our times. So I asked Magic Lantern Foundation whether they still wanted to make the film. Luckily, they did. And so here I am with *Partners in Crime*. *I know it touches on a lot of cities and subjects -- the mainstream debate on ‘copyright’ and ‘piracy’, how young people see it, traditional artists and how they are affected… How would you describe what the film is about?* I think a discussion about copyright is eventually a discussion about culture and the market. For me, this is a film about art, its importance and value in our society, and via that, some questions about how we decide the value of anything. At this point we live in a time where the value of everything is measured by money. In general, increasingly, there are no other means by which we commonly value something or feel it is worthwhile. This eventually strips everything of value and makes it very difficult to create beauty and meaning, especially in popular art. Copyright is a prism through which to see these ideas. *Do you think this is an important debate for countries like India? Why?* I think it’s an important debate for all countries, but yes it’s very interesting and important for India. At this point, millions of people are denied access to knowledge and cultural things because they’re priced too high (for instance, cinema tickets). Piracy becomes a way for people to access all this. We have a very large population that cannot afford cultural goods any other way. If you say therefore that piracy is a criminal activity, without making any nuanced difference between illegality and criminality, and in fact you have corporations, especially multinationals, lobbying the government to put it under the same laws as terrorism, you are effectively saying that the entire country needs to be in jail! There’s a contradiction here -- you are compelling people into so-called criminal activity because of your market model, then wanting to punish them instead of looking at new market models. But this does raise a very important problem: how are artists supposed to live? How are resources going to be generated to make more art? I strongly believe that there is a growing culture of independent art not having any value. That’s because between the corporate model where all cultural artefacts are just fast-moving consumer goods, and piracy, no one wants to pay for anything and, in fact, considers it not worth much. I don’t believe this is a sustainable way to live, for artists and also consumers of art. It is not good for the soul! It seems to me that there is too little discussion around copyright from the artist’s point of view. And in a country like India, where independent art as also older art forms like folk music really struggle, I think it is important to start talking about it. The copyleft debate emerged from the open source/free software discussion. Obviously it has been an important moment in the so-called ‘dialectics’ around copyright. But it cannot be applied blindly to art. Using it as a springboard, there has to be a parallel debate emerging from the practice of artists to create new paradigms that will protect the artist without impeding the free flow of art. *What has the response to the film been so far?* We’ve only had a couple of screenings so it’s hard to say what the response has been. I’m very keen that films be enjoyable, that people love the film and don’t fall into this sort of earnest, pious mode when they watch a documentary because that really interferes with a genuine engagement with the ideas and experience of the film. So yes, people seem to have really enjoyed the film. That said, it is a complex film so we will know only with time and more shows how people respond. Eventually, you sort of nurture the film up to a point and organise screenings, etc. After that it really depends on whether the film is going to resonate with people; if they feel it is at all relevant to their feelings and half-articulated thoughts; and takes on a life and journey of its own. *Most of us are brainwashed into accepting ‘copyright’ as the norm. How tough is it for you to convince people otherwise?* Are we? I don’t know about that. I think most people are brainwashed into not really thinking, or knowing about things, or asking questions in general! I think people don’t realise one thing: that copyright is an evolving idea; it has arisen because of a certain technology and now technology itself is throwing it into tremendous flux. So we really have to come up with new approaches to the idea of copyright and I imagine, as do most people, that we will eventually have a hybrid notion of copyright in which many forms co-exist. The greatest fuzziness is about what’s actually going on with copyright on the ground. Copyright is meant to protect the artist -- to acknowledge authorship, to protect his/her right to earn a livelihood from talent and labour, and to be able to share art as the artist likes. However, at this point, most copyright lies not with the artist but with corporate bodies. Copyright, or IPR as it is called, becomes a way for corporations to own everything and share nothing. There are artists who cannot access their own art, sing their own songs, screen their own films. And the truth is, even if the law changes, beyond a point IPR is a symbol of the power relations of these industries in which artists have no bargaining power and so are routinely underpaid and stripped of all rights. Capitalism and feudalism is a toxic mix that decimates any justice and fairness -- and eventually any genuine creativity one can exercise in one’s work. They replace creativity with anxiety and abjectness. I think all of these things need to be and are laid out in the film along with presenting the fluidity and associativeness of the creative process and the need for a nuanced understanding of these concepts while framing copyright practice. I think people do go on that journey with the film and come to various understandings or at least to a place where they have many questions. The idea of the film is not to insist on one ‘correct’ or definitive conclusion but rather to make a conceptual exploration that prevents anything being unquestioned. I think the one thing people are really brainwashed into is the idea that there is only one kind of market. The puritanism of those who say “the market is bad” is a kind of silliness because there are many, many markets and they are based on many different ideas of exchange -- some of these you see in the movie. On the other hand, there is the religiosity of those who believe in the current mainstream market economy which makes them refuse to accept when the model fails. In the end we have to engage with all this. To say that technology is the democracy is a kind of fascism. Technology is obviously a valuable tool that could allow for democratic access, and the shape of much technology now is democratic in tendency. But democracy depends on people and political choices/processes, not machines. *What were the two or three most surprising aspects you came across while researching or shooting the film?* There were so many things! But I think definitely the *Munni Badnaam Hui* story. As you know, *Munni Badnaam Hui *was the big hit song of 2010. Along the way I read about how it was ‘copied’ from a song sung by a duo called Rani Bala and Rampat Harami. I heard the song on the Internet and I really liked it and then I began this huge search for them -- it was quite a little detective adventure and we succeeded with the kindness of friends like the filmmaker Saba Dewan who has made *The Other Song*, who asked some of the performers who were in her film to help. Two things emerged -- one, that there are dozens of versions of the Munni song, emerging from the original folk song *Launda Badnaam Hua*, including a Pakistani film version. The existence of one version does not seem to harm the other -- because there are several parallel markets, and different versions work for those various markets. There is a certain creative richness which emerges from this logic of the market. But the increasingly monopolistic capitalist market we see right now is not only monopolistic, it’s monotheistic, mono-cultural and eventually monotonous. It swamps everything with its version and declares all others illegal, so much so that art forms end up dying as the markets that sustain them falter. Instead, one needs to nurture different scales of market for different types of work. What I also understood is that this market takes from every other market -- but then influences law and cultural perception in its favour, presenting itself as profitable and non-value-loaded, and then desires to shut down every other market saying that what they do is illegal. It’s similar to the way people take from the environment without replenishing the environment. It impoverishes the world. These were not precisely discoveries but renewed understandings that came from working on the film. The third discovery that was interesting was this big push going on to link piracy to terrorism, influenced by the Rand report, and the degree of lobbying that’s going on with the government by multinational media conglomerates in this regard. On the other hand though, they are making deals and alliances with the very Indian film companies that have pirated and violated their IPR through wholesale plagiarism. So the big guys with money are your friends and their crimes are permitted, but the small guys are the ones you’ll go after. It’s a weird ideology. Last of all I discovered a term -- vertical integration. To know what it means you must see the film! Of course you can also Google it, but it’s more fun to see it in the film! *Given that your views on copyright are a bit sceptical, are you using alternative models to promote your own films?* I agree with Lawrence Liang in the film: It’s not about property, it’s about propriety. I would not like someone to take a part of my film or writing without acknowledging me. If they have some money, then it would be nice if they gave me a little. If they don’t, then they could ask me and I don’t think I’d say no. Although, what if I disagree with them? Can I prevent them? No I can’t really. But could there be a conversation about it? These are not questions with clear answers, but they do require each of us to respect the other and to live according to that respect and propriety. Being an independent filmmaker, that too in the most marginal and maligned of forms -- documentary -- it is alternative models alone that have worked. Mainstream models probably would not work for this, at least not right now. So far, in most of my films I share ownership with the producers and we both work separately to promote and sell the film. Also, all distribution arrangements that I make are non-exclusive. This helps support more initiatives and expand the space, I think. The sale price of films that I sell is discretionary; sort of each according to their ability. But I do expect that people will pay something at least for the film as this is what makes it possible to keep doing what we are doing and make an alternative space. I find it very violent when people insist that I give my films to others for free. When food and housing are free, so will my films be! There is a way that should be mutually non-exploitative. For instance, I always buy other filmmakers’ films as far as possible and don’t ask for free copies. There are also all sorts of methods of barter and exchange -- filmmakers buy each other’s film, but we also exchange films. There are people who work for very little in our films. There are friends for whom you try to do some work in return for theirs. And, obviously, the Internet allows for a lot of possibilities and creative ways of promoting your film and reaching the scattered but strong audience that loves this kind of work. I think there is a lot of collective energy that helps us do what we do -- collectives that screen each others’ films, like Vikalp or the Delhi Film Archive. It is, as one of the metal musicians, Sahil Makhija aka ‘The Demon-Stealer’, says in the film -- if the scene does not exist, you do not exist. So you have to nurture and protect the ecosystem you are part of. *Would you suggest the some-rights-reserved or no-rights-reserved approach to other documentary filmmakers to promote their work? Why, or why not?* I don’t know. For me personally I am very uncomfortable with anyone having exclusive ownership of my work. Some-rights-reserved is a good model I think. I’ve found greatest freedom in these joint models because they help increase audiences and create documentary cinema for Indian audiences. I would recommend them. On the other hand, all these models belong to spaces which have little money even in the world of documentary. I work with rather small budgets and have to do a lot of different things to survive. So who am I to tell any filmmaker that he/she should not work with a big or bigger budget that requires all-rights-reserved by the producers? I suppose it’s both a personal and political choice. And there are people who work with both models. But one should try to take the long view and build a space and do what’s needed to build that space. *Who, in your view, are the people doing the most impressive work in India, in questioning copyright?* It’s a vast area and by no means do I know all the work that’s happening. Obviously, in the software and legal areas there are strong groups with a long history. But that’s not the focus of *Partners in Crime*, and there are too many to name here. Within the arts, I think, independent bands are doing impressive work in creating alternative market models and keeping their art independent. I think the people in the Right to Read Campaign, who are working to change copyright law to make the conversion of books for reading-disabled people possible, are doing very important fundamental kind of work. *Lastly, how would you see yourself?* I'm a filmmaker and writer. A teacher and curator. I work on themes of politics, popular culture, sexuality, desire and gender. I've grown up in many places and lived in Bombay half my life. I like living in Andheri East. I like acting, cooking and traveling. I'm a neatnik and workaholic. All other serious information is on the website, www.parodevi.com. *(Frederick Noronha is a Goa-based writer who focuses on technology and development)* * http://infochangeindia.org/media/related-features/copyright-copyleft-and-everything-in-between.html * *Infochange News & Features, July 2011 FN +91-832-2409490 or +91-9822122436 (after 2pm)* *#784 Nr Lourdes Convent, Saligao 403511 Goa India * *http://fn.goa-india.org http://goa1556.goa-india.org* * * ----- End forwarded message ----- From pranesh at cis-india.org Mon Jul 18 13:01:54 2011 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:01:54 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Copyright as a cultural notion Message-ID: <4E23E16A.6030609@cis-india.org> From the Telegraph: http://goo.gl/Qg5DJ Copyright as cultural notion A STAFF REPORTER That book history is gradually coming of age becomes evident when the National Library organises the first BS Kesavan Lecture on this subject that few were aware of even a decade ago. The lecture on Saturday at Bhasha Bhavan on the library premises in the memory of the first National Librarian after Independence was by A.R. Venkatachalapathy of the Madras Institute of Development Studies on the “Cultures of Copyright.” Presiding over the event, Jawhar Sircar, secretary, ministry of culture, asked the rhetorical question: “Where are the Kesavans of today”, as there is a dearth of librarians and archivists in this country, and the system is on the point of collapse. But he had no ready solutions to this problem. Swapan Chakravorty, director-general, National Library, introduced those present, including Mukul Kesavan. Venkatachalapathy, in a blue silk shirt and veshthi, said his contention was that although copyright is a legal notion, in India it was more of a moral and cultural notion. He began his lecture saying in the beginning he was critical of BS Kesavan’s publications, History of Printing and Publishing in India and The Book In India: A Compilation, and of Sisir Kumar Das’s book as well. But it later changed to appreciation as he realised how difficult it was to write history. In the past 10 to 15 years there has been an “efflorescence” of interest in book history but the field is “barely scratched”. Venkatachalapathy related a humorous story of the medieval Tamil poet, Kambar, who authored the Tamil Ramayan. He was delighted to be present at a literary discourse on his work. But he soon realised that the verses being recited were not his own. “Every aspect of copyright was being violated by interpolation,” he commented. In a scribal and oral cultures like ours, the only way of preserving manuscripts was copying these. This was an expensive proposition and the Jains had an institutionalised way of doing it. Copies of these manuscripts were given away to scholars, but this does not gel with modern notions of copyright, Venkatachalapathy said. We look at texts, while in institutions like the Library of Congress books are listed according to the names of authors. In colonial times, while Indian authors expected patronage, the East India Company looked at copyright. In Madras, when a Telugu scholar produced a dictionary, the Company was willing to pay him a king’s ransom for its copyright. But the scholar wanted perpetual pension and rent-free land. Again, when another author translated the Dharmashastra and the Company sought its copyright, the brother of the deceased author looked for patronage. The British kept tabs on literary production and this was when modern notions of copyright entered. It was only with the rise of the novel that the commercial value of books was realised. Till then most publishing was done by the author himself. In the 1920s, the corollary of publishing, royalty, was actually talked about. There were very few copyright cases in colonial days and these involved publishing in English. There was a keenly fought case involving a collection of biographical essays, many of which, another man claimed, were by him. In the 1940s, the notion of copyright was one of simple transaction — outright sale of copyright for a pittance. When a man said he was a writer, he was asked what he did for a living — the earnings were so meagre. Kalki was a successful journalist and writer, but when he wanted to join the satyagraha, his employer was not happy. He said what Kalki had written was as an employee and thus had to relinquish his copyright. The case was hotly debated in Kerala. The writer’s claim was always made on moral and cultural grounds, not on legal grounds. When the same song on different topical issues made the rounds, several people would claim authorship. Copyright was recognised only if registered. After Independence, 50 years after the death of Subramanya Bharathi, his songs and works were placed in the public domain in 1949, overruling the legal right of two men. The government gave a decent sum to Bharathi’s widow although she had no legal right, the move stemming from the notion of moral responsibility. Moral and cultural claims superseded legal notions. -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 262 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From pranesh at cis-india.org Tue Jul 19 23:48:39 2011 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:48:39 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you Message-ID: <4E25CA7F.9010703@cis-india.org> http://goo.gl/SiGGj (PDF) "In all, [Aaron] Swartz stole approximately 4.8 million articles, a major portion of the total archive in which JSTOR had invested... Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR’s archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites" And finally, > 36. The Grand Jury realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in > paragraphs 1-33 of this Indictment and charges that: > > From on or about September 24, 2010, through January 6, 2011, or thereabout, > in the District of Massachusetts and elsewhere, the defendant, > > AARON SWARTZ, > > intentionally accessed a computer — namely, a computer on MIT’s computer network and a > computer on JSTOR’s network — without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and > thereby obtained from a protected computer information whose value exceeded $5,000 — > namely, digitized journal articles from JSTOR’s archive — and aided and abetted the same. > > All in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(2), (c)(2)(B)(iii) and 2. -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 262 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From prasad at cis-india.org Fri Jul 22 18:17:48 2011 From: prasad at cis-india.org (Prasad Krishna) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:17:48 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India [Deadline Expires on 26 July] Message-ID: <20110722124748.7918.qmail@mail.cis-india.org> . Dear commons-law, Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [Deadline Expires on 26 July] Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08; When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011; Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad; Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India. LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India. Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments. Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days. Bridging the Gap: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives. Paradigms of Practice: One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen. Feet on the Ground: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures. Workshop Outcomes The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country. Participation Guidelines LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format: 1. Name: 2. Institutional affiliation and title: 3. Address: 4. Email address: 5. Phone number: 6. A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words) 7. Statement of interest (max. 350 words) 8. Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words) 9. Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words) 10. Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words) 11. Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines) Note Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at locatingInternets at cis-india.org Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation. Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation. Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop. A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country. Chairs: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore; Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor and Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University Supported by: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad Experts: Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa Thank you Prasad Krishna Publication Manager Centre for Internet & Society to unsubscribe: http://crm.cis-india.org/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/mailing/optout&reset=1&jid=143&qid=69528&h=d77a0c99697e36b5 #194, Second 'C' cross Domlur Second Stage Domlur Bangalore, 560071 From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Jul 27 15:55:29 2011 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:55:29 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] =?windows-1252?q?Google_Lawyer_Says_Patents_Are_=91?= =?windows-1252?q?Gumming_Up=92_Innovation?= Message-ID: <044457F2-F4DC-4665-9311-A291D70D3E26@sarai.net> Google Lawyer Says Patents Are ‘Gumming Up’ Innovation By Susan Decker - Jul 27, 2011 3:42 AM GMT+0530 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-26/google-general-counsel-says-patents-are-gumming-up-innovation.html Google Inc. (GOOG) General Counsel Kent Walker said the smartphone industry is in an arms race for patents that is hurting consumers and leaving the company to “sort through the mess” of litigation. “It’s hard to find what’s the best path -- there’s so much litigation,” Walker said in an interview late yesterday. “We’re exploring a variety of different things.” Google, whose Android mobile operating system has been targeted in at least six legal complaints, is seeking to buy intellectual property that could be used as a defense against litigation. Google, the world’s largest Internet search company, is also seeking to curb abuses of the system, calling on Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to rein in lawsuits, and asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to take closer looks at patents being used in litigation, Walker said. “The tech industry has a significant problem,” he said. “Software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation.” Google’s competitors have said the Mountain View, California-based company is critical of the patent system because it has few patents of its own and entered a smartphone market where companies had been researching and selling products for years before Android phones went on sale in 2008. Innovation, Competition Google has been assigned 728 patents through today, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database, mostly for search engine technology. Apple has more than 4,000 U.S. patents, and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) more than 18,000, according to the database. Patents give their owners a right to exclude others from using the invention for a set period of time. “It is about innovation and competition,” said Will Stofega, a program manager at researcher IDC Corp. “Doing basic research to bring new products to market is something quite distinct from their core capabilities.” Google’s position is part of a larger debate over whether certain software should be eligible for patent protection, said Ron Laurie, managing director of Inflexion Point Strategy LLC, which counsels companies on purchasing intellectual property. Microsoft and Oracle Corp. had the same “cultural bias” more than a decade ago, he said. “Every software company would be happy if patents went away,” Laurie said. “Patents are irrelevant to YouTube, face it. Software is developed incrementally and patents get in the way of incremental innovation.” Google’s Weakness The Android system is a free, open-source program that relies on some nonproprietary features Google didn’t create and allows outside developers to modify the code. That has left the company vulnerable to claims that it built Android on the backs of research done by other technology companies. “A patent is a patent and you may not agree with it, but it’s the law,” Stofega said. “It’s a weakness for Google and everyone’s acknowledged it. The competition is so fierce and so brutal, any perceived weakness is going to be found out and you’re going to pay for it, in court or wherever.” Google, which had $39.1 billion in cash and short-term investments as of June, put in an initial $900 million offer in April to buy the patents of bankrupt phone-equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp. It was outbid by a group that includes Apple, Microsoft, and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), which all make devices that compete with Android phones. More Discipline Walker wouldn’t say whether Google will bid on InterDigital Inc. -- an owner of more than 1,300 patents that is exploring a potential sale -- the digital-imaging patents of Eastman Kodak Co. (EK) or any other portfolio of intellectual property. He said it’s unclear if the $4.5 billion winning bid for the Nortel patents is a sign future sales will command a similar premium. “We want to be disciplined about how we approach all this stuff,” Walker said. “We’re looking for a reasonable alternative, but we want to make sure Google and the companies Google partners with aren’t shut out of the opportunity to bring great new products and features to consumers.” Google rose $3.54 to $622.52 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have climbed 4.8 percent this year. Android is the most widely used mobile operating system for smartphones, with 38.9 percent of the worldwide market, compared with 18.2 percent for Apple’s iPhone, according to IDC. Oracle, the world’s largest supplier of database software, contends Android uses its Java programming language, in violation of patents and copyrights, according to court filings. Redwood City, California- based Oracle sued, seeking as much as $6.1 billion in damages, after Google balked at paying $100 million for a license to use the technology. Roll the Dice In ruling last week on what type of damages should be considered, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said “Google may have simply been brazen, preferring to roll the dice on possible litigation rather than to pay a fair price.” Alsup said $6.1 billion in damages was too high a price for consideration based on facts of the case and set $100 million as the starting point for discussion of damages. Walker said Google maintains that the patents are invalid and not infringed. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has patent cases before the U.S. International Trade Commission that target Android phones made by Samsung Electronics Co., HTC Corp. (2498) and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. Each of those companies has filed cases against Apple. Microsoft and Motorola Mobility also have patent suits against each other, and Microsoft has a pending ITC complaint against Barnes & Noble Inc. over the Android-based Nook reader. Google has few of its own patents, while Samsung and Motorola Mobility have been able to use their patents to lodge infringement claims against Apple and Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft. ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ Winston Yung, chief financial officer of Taoyuan, Taiwan- based HTC, said in an interview today that the company is willing to negotiate a settlement with Apple. Walker said it’s “crazy” that both HTC and Apple phones could be barred from the U.S. market if a deal isn’t reached. “Each side can blow the other up on some level --everybody can block the other’s products from coming to market,” Walker said. “You create this mutually assured destruction scenario, but it’s very expensive to get all those munitions.” Google has been hesitant to use patents to file suits against other companies, he said. “Buying patents so you can hit the other guy, it’s not good form,” Walker said. “You hate to unilaterally disarm here, but we haven’t in our history.” ‘We’ll be Fine’ Google has sued to challenge the validity of other companies’ patents. The company filed a lawsuit today against closely held SourceProse Inc., which claimed that phones made by companies including HTC and Apple infringe its patent through the Google Maps Mobile product. Google is seeking a court order that would clear Google Maps Mobile of infringement, or a finding that the SourceProse patents are invalid. Google in March joined with Microsoft to challenge the validity of mapping patents owned by GeoTag Inc., which had sued their customers. Google is also providing support and technical help to companies that make products for Android and are being sued, either by rival companies such as Apple and Microsoft, or by small patent owners that don’t make products. “We’ll be fine,” Walker said. “We have the resources to balance the scales here.” -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From prasad at cis-india.org Tue Jul 26 18:25:34 2011 From: prasad at cis-india.org (Prasad Krishna) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:25:34 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] The Centre for Internet and Society - Bulletin - July '11 Message-ID: <20110726125534.31415.qmail@mail.cis-india.org> Dear commons-law, Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage: *RESEARCHERS at WORK* RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs: Re: Wiring Bodies [1] by Asha Achuthan, Archive and Access [2] by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, Pornography and the Law [3] by Namita Malhotra, The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance [4] by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities [5] by Pratyush Shankar were sent for peer review. # Upcoming Event in CEPT, Ahmedabad * Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India -- Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [6] [Deadline for submission - 26 July 2011; Participants to be selected by 30 July 2011; Workshop from 19 to 22 August 2011] *DIGITAL NATIVES WITH A CAUSE?* Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures. # The Digital Natives Newsletter "Links in the Chain" is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" community members. It includes opinion posts by participants from the three workshops -- Talking Back [7] (Taipei, 15 - 18 August 2010), My Bubble, My Space, My Voice [8] (Johannesburg, 6 - 9 November 2010) and >From Face to the Interface [9] (Santiago, 8 - 10 February 2011) as well as the facilitators, interviews with them, comics and cartoons highlighting current issues affecting the community, as well as current news and discussions happening at the project website, www.digitalnatives.in [10]. 1. The Digital Dinosaurs [11] [Links in the Chain, Volume 7] 2. Special Mid Year Edition [12] [Links in the Chain, Volume 8] *ACCESSIBILITY* Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities. # Featured Research * Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective [13] (Revised Edition 2011) [A G3ict White Paper researched and edited by the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. Editor: Nirmita Narasimhan, Revised edition: May 2011] * ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE* (PREVIOUSLY IPR REFORM) CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. # Featured * Don't Shoot the Messenger: Speech on Intermediary Liability at 22nd SCCR of WIPO [14] (speech by Pranesh Prakash at a side-event co-organized from 15 to 24 June 2011, by WIPO and the Internet Society on intermediary liability). * OPENNESS* CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software. # Documentary * People are Knowledge - Experimenting with Oral Citations on Wikipedia [15] (co-produced by CIS in association with the Wikimedia Foundation, on Oral Citations in India and South Africa) # Featured * Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector [16] (published by Transparency & Accountability Initiative, CIS contributed the section on Open Government Data). *INTERNET GOVERNANCE* Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as "the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet." Its latest endeavour has resulted into these: # New Blog Post * RTI and Third Party Information: What Constitutes the Private and Public? [17] [by Noopur Raval] # Events Organised * Socio-financial Online Networks: Globalizing Micro-Credit through Micro-transactional Networked Platforms - A Public Lecture by Radhika Gajalla [18] [at CIS, Bangalore on 8 July 2011] * Internet Surveillance Policy: "…the second time as farce?" - A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden [19] [at TERI, Bangalore on 27 June 2011] CIS is doing a project, 'Privacy in Asia'. _It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon_. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public. # Featured * Privacy & Media Law [20] (by Sonal Makhija). The research examines the existing media norms governed by Press Council of India, the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and the Code of Ethics drafted by the News Broadcasting Standard Authority, the constitutional protection guaranteed to an individual's right to privacy upheld by the courts, and the reasons the State employs to justify the invasion of privacy. # Comments * Right to Privacy Bill 2010 -- A Few Comments [21] (by Elonnai Hickok). CIS has given specific recommendations and specific comments on the Right to Privacy Bill, 2010, which was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by Rajeev Chandrashekhar. # Event Report * Privacy Matters, Guwahati [22] - the event was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, IDEA Chirang, an NGO initiative working with grassroots initiatives in Assam, Privacy India and CIS on 23 June 2011. # New Blog Entries * My Experiment with Scam Baiting [23] (by Sahana Sarkar) * When Data Means Privacy, What Traces Are You Leaving Behind? [24] (by Noopur Raval) * Video Surveillance and Its Impact on the Right to Privacy [25] (by Elonnai Hickok) * Consumer Privacy in e-Commerce [26] (by Sahana Sarkar) * An Overview of DNA Labs in India [27] (by Shilpa Narani) * UID: Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? [28] (by Shilpa Narani) *NEWS & MEDIA COVERAGE* § Indian SMEs still fail to harness the power of Net [29] [Sunday Guardian, 19 June 2011] § Sorry Wrong Number [30] [Telegraph, 3 July 2011] § Aadhaar's moment of truth [31] [Deccan Herald, 5 July 2011] § The Walls Have Ears [32] [Outlook, issue, 11 July 2011] § Transparent Government, via Webcams in India [33] [New York Times, 17 July 2011]; news also published in other languages in wprost [34] (Polish), ictnews [35] (Vietnamese) and @rret sur images [36](French) § NYT lauds Oommen Chandy's 24/7 office webcast [37] [Deccan Chronicle, 19 July 2011] § UID: The World's Largest Biometric Database [38] [International School on Digital Transformation, 21 July 2011]. Sunil Abraham made a presentation [39]. § Facebook, my boyfriend is lousy [40] [Bangalore Mirror, 24 July 2011] § Portal augurs well for transparency [41] [The Hindu, 25 July 2011] *Follow us elsewhere* § Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter [42] § Follow CIS on identi.ca [43] § Join the CIS group on Facebook [44] § Visit us at www.cis-india.org [45] _CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects._ Thank you Prasad Krishna Publication Manager Centre for Internet & Society Unsubscribe [46] #194, Second 'C' cross Domlur Second Stage Domlur Bangalore, 560071 Links: ------ [1] http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=547&qid=73602 [2] http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=548&qid=73602 [3] 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