From tahir.amin at btopenworld.com Tue Mar 1 11:15:58 2005 From: tahir.amin at btopenworld.com (TAHIR AMIN) Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 05:45:58 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Biodiverse countries call for tighter patent rules Message-ID: <20050301054558.86194.qmail@web86107.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Biodiverse countries call for tighter patent rules Priya Shetty 28 February 2005 Source: SciDev.Net Developing countries that are rich in biodiversity have called for tighter patent rules to prevent their biological resources being misappropriated and to ensure that benefits arising from their use are shared fairly. The proposal was made at a meeting of the parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity held from14-18 February in Bangkok, Thailand. Its proponents included the Like-Minded group of Mega-diverse Countries (LMMCs) — so called because they contain most of the world's biodiversity — and a negotiating group representing Africa. They proposed a legally binding regime that would require users of biological resources to first seek informed consent of the country of origin, and to ensure that the origin of the resources were disclosed in patent applications. Developing countries said the regime should be broad enough to also cover products derived from patented resources. However, developed countries at the meeting, including Australia, Canada, the European Union and Japan (the United States is not a signatory) maintained an 'open' position, suggesting that benefit sharing could be enforced through existing instruments. Among these are the Bonn Guidelines, drawn up in 2002 to help parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity implement fair access to genetic resources. But many developing countries, including the LMMCs, stressed at the Bangkok meeting that these voluntary guidelines were not enough to prevent violations of national legislation or ensure compliance with benefit sharing. Their chief concern is 'biopiracy', whereby biological resources could be appropriated by foreign researchers and used to develop new, patent-protected products, without benefits being returned to the country of origin. The South African representative told delegates that some intellectual property instruments undermine rather than promote benefit sharing. Developing countries said that instead they sought an international regime that supports and complements — rather than overrides — national legislation. Critics of the developing countries' proposal include Alan Oxley, based at the APEC Study Centre at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. In a report published to coincide with the Bangkok meeting, Oxley warned that going down a "litigious" path in which patents are tightly regulated "risks destroying benefits for everyone". He argues that a market-based approach, in which agreements between users and providers of genetic resources are designed on a case-by-case basis represents the way forward. However, an internationally flexible system that relies on such ad hoc agreements would mean that developing countries would be forced to police their own biodiversity — and not all countries have the resources to do this. The LMMCs want the convention on biological diversity to ensure that countries can determine how products derived from their biological resources can be used. Oxley maintains that the LMMC proposal would "block the development of biotechnology" and halt bioprospecting by deterring pharmaceutical companies from investing in research into drugs based on indigenous resources. The LMMCs are Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela. 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URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20050301/60c472c9/attachment.html From patrice at xs4all.nl Tue Mar 1 15:52:46 2005 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 11:22:46 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] fwdurfyi: The Fallacy of Microsoft's Shared Source Program Message-ID: <20050301102246.GA57174@xs4all.nl> As per request ... ;-) (it is indeed sub-zero in Amsterdam, brrrrrr patrizio & Bada Chipkali & Chotu Mia ;-) ----- Forwarded message from Aldert Hazenberg ----- Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:24:20 +0100 From: Aldert Hazenberg To: Patrice Riemens Subject: The Fallacy of Microsoft's Shared Source Program Hi Patrice, This is I think something you like to share with lots of people :) The Fallacy of Microsoft's Shared Source Program http://www.sateh.com/archives/2005/02/the_fallacy_of.html Greetings from a sub-zero Amsterdam :) Aldert. - -- "You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends." --Robert Anton Wilson - ----- End forwarded message ----- From patrice at xs4all.nl Wed Mar 2 17:24:50 2005 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 12:54:50 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] John Gilmore's fight for privacy and against ID laws Message-ID: <20050302115450.GB26053@xs4all.nl> Original to: http://www.postgazette.com/pg/05058/462446.stm Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy He's unable to travel because he refuses to present a government-approved ID Sunday, February 27, 2005 By Dennis Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette SAN FRANCISCO -- John Gilmore's splendid isolation began July 4, 2002, when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket. Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette John Gilmore, beside a graffiti-covered wall, has his morning coffee at a shop that's one block from his San Francisco home. The Bradford native doesn't drive and has other travel restrictions, thanks to his challenge of a law that the government won't allow him to see. Click photo for larger image. The gate agent asked for his ID. Gilmore asked her why. It is the law, she said. Gilmore asked to see the law. Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection. What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore's question: Why? In post 9/11 America, asking "Why?" when someone from an airline asks for identification can start some interesting arguments. Gilmore, who learned to argue on the debate team in his hometown of Bradford, McKean County, has started an argument that, should it reach its intended target, the U.S. Supreme Court, would turn the rules of national security on end, reach deep into the tug-of-war between private rights and public safety, and play havoc with the Department of Homeland Security. At the heart of Gilmore's stubbornness is the worry about the thin line between safety and tyranny. "Are they just basically saying we just can't travel without identity papers? If that's true, then I'd rather see us go through a real debate that says we want to introduce required identity papers in our society rather than trying to legislate it through the back door through regulations that say there's not any other way to get around," Gilmore said. "Basically what they want is a show of obedience." Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette There's no place like home for John Gilmore, who can't travel very far from his San Francisco residence. The Bradford native refuses to give his identification for flying. Click photo for larger image. As happens to the disobedient, Gilmore is grounded. He is rich -- he estimates his net worth at $30 million -- and cannot fly inside the United States. Nor can he ride Amtrak, rent a room at most major hotels, or easily clear security in the courthouses where his case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, is to be heard. In a time when more and more people and places demand some form of government-issued identification, John Gilmore offers only his 49-year-old face: a study in stringy hair, high forehead, wire-rimmed glasses, Ho Chi Minh beard and the contrariness for which the dot.com culture is renowned. "I think of myself as being under regional arrest," he said. Even with $30 million in the bank, regional arrest can be hard. He takes the bus to and from events at which he is applauded by less well-heeled computer techies who flew in from around the country after showing a boarding pass and one form of government-issued photo ID and arrived in rental cars that required a valid driver's license and one major credit card. He was employee No. 5 at Sun Microsystems, which made Unix, the free software of the Web, the world standard. He japed the government by cracking its premier security code. He campaigned to keep the software that runs the Internet free of charge. After he left Sun, Gilmore started his own firm, sold it for more money than he seems to have bothered to count and has since devoted his time to giving it away to favored causes: drug law reform, a campaign to standardize computer voting machines and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, something of an ACLU for the Information Age. To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from the black helicopter crowd. "That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read. Gilmore will show ID for an international flight because he doesn't expect to set the rules for other nations. "I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said. "I used to laugh at countries that had internal passports. And it's happened here and people don't even seem to know about it." >From geek to riches The passage of John Gilmore from a bespectacled proto-nerd from Bradford, Pa., to the twice-wealthy privacy-rights pioneer of the dot.com West Coast started in his father's living room, where he first suspected authority is used simply because someone has it. When something was found broken or spilled or some other evidence of a fractured rule surfaced, and the guilty party unknown, the elder Gilmore would summon his four children to the living room. "He'd line us all up in the living room. Until one of us confessed, we wouldn't get to leave. Eventually one of my younger brothers started confessing to things he didn't do just so we could get out of there," Gilmore said. Gilmore's father was a mechanical engineer. John was born in York and the family moved to Bradford, near the state's northern border with New York, when he was small. Today, at his home in Haight-Ashbury, a place he named Toad Hall, after the character from "The Wind in the Willows," Gilmore keeps a small school photo. It shows him with a little-boy crew cut and thick, half-rim eyeglasses, the kind that have been in and out of fashion twice since the photo was taken in the mid-1960s. The young Gilmore was a strong student at the schools in Bradford. He took to math. In high school, he became curious about computers. The 1960s were an era in which computers enjoyed an almost mystical reputation; imputed by popular culture with the power to deduce anything. One year, a team of scientists entered data for the 1927 New York Yankees and the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers to see who would win -- an early "computer match." Babe Ruth was even credited with a home run. It was easy for a bright boy to become curious about how something so all-knowing worked. "When he was 12, for his birthday, he asked for an IBM manual," said his mother, Pat Woodruff, who remarried after she and Gilmore's father divorced 20 years ago and returned to live in Bradford. "His floor used to be littered with papers. I had no idea what he was doing." The University of Pittsburgh opened a branch campus in a building across the street from his high school. In it, they placed a desk-sized IBM 360. Gilmore started wandering over to learn FORTRAN, the punch-card programming language that made the computer do complex mathematical calculations. The Pitt-Bradford library had a few computer books, and one of his high school teachers got John a card. The family was about to move to Alabama when John began writing to the company that printed up a $3 manual for computer use. The firm, Scientific Time Sharing Corp., in Bethesda, Md., rented out computer time to companies such as Arbitron and ABC News, which needed storage for vast databases. After the third or fourth correspondence, they wrote back to ask if he was a customer. Gilmore wrote back that he was a high school student and he was moving to Alabama. After completing high school in Alabama, Gilmore had two summer internships behind him and a full-time job as the youngest geek in Bethesda. He had a few dollars in his pocket and a letter of acceptance from Michigan State University. He used the money. The letter was of little use. Computer science had not yet come into its own as an academic discipline. "Why pay someone to teach me computers when I can get someone to pay me to learn them?" he reasoned. Road trip When techies burn out, they tend not to do strange things. They are, by nature, already a few degrees off plumb. So they revert to the ordinary. Gilmore burned out in the late '70s. He got on a motorcycle and rode west. "He just packed up his stuff and moved off," Pat Woodruff said. "I don't know where he went at this time." He went to New Mexico. Gilmore worked for a while in the lowest of mechanical technologies: a traveling carnival. He ran the Tilt-A-Whirl. "You have to watch the thing closely and know when someone's going to lose it, so you move back," he said. Dodging stomach contents kept him employed for a while. At one point he moved in with New Mexico's most dysfunctional couple. The male in the relationship found out the female was pregnant. An argument broke out. A gun was produced. Gilmore forgot his lesson from the Tilt-A-Whirl. He didn't duck. A bullet caught him in the hand. He finished his New Mexico stay sleeping under a stairwell at the local college. He knocked around the country a bit more. Staying with a relative in Jacksonville, Fla., Gilmore looked for a job at a local bank. "They said they wouldn't hire me as a teller, but they'd be glad to hire me to run their computer," he said. Eventually, Gilmore moved to San Francisco and took up computer consulting. One day, a friend called. He'd gone to work for a startup firm called Microsoft. The company's founder, a Harvard dropout named Bill Gates, was selling Unix, a universal software on which the Internet would be based, and he wanted Gilmore to find a way to make Unix work on the computers of a prospective customer based at Stanford University. After a job interview, Gilmore called the people at Stanford. They were starting a company to be called Sun, short for Stanford University Network, and would Gilmore like to be their first software employee. "I hired on at Sun because the work was interesting," he said. The pay was just short of marginal. Thus did John Gilmore get rich by accident. Because he was on the ground floor, his stock was worth more. Sun went public in 1986 and suddenly John Gilmore was rich. He stayed on at Sun as a consultant until 1989, then started his own company, Cygnus. A few years later, when he sold Cygnus, he was, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, "loaded." That is to say he is not ridiculously rich -- just wealthy enough to make trouble. He did. Gilmore, for instance, is blocked from most e-mail servers because he runs what the industry calls an "open relay" on his computer server, tucked into the basement of his house. People are able to send e-mail through it without identifying themselves, raising the ire of the anti-spam movement. His server sits next to the remnants of what is known in the industry as the "DES Cracker." It is a collection of computer chips, connected by a spider web of circuitry that he built to overpower the most widely used encryption system -- the same one used on ATMs and satellite dishes. "The government was recommending everybody use it. We did that to show it wasn't worth relying on," Gilmore said. His own theory was that a privacy program offered by the government isn't, by nature, likely to remain private. By 1996, Gilmore's dislike of authority was in full bloom. At San Francisco Airport, he refused to produce a driver's license for security police. "The cop said, 'You want me to arrest you?' I said, 'I'd consider it an honor.' " They honored him with an arrest. The district attorney dropped the case. Gilmore has epilepsy, and because of that his driver's license was suspended five years ago. He decided not to reapply because it is now easier, when asked for a photo ID, to be able to say forthrightly that he has none. More than $1 million of his money has gone to house and feed the Electronic Frontier Foundation. On a given day, visitors can find a team of lawyers meeting with young men and women, still pale from too much time indoors, seeking counsel to protect them from the wrath of everyone from the Recording Industry Association of America, which is trying to shut down music file sharers, to federal regulators worried about the latest software for encrypting e-mail communications. "He cares a great deal about privacy," said Lee Tien, a full-time litigator at EEF. Because privacy is one of those things that disappears without always being noticed right away, Tien and other EFF lawyers find themselves fighting regulations nobody gets excited about right away. "Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?' vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said. "If John Gilmore were a country," adds his personal publicist, Bill Scannell, "his motto would be 'Let Me Alone.' " Conscious objection Rosa Parks did not ride that bus in Montgomery by accident. Several strategy meetings preceded the famous ride in which the founding mother of the civil rights movement boarded a bus and declined to sit in the back. Gilmore's famous visit to two airline ticket counters in the Bay Area was charted out. He checked in with his lawyer. He kept notes. He booked a flight from Oakland, with its slightly cheaper fares, to Washington, D.C., where he planned to drop in on the offices of his member of congress, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to convey his growing concern about the amount of data the government is gathering from and about its citizens. His reason for travel, he would later say, was "to petition the government for redress." That added First Amendment issues to a Constitutional exercise that would also turn on the amendments against unreasonable search and seizure and the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Everything went pretty much according to expectations. That is to say, everything went to hell in a hurry. As Gilmore tells it, he arrived at the gate two hours early, a paper ticket purchased through a travel agent in his hand. A Southwest agent asked for his ID. Gilmore, in turn, asked her if the ID requirement was an airline rule or a government rule. She didn't seem to know. Gilmore argued that if nobody could show him the law, he wasn't showing them an ID. They reached a strange agreement for an argument about personal privacy: In lieu of showing ID, Gilmore would consent to an extra-close search, putting up with a pat-down in order to keep his personal identity to himself. He was wanded, patted down and sent along. As Gilmore headed up the boarding ramp a security guard yanked him from line. According to court papers, a security agent named Reggie Wauls informed Gilmore he would not be flying that day. "He said, 'I didn't let you fly because you said you had an ID and wouldn't show it,' " Gilmore said. "I asked, 'Does that mean if I'd left it at home I'd be on the plane?' He said, 'I didn't say that.' " The Gilmore case is, if anything, about things unsaid. Gilmore -- and millions of other people -- are daily instructed to produce some manner of ID: a driver's license, a Social Security number, a phone number, date of birth. When Gilmore asked to see the rules explaining why his photo ID is necessary for airline security, his request was denied. The regulation under which the Transportation Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, instructs the airlines to collect such identification is classified as "Sensitive Security Information." When Congress passes a law, it is as often as not up to some agency to decide what that law means and how to enforce it. Usually, those regulations are available for people to examine, even challenge if they conflict with the Constitution. This wasn't the case when Congress passed the Air Transportation Security Act of 1974. The Department of Transportation was instructed to hold close information that would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" or "reveal trade secrets" or "be detrimental to the safety of persons traveling in air transportation." The Federal Aviation Administration, then a branch of the transportation department, drew up regulations that established the category now known as Sensitive Security Information. When the responsibility for air travel safety was transferred to the newly created Transportation Safety Administration, which was in turn made a branch of the new Department of Homeland Security, the oversight for Sensitive Security Information went with it. The language in the Homeland Security Act was broadened, subtly but unmistakably, where SSI was concerned. It could not be divulged if it would "be detrimental to the security of transportation." "By removing any reference to persons or passengers, Congress has significantly broadened the scope of SSI authority," wrote Todd B. Tatelman, an attorney for the Congressional Research Office. Tatelman was asked by Congress last year to look at the implications of Gilmore's case. Tatelman's report found that the broadened language essentially put a cocoon of secrecy around 16 categories of information, such as security programs, security directives, security measures, security screening information "and a general category consisting of 'other information.' " The government has been so unyielding on disclosure that men with the name David Nelson suddenly found themselves ejected from flights. Somewhere in the system, the name came up on the newly created "No Fly" list. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., found himself in the same dilemma. When baggage screeners were caught pilfering, prosecutions were dropped because a trial would require a discussion of "Sensitive Security Information." When John Gilmore demanded proof that the airport ID rule met Constitutional muster, the government at first declined to acknowledge it even existed. Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for TSA, tacitly acknowledged the strange rabbit hole into which Gilmore has fallen. The Department of Justice, in its first response to Gilmore's suit two years ago, declined to acknowledge whether such an instruction existed. Later, it admitted its existence. Then the government asked a judge to hold a hearing in secret and preclude Gilmore's lawyers from seeing the regulation they sought to challenge, the contents of which seem to be pretty widely known. "It's a rubber stamp. TSA security directives are -- plural -- sensitive security information and not subject to public disclosure," Davis said. How, then, is someone to challenge in court a law he's not allowed to see? "I have no idea," Davis said. "If a passenger doesn't wish to show ID prior to getting a boarding pass, that's something they're going to have to take up with the air carrier. And the air carrier is required to obtain government-issued identification." That, says Gilmore's lawyer, Jim Harrison, is the enigma of the case: "It's about the ability of the citizens of this country to be able to move about the country, to move about freely, without being subject to laws they can't see." The legal cul-de-sac erected around airport security is not limited to Gimore's deliberately chosen fight. In October 2001, at San Francisco Airport, Arshad Chowdhury, born and raised in the United States, was surrounded by security agents and kept off a Northwest Airlines flight. He was trying to get back to Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a graduate student. Chowdhury's last name sounded somewhat like another name on the no-fly list. He could never get an explanation. He filed suit against Northwest, but, to date, his court fight has been with the government, which has pleaded Sensitive Security Information. To sue Northwest for racial profiling, Chowdhury must first sue his own government for the rules Northwest will plead it was enforcing. High-tech togetherness Code Con is one of those technological events so deep that ordinary conversation requires an English-to-English translator. A young woman was onstage explaining a system she had developed to, as it turns out, automate trust in discussion groups by assigning a ranking of credibility to participants based on past messages and reactions. Discussion boards must either be moderated, to keep the wackos from disrupting them, or wide open, in which case postings can take unreasonably long times. As she spoke, half the audience inside a darkened nightclub rented for the event stared into the blue glow of laptop computers. Some were following the PowerPoint presentation on a Web site set up for the affair. Dan Klein, a Pittsburgh computer consultant, was in the back of the room. He has known Gilmore for years, and to know Gilmore is to know the room. Computer programmers, the really good ones, combine an artistic temperament with a conviction that intuitive reasoning can lead to mathematical certainty. "It's elegant thinking," Klein said. "We are most of us white hats, but we think like black hats." The elegance of Gilmore's thinking is that knowing someone's ID does not prevent the person from committing a terrorist act. The 9/11 hijackers had driver's licenses. Knowing someone's identity, as Gilmore argues it, adds less to a security than it takes away from a traveler's protection from authority that might oppress simply because it can. "It's just rebellion against oppression," Klein said. "Part of it is this sense of 'Why do I have to follow all these rules when they don't make any sense?' " The young woman finished her speech, took a few questions and, just as everyone was about to rise for lunch, Scannell, a peripatetic man who orbits around both the techies and the world of PR, was on the stage. He had a special request. He had just become a parent and wanted to put in a wireless baby monitor. Could someone come up with a way to encrypt a baby monitor so outsiders couldn't pick up the signal? By day's end a few people had approached with ideas. It is doubtful anyone would bother to listen in on a baby gurgling, but this was the principle of the thing: meeting the people who know the math to make it work. Soon afterward, 14 Code Con attendees flooded into a nearby Italian restaurant. Gilmore sat at one end of the table, chatted privacy, travel and whether the drug called Ecstasy has a medicinal application. Then, to save time, he picked up everyone's check. In cash. No credit cards. Why leave a paper trail? That night, he caught a ride home with a friend. The night before was more to his liking. On a bus running through San Francisco to Haight-Ashbury, a multimillionaire sat alone in a seat next to a woman who appeared to be homeless. Neither knew who the other one was. All John Gilmore had to show to get on board was a $1.25 fare. That's how he likes it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Dennis Roddy can be reached at droddy at post-gazette.com or 412-263-1965.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright �1997-2004 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved. From lawrence at altlawforum.org Thu Mar 3 10:20:12 2005 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 10:20:12 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] When Free Music does pay - Thermal Story Message-ID: Hi all some time ago I had posted the news of an upcoming band called thermal and a quarter who released their latest album "Plan B" for free to download under a Thermal Open Music License. Perhaps a good example of how a band without large studio backing can make good use of the internet to gain recognition for themselves. We are also in the process of finalising a copyleft comic which takes off on a WIPO pedagogical comic on Copyright and thermal will also feature in the comic, a rough cut of the comic of the comic is available right now on our website but Ver. 1 with the thermal story should be up in a few days lawrence ===== Hey there, This has been a really busy weekend and we can't wait to get to the big news! NPR's highly rated show 'All Things Considered' featured Thermal And A Quarter on February 28. We were interviewed by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, who has also interviewed Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn and our own Allah Rakha Rahman. The entire audio documentary is up at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4516908 THE LAST PLAN B DOWNLOADS With the release of Motorbyckle and Intermission, we come to the end of Plan B downloads. The album will remain up on the site for you to download and share. Enjoy! For more details, check out our web site at www.thermalandaquarter.com (just a warning: the site may be slow as there are plenty of downloads after the broadcast). RADIO GA GA! We rocked Bangalore mighty hard on Saturday, February 26 at the Airtel-Radio City Live Chapter 1 gig in Cubbon Park. Our interviews were broadcast before and after the gig on Radio City 91 FM in Bangalore. That's all we have for you to munch on... keep downloading Plan B! peace. TAAQ From oli at zeromail.org Wed Mar 2 20:36:21 2005 From: oli at zeromail.org (Oli) Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 16:06:21 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] digital inequalities Message-ID: Dear all, here is a proposal for what could be called "digital inequalitities". Best, Oli Leistert ---- Digital Inequalities Abstract The following text raises questions about digital dependencies and inequalities. Most agendas of development work and computer literacy see their goals in a distribution of computers and relating hardware. « Computer » here is seen generally as a means for empowerment, as a means to access resources of knowledge and as a means for building networks. Left out, whether consciously or not, is a critical reflection on the product « computer » and the accompaining regimes of computer products. This text argues, that a distribution of computer products such as Microsoft through multiplicators such as NGO's does not diminish digital inequalities, but, in a way, extends them. With the distribution of a black box, such as Microsoft Windows, a profound empowerment is prevented, not inforced. The users of these software bundles are strictly depending on the proprietary product. With this kind of distribution of computers, the misleading and wrong equation « Computer is Microsoft » is transported as a gospel, or ruling motto, into rural areas. The second issue this text discusses is the general accumulation of data in a digitally connected environment, that confronts our everyday life more and more. This world of data is produced by us while we are acting the way we always used to do. Our acting gets more and more translated and transported as data into a dataworld, mostly without that we know about it. Wireless networks connect everyday life (mobiles, smartcards in the metro, payback cards while shopping) and produce a counterworld, that consists of data, intangible and purely informational. This data then feedbacks into the real world, into everyday life, structures what we do and how we do it, sometimes even determines it. Digital inequalities belong to a world of patents, licences and copyright protection The digital divide saga goes roughly like this: the poor on this planet do not only have not enough to eat, no, (even worse) they they don't have computers. And not having computers seems to be the reason, why they don't have enough to eat. Other reasons of their poverty, or of poverty in general, are not touched or even considered in this discourse, because development aid is not about questioning the political agenda where it gets its money from. The analytical gap is being replaced by a simple equation: once the poor have computers, they have access to information and with that, they have access to resources of knowledge that will help them escape their poverty. This tale of progress through technology is being used to implement new dependencies, dependencies that are of an old kind, but with a new look. Digital dependencies emerge, when western commercial products, such as Microsoft Windows, are being introduced as bringing salvation in communities of the paupers. The dependency consists of not more and not less than the usage of a commercial product, including the introduction of such concepts as licenses, copyright regimes and patents. And, maybe most important, the introduction of what a computersystem is, or seems to be: a commercial product. A deep rooted equal computer system would be one, that allows full control over its usage, distribution and changing in any way, including improovement. An equalitiy would allow free choice of applications and the possibility to deny the usage of some. So, digital inequalities can in part be seen as a result of a society, that is shaped by commodities, where social interaction is replaced through an exchange of commodities and of a society, where important tools are « protected » by regimes of copyrights, patents and licenses and where a huge political, juridical and police apparatus takes care of this. These regimes successfully prevent any emancipation of the consumer to a user controlling his/her means by her/himself. This is applies to the west as to any other region (although, surely, there are big differences, the main line stays the same). A licence defines the terms of usage. It prohibits that the user appropriates the products in a way not being intended by the manufacturer of the product. The product is not intended to become a thing amongst others, which is being determined by the user. Licenses somehow guarantee the determination and limitation of the user. A different example of digital inequalities is much deeper situated in the logique of software products: no matter the customer is allowed to use the product in a way different from the licence agreement, software products (including the software running on mobiles) can hardly be changed into appropriated means. The interface design is strictly determining their usage. It is not open to any change. Also, the product does not need to even inform the user about what else it does. By offering the services mentioned in the licence, the product fullfills its requirements the user has paid for. The contract between user and manufacurer is not about any activities of the manufacturer, but solely about the user's. So, the product may have interfaces and communication channels to a third party, without even informing the user. The SMS-channel provided by mobiles is such a case, where a channel, initially made for technical services as checking remotely the functionality of the mobile, has become popular means of communication, sold seperately. Letting connected digital devices give feedbacks and transmit data, with or without notifying the user, is the contempory challenge of the majority of IT-companies. Their goal is to build an environment, an ambient, that permantly transmits data about « events » in real time. The Rfid-technology (link) is such a case, where little computers, that transmit data, are being attached onto or implemented into any possible thing surrounding an individuum, or carried by the individuum. A different approach of bringing together offline and online worlds is made by the consortium that tries to establish « Trusted Computing » . They don't even try to hide their ambitions: a complete control over any connected personal computer, including the possibility of remotely deleting files, if « appropriate ». The history of these kind of plans shows that totalitarian goals usually fail because they underestimate the complexity of reality. But on the other side, if the transnationals make a combined effort in a connected world, one should not underestimate their will and power to solve the « problem » of pirated media and what else they have on their agenda. With the emergence of a counterworld and its computational infrastructure, everyday life is being more and more confronted with a data accumulation innaccessible for most. A kingdom of information for governments, authorities, companies, sales persons and so on, beyond any legitimation. Everyday life produces a counterworld What follows is an example of RFID-technology, that shall serve to explain the impact of a digital black box computer in everyday life. The first part of the Delhi Metro is on service for a couple of months now. This line goes from east to west, connecting the city devided by the river Yukamo. The Delhi Metro has been equipped with a complete computerized ticket system by french global player Thales. It offers to types of « tickets »: one for the single or two-way passage, and one for multiple passages. The ones for the single/two way passage are looking like plastic coins, manufactured by Sony (CHECK), they go uner the product name RC-S 890 and have a diameter of 30mm, are 3 mm thick, and weight 2.7 gramm. They contain a small computer with an antenna. They have themselves no power supply (a very important aspect of RFID-items), but get their energy through field induction from a reader-device. Between the « Ticket » and the reader-device, that is integrated into the barrier one has to pass to reach the platform, an intense data traffic takes place: the computer is activated by induced energy. Then, the reader reads the data on the « ticket » that has been stored on it. The system now knows which smart token has been purchased, for what passage and when. Possibly the smart token stores data given by the reader: the reader might store place and time of passing the reader on the « ticket ». The communication between the two runs on 13.56 Mhz. Both, token and card are working within a so called close coupling distance (distance from reader not more than some centimeters). The smart token has a memory size of 576 bytes. This Eeprom-memory can be overwritten up to 50.000 times. These coins, which have to be placed near the barrier before every passage, open, if valid, the barriers and the commuter can proceed to the platform. After the passage, they are thrown into the barrier again. And depending on the passage done and the one paid for, or better: depending if the passage done is compatible to the one reserved for the commuter by the system, the barriers open or don't open. The traveller does not get any material proof of the passage, like the paperticket in the old days. The tickets are bought at the ticket counter, readily configured for the announced passage. A spontanous prolongation of the passage is not possible without somehow embarrasing procedures at final station. The ticket system notices the change of passage and the yatri gets punished with high attention by the uniformed employees. Furthermore, only a limited timeslot is open for the passage. If the yatri leaves the train in between and discusses with a fellow the pro's and con's of the Delhi Metro and then continues the passage, the timeslot will be closed and again the uniformed personal will pay high attention to this yatri. This high attention mostly leads to a rising deprivation of the yatri, She/he is now a disturbing subject, at least disturbing the continuous flow of the other passengers at the gate. With the total electronic control, no manual control and no spotting of faredodger is necessary in the trains. This means less employees and the end of a possible economy not fully in the hands of the Delhi Metro Transport Corporation (DMTC). Supposedly, full control of metro usage is done over two different stages: purchase of ticket at counter and barrier/reader-device. As some uniformed employees always hang around at the barriers, it is hard to jump over them - a sport of civil disobedience very popular in several western old metro systems. It's even harder, as two barriers have to be passed: at the beginning and the end. The uniformed employees are mere appendixes of the digital machine: they are getting active when the machine tells them to, by sending off alarm clock like sounds that changes the whole place into a location of emergency. One detail, that arises from the fact, that the tickets are computers, is the fine of RPs 100 one has to pay, if the « ticket » is not used for travelling but taken away, removed out of the closed system of the digital machine. It is not allowed to do this, because these « tickets » are far too expensive. They cost far more than the prize for the passage. A smart token ticket system only pays off, if each token is used some hundred times. Only then it is cheaper than the classic paper ticket system. To prevent « theft » of tickets, the DMTC has invented so called « souvenir tokens », simple plastic coins without any computer inside, for 4 rps, that can be taken home by fans of the metro. That it does not contain a computer might not matter, as the computer is invisible anyway. The contactless data traffic does not feel very technical, more magic. While purchasing a paper ticket in a classical metro system, it is still the passengers decision to make the journey or not. In the case of the RFID-System, the passenger has to do the passage or to give back the ticket at the counter. The second type of ticket offered by the DMTC is a plastic card in the size of creditcards. It is intended for those who commute frequently and can be obtained for a deposit of one hundred rupees, which comes close to the actual prize for the product on the market. This smartcard can be charged with data that represents money, from 50 rps upwards. The usage is identical to the usage of the tokens (but you keep it and don't throw it into the slot). Some commuters have invented the practice to keep it in the wallet or bag and to hold the wallet against the reader, which works fine as long as the wallet or bag does not contain too much metal. The value « on the card » will be shown each time the card is read. A little discount is given for users of the smartcard, which means that two classes of users are invented, token user and card user. Whoever has enough money to pay the deposit and at least 50 rps gets rewarded with a discount. Technically seen, the « metrocard » is more sophisticated than the token. It is again a product by Sony, called FeLica, most reasonably the type RC-S833, made out of PET-plastic. The Computer has an 8-bit RISC CPU with 1.2 kbytes usermemory. The most important difference is the Triple-DES Encryption Algorithm the CPU is equipped with. This Encryption is used everytime the card gets read by the System. It prevails the « illegitimate » charging of the card. The metrocard can be used as an electronic wallet, and some shops in the metro stations supposedly accept it (I haven't tried). Whether token or card, both are computers, and being a ticket is just one possible application. It can also be said, that they simulate tickets. The smart ticket system offers online statistics about the metro usage, because every single passage is tracked by the system. This is a manager's dream, a real-time analysis of such a complex company. The possibility of real-time analysis lowers operational cost and increases profits. Information is of big value for companies. Today, a lot of products, from toothpaste to milk, have toll-free number printed on, that can be called by consumers. « We want to know what you think about this product! » Sure they want. And while this kind of feedback is based on free will, other feedback channels have emerged which are much more subtile and imperceptible: City Bank's PayBack card reports every item purchased to the members of the Payback consortium. Customers Cards by chains are a different example. They provide special offers or discounts, which shows how high this kind of informations is valued by the chains. But in all these cases, it initially was a decision by the customer to be member of the « club ». This is different in the case of the Delhi Metro. Every commuter is being reported in real time. >From the operator's perspective, the ticket system provides a complete picture of the metro usage, from its first day of operation on. Every token or card, that had been connected to the reader, gets storaged. So, for exampe, no inspectors in the trains are needed anymore. Also, the expansive and inexact counting of passengers, still seen in older metro systems, is outdated. The system counts everything itself, or better: by counting it works. Every metro station is connected via fibre cable or satellite dishes with the central server. The metro operates its own, closed network, no local business is envolved. The central database, run by a software system thats main target is to eliminate costs (SAP, the neoliberal's dream), contains each single passage: time, places, durage, which token or card used (they all have unique numbers). The software generates daily analysis of each stations usage, routes taken. The metrocards are not personalized, but as video pictures from each station are also transmitted to the headquarters, tracking of each single yatri is fairly easy. The commuting behaviour of each metrocard can be visualized with a mouse click. Okay, well, somehow interesting this, but tell me: what has this to do with digital inequalities? Every yatri produces data during her/his voyage, without knowing about it. No one informs the yatri about this, not during « ticket » « purchase » or by a leaflet handed out. The signs in the stations inform about video surveillance and not to touch unknown things. It seems as if the data is not a matter of the yatri, who produces it. This raises questions of ownership: whose data is this? Doesn't it belong to the commuter? Or should not at least the commuter decide what this data is used for? In the case of the Delhi Metro, the yatri has no possibilities to interfere into the production and usage of his/her data. The Metro System needs the data to operate, so the data is an immanent part of the metro. Any questioning of the data production means a questioning of the whole metro system. The only possibility to avoid data production is not using the metro, definitely not a good choice. The Delhi Metro has implemented a data regime, that is immanently connected to the metros functionality as a transport system - real world and virtual world fall together. Digital inequalities consist in this of the asymmetric dataworld. No influence possible on the data produced and the way it is used. The way to any surveillance scenarios is paved. But even without this in mind, the data production is highly questionable: who has legitimized the DMRC to maintain a total data collection of their passengers? Can this be legitimized by the system itself? A technology, that has implemented such features as being necessary for operation is frightening. What if the next generation cars only move, if a real time data stream is up and running? In a wireless connected surrounding, the real, physical world of moving objects produces a virtual, informational world, a distorted mirror. Simultaneously and in synchronity this mirror is build. But while the real world is fluid, passing, fading in its stream of time, the virtual world is of very different character. It consists of incoherent, but continuously generated data, that does not fade away in time. It is an evergrowing accumulation of discrete « moments », that, as data, lack the sense of time humans have. Data is omnipresent. The virtual world collects passing moments and preserves them for signification at any possible time in the future, in a reductionist way, as data never represents the qualities of real life, the overwhelming number of impressions and emotions one connects with moments passed. The virtual world is a homogenized substratum, lacking any sense of time. It can haunt the real world at any arbitrary moment by « prooving » long forgotten situations or constellations. The temporal disconnection and, with that, the shortage to an everlasting present is not only of philosophical interest. Nothing less but everyday life is affected by it. The virtual world affects everyday life as an objective narrative Although much poorer in sensual qualities and details, which makes the world surrounding us so interesting, the quality of total objectivity is attributed to the virtual world. This total objectivity is also seen as universal, meaning the same anywhere at anytime; the « pure truth ». This authoritarian style data, being always correct, echoes the politics of those who are building it: technicians, engineers, scientists, and authorities of states and companies. White male's dreams of omnipotence rule the data world. A well trained view from above, learned through centuries of « neutral » science and thinking, a god's view. The data world is independent of local bindings. It is a register of a divine almanac, never to be questioned. This objectivity is unquestionable, as there is no locality to question it from. It lies beyond the living world, a dead(ly) objecitivity. This doesn't mean that any data is evil or forever lost in bad politics. But being in the hands of those, whose interest is control, government, surveillance, optimization, cost reduction, the virtual world helps generate images of the real world, that are reduced to parameters belonging to such regimes. The output, the generated view on the real world, always appears to be true and unquestionable, independent of how contingent the meanings given to it are. While emotions and other not quantifyable matters structure the signification of everyday moments, and truth and objectivity are of secondary interest, this relation is upside down in the virtual world. Data of total objectivity generate the meanings of moments. The parameters used for these operations are contingent, maybe even senseless and incomprehensible. They are set by the operators of the system, by the managers, politicians: they generate a world of theirs. The « real » world is being generated from scratch on the basis of datasets, replayable in any contingent way, objectified by computers. A good example is the weathershow on BBC World. A colourful ball appears on the screen, that represents the « world weather » of, say, the last 24 hours, and some gray spots hurry around it. We are feeling comfortable with images like that and hardly notice, that the picture shown by BBC World can not be seen by anyone on earth. It is generated from the virtual world's data and narrates something about the real world, that is computated out of billions of data sets. We are all astronauts, aren't we? The virtual world acts normatively on the real world because of the objectivity awarded to it. The power of the virtual world to generate reductionistic perspectives, views, diagrams, cross-sections by any possible criteria, that are always true, but never representing something experienceable in this abstract and contextless way, alienates the real world from it self step by step. Endless generating of « real » worlds by the means of virtual worlds change every real world substantially. The virtual world is a misguided mirror of the real world, in which the real world never can regain itself. In its reduction to some few parameters, the virtual reduces the real, that bows to it, anddeclares its own richness of images, imaginations, emotions more and more irrelevant. The virtual objectivies the real. The accumulation of data in a digitally connected world generates a counterworld, immaterial, informational, of ruling objectivity. It structures the real, it economises the real and sorts it by contingent, undiscussed criterias, that reflect the thinking of those who have access to it. To trace, to govern, to control, to collect, to calculate, to divide. Quantifyable kingdoms, pure and clean. Classes, modules, segments, parts. Most of the time, we don't even notice the production of the counterworld. The striking thing is, though, that it is us who produce it. Without movements of objects, of transactions, of sounds and any other dynamics, no data would be produced, at least no data of interest. Our actions are connected only one way: into the virtual. The stream goes unidirectional, away from us. It is only on special occasions that we get an impression about the accumulation already done, about datamountains and informationrivers. We are kept away from the data we produce, as if they had nothing to do with us and as if they would not feedback into our worlds. It is an inequality of prominent kind, that our data are present in an unaccessible counterworld, always about to interfere into our lifes. Besieging our lifes with meanings generated by others, meanings we only can react on, mostly helpless as the meanings comes in an objectified form. Personalized data are suspected to be the most problematic data, as a counterimage of a single person is made up with it. But personalisation of data at least offers some advantages: a personal reaction is possible, it is much easier to adress the problem of personal data storage and ask for access to it. Unpersonaliszed data, however, are in a way a much bigger challenge, as they also feedback onto single lifes, but on a different, bigger scale. It's much harder to comprehend and critize their effects, as they act on whole segments of societies. An overwhelming case of building constant data flows into the counterwelt is RFID-technology, pushed by huge transnational companies. They dream of a permant data emission by individuals and their objects. Putting life online. A doubled world of data. Digital inequalities are basically productions of data, that are caused without the consent and knowing of the individuum, that uses digital devices such as Personal Computers or the Delhi metro « ticket ». When Microsoft promotes the connection of every earthling to the net, in collaboration with huge development agencies, their goal is not to fight digital inequalities, but to gain control over its definition. Unconnected people are not of interest to anyone, like unaccessible islands. To connect them means to connect them with and to an unequal digital world, like it is done with the wide distribution of MS Products through NGO's. Connection is always designed by third parties. In the case of most NGO's, a connectivity and computer distribution is promoted, that is designed by one of the largest companies in the world. While the small tokens of the Delhi Metro are hardly to be recognized as computers, the personal computer is the most significant incarnation of a computer, and what is striking, always with some proprietary software by a single company running on it. But this is without any proper reason, as the GNU/Linux solution offers an open operating system free of charge, completly controllable by the user and changeable in any imaginable way. This is a setting, that reduces digital inequalities from the ground. Once the technical knowledge is spread, the computer is under control of those, who should have it under control: the users. Meanwhile, every single newly distributed MS computer only reinforces the reign of Redmond. As the information politics goes, new user even don't get told about alternatives. The equation that MS is computer is being passed on from generation to generation, like some religion. Some argue, that MS is easy to use and that its desktop is the entry to computer literacy. This is an interesting claim that internalizes an element of IT-politics that has undoubtly successfully been brought into people's mind: the problem of the difficult machine and how to solve it. Computers are some of the most complex machines build by humans and their power lies in their ability of calculate in such an enormous speed, that the calculation can be used to generate representations as graphics, sounds and so on. But this computational power has also produced fear and anger at computers. To make them a mass product, it was necessary to give them a human-touch look. The promise of simplicity Computers are of complex and difficult matter. 25 years ago, computers were part of the world of experts. These experts were and are educated to understand the processes inside the machine, to configure and programme it. To operate such a computer was difficult and laymen had lots of respect for these machines and their commanders. These were understandable fears of contact with these modern, eerie machines. Images of machines ruling human kind were born and entered the world of science fiction. Today, the computer has become an everyday item for a lot of people and it can be found in many offices and at home. Fear of contact has been reduced and the computer has become an integral part of contempory life, in many places of the world. Like radio and television, one can't think about life without it. But still, computers are complex machines. Nothing has changed for that. Still, their inner processes are only understood by experts. What has changed and what made them such a big success is their surface, or better: its design. With a little training, one feels comfortable with this surface and one gets the impression to understand a computer. Though, one has « only » become a user. Computers with desktops such as Windows are made to look easy understandable at the price of not letting anyone know what really happens inside. A promise of simplicity is being given, that builds trust between a higly complex machine and a layman. With this promise of simplicity, people get initiated into a colourful world, that provides any means for the consum of digital products. Through this simplicity, the computer as become a mass product. But behind the surface, the complex machines still operates in the same way as 25 years before. And everytime the machines crashes, an event of regularity, some window pops up that « tells » about errors that happened in the most cryptical way. In this moment, the user is helpless and experiences the fragiltiy of her/his relation to the machine. In these cases, the computer proves its power over the user. But this is only because it was build this way. Microsoft has no interest in any other relation. Their software doesn't allow more than a superficial knowledge of the machine. Errors are not to be solved by the user, but by the hotline, an expensive service and integral part of the product. The user's dependency on the manufacturer and other commercial services is part of the game. The user's kingdom ends with changing the background colour of the desktop. In this ambivalence of computer complexity and the politics, to connect everyone to the internet through pretending computers are simple, a digital inequality emerges. The prize for simplicity is a black box, a product that treats the user like a child. The metaphor of the desktop had helped to spread the equation MS is Computer. The politics of making people using computers, whether they need them or not, with the promise of simplicity, has the goal to reduce the number of those, that have been left out of the computer world so far. In the west, these are the older people, the last analog generation. As the market reached its limit in the west, the targetted number of people had to be increased. The retired people are mostly wealthy (they gained the fruits of 60's and 70's social system), buy laptops and search the internet for information on old age illnesses. In the computer courses they visit, they learn how to make spreasheets with MS Excel and other weird things, but no one tells them about Linux. The retired in the west are the rural people in big parts of Asia. While the cities and towns offers internet services in so called cybercafes, NGO's try to bring the computerblessing to the countryside. Main reason is the argument, that computers increase knowledge exchange, that a network of computers also helps to build a network of humans, and finally, computerliteracy is seen as empowerment. This all might be true, even if the computer itself serves also as a fetish that makes people move. The problem is the computer system the NGO's introduce, as it is most of the time MS Windows. They introduce a western regime, that finds its expression in the equation MS is computer. It would be an easy task to qualify a person to administrate Linux machines. Doing this, the network could easily add applications for free and change their own system in any desired way. This autonomy is not intended, supposedly. The agenda fighting the « digital divide » is not an agenda for digital independence, including operating systems and applications. Moreover, the goal is to redo what has been done in the west before. The distribution of western products through NGO's might not be a reflected part of their work. Having the same computers in their offices, why should they distribute Linux to the rural people? Multiplicators such as NGO's are the vehicles to promote the de facto monopoly of one software company. The Desktop-metaphor was one of the most striking events to make the computer a mass medium, followed, of course, by the internet. By succesfully pretending that knowing how to move a mouse and clicking some windows means being able to operate a computer, millions of computers have been sold to people lacking any sense of the machine. But the illusion soon gets into trouble when the first time one of those well-known and weired messages appears, telling about something happening deep down inside the machine, completely in cryptic language. This is where the metaphor of the desktop ends and where the users dependency begins. Knowing how to change the colour of the desktop's « background » doesn't help here. Microsoft is not letting anyone understand the inner states of the computer. Two kinds of PC's exists: unequal and equal ones. The unequal ones are more popular, because they seem to fulfill the promise of simpleness. But also because the unequal ones are being promoted by a huge apparatus of politics, bureaucracy and administrations, not to mention economics. The whole machinery of patents, copyright, commodities, licences, that comes with an unequal computer, feeds the power of these promoting agencies. The entertainment industry finally depends on a machine that can not be controlled by users themselves. How heavily armed this destructive apparatus of control and moneymaking is, shall be shown with an example not entirely realistic today, but very much in a couple of years: You switch on your comp and open, as every morning, your dairy, a file in MS Word. At your surprise, a window pops up that announces some irritating message: « Your license to use this MS product has expired. To renew it, please visit microsoft.com .» And the application closes. You think you are smart and you start OpenOffice, an alternative some computer geek once installed on your comp. OpenOffice can import doc. files, so what's the problem. But instead of your dairyfile, again some message pops up: « This file's license has expired. To renew it, please visit microsoft.com » This time, you start feeling a bit worried. Not knowing what your computer does and always living in a subliminal state of panic to loose data while using it, is normal for you, but not having access to some of your most personal data is a new chapter in your computer dependency. You worry even more, in fact start being hectical, as the same happens when you doubleclick your Phd-Thesis, that is almost finished. Also every letter you have written is inaccessible. There seems to be no other possibility but to « visit » the mentioned website and hope for help. This takes longer than a coffee break. You are being requested to submit a whole bunch of personal data concerning your person, profession, income, creditcard number and more of the kind that is absolutely unnecessary to male your MS Word work again. After having gone through this striptease process, you doubleclick a small « OK »button on the website. To your surprise, an even more worrying text appears: « According to the Trusted Computing guard, your computer system gives host to the following applications without any licence and therefore illegally. We remind you that computer piracy is a criminal act: MS Paint Adobe Photoshop QuarkExpress All data, that has been illegally generated with these applications has been deleted from your computer. In case any other files carrying the signature of these illegally used applications are circulating on the Internet, they will be deleted successively, too. Also, the applications themselves have been deleted. You have infringed copyrights and licenses of Microsoft and other companies by installing and using these applications. It is possible that you have caused severe financial losses for these companies in doing so. Please expect a legal case taken against you. The renewal of your MS Word licence is valid 18 months. We will withdraw $ 293 from your account in the next 24 hours. Thank you for using Microsoft! » Paths to digital independence This scenario of expired dairies does not seem real since until today, there has always been a way to use pirated software. But this time, the past is not much helpful to evalute the near future of computers. Cracking of programs and the old liberal times of the internet are about to be replaced by strict regimes of control. Since 11/9, nearly every government implemented laws and regimes to control the flow of data. The authorities are prosecuting the sharing of music files in the name of antiterrorism. And they monitor the data streams. They store terra bytes of data. Automated filter software works its way through myriads of information, sorting things out by any criteria imaginable. The governments oblige internet service providers to hand over log files without telling their customers; in some countries, the authorities even have direct access to the ISP's internal data. The governments are driven by the reduction of liberties on the net. In a networked world, things have to regulated properly. And it does not take much manpower to do this, since data is processable by computers easily, even such large quantitites as the daily internet connections. This counterworld, being generated in the name of counterterrorism, produces new suspects and delinquents en masse and en passant. Computertechnology has began to tyrannize everyday life. Every citizen is a possible bad guy. But it is not only governments, that have put the counterworld on their agenda and make intensive use of it. The « Trusted Computing » consortium is about to change the Personal Computer from an autonomous machine to a mere appendix of software companies, content providers and entertainment industries. Intel, Microsoft, HP and others invest huge sums to convert the PC to a device, which they can trust. This has nothing to do with a secure computer for the user. The trust is about total control of what is running on a machine under conditions dictated by them. The biggest inequalitiy so far in the digital domain. A sophisticated implementation on hardware level of algorithmns, that ensure proper payment and licensing, that will not be an easy case for crackers and hackers, if at all. The goal is to define, what the user is allowed to do with her/his comp. This control is only possible through a huge connected infrastructure such as the internet. This computer is definitely not a good place for storage of relevant personal data. This computer has become an outlet of the transnational company. Today, the question is not to have or have not a computer. Today, the question is how a computer can be used, without being a data producer for governments and companies. It's about the liberty to decide which data one produces, where it goes and who can access it. It's about the one's self-defined usage of a technology, that holds immense means of empowerment by its huge range of applications, whereof email is the killerapplication. If it is right, that a networking computer is a means of empowerment, than all the big players involved are trying to take control over this empowerment, cutting it down to dependencies and consumerism. Microsoft does not wait until NGO's start to distribute Linux computers. They take care of it themselves to explore new markets, with the aid of agencies like UNESCO. A developing world that develops with Linux is a a nightmare for the big players and would mean the end of the neverending growth of their market shares. China, India, most parts of Asia are about to be computerized. A huge market emerges. Every engagement of Microsoft in Asia is part of a fight against national IT-solutions and Linux. The WTO and other neoliberalist structuring regimes are the instruments to fight any development in the IT-sector that differs from the past ones. But digital inequalities are no natural laws. They are manmade and can be changed by man. It is not advisable to seek help from governments, companies or even NGO's. Digital independence is for the most part selfmade and self empowerment. It doesn't matter to have the latest Computer model. Linux runs on every old machine just perfect. And a computer that has the « trusted computing » hardware implemented can't be trusted much. As digital inequalities are not primarily depending on levels of « development », but on levels of self empowerment and consciousness, digital inequalities are not only subject to the « developing  world ». It doesn't cost much money to operate a comp that gets upgraded regularely and is well documented. Only pay for the Hardware, never for the Software, since Linux is free. Uncountable online-sites contain helpful postings and discussions on technical problems. Most of the times, people answer ones question very fast, because helping others to empower themselves is fun. Linux supports willingness to help. It is pretty easy to encrypt your emails. Noone but you and your communication partner will then be able to read it. The manuals for PGP and GPG are all out there. To encrypt your email it comparable with the usage of an envelope in classic mail. Any non encrypted email will automatically be prossessed by huge keyword search machines, storaged in databases and maintained for possible later use. It doesn't matter if your mail contains secrets, poems or whatever, because it simply isn't anyone's elses business to know the content. What would you say, if all your paper mail letters arrive with an open envelope or if the postman would tell you what your mail contains today? The payments by creditcards, bankcards or any other smart cards is being pushed because it provides two simple advantages for companies: it is cheaper, as cash is cost intensive and always a risk and it provides a flow of data that enters into the counterworld. It is still fairly easy to say no. Use cash where possible. Everytime you choose electronic payment, you let a third party participate in your business and you expose yourself to a situation in that you don't know what happens. A similar case are RFID chips, that emerges more and more in everydaylife. They might be attached to products in the supermarket, to CD's in music stores, and they have already been sewn into clothes. They garnish medical products and are present in systems like the Delhi Metro. Spare parts for cars or mobiles, printer cardridges and other items are identified through their unique number and they have been used to tag dead bodies after the tsunami in Thailand. RFID is a technology for different purposes and usages and there is not one single way to deal with them. They will appear more and more in very different situations of our everyday life. Each specific usage needs its own reflection. There is not a single solution for or against it. But what they always do: they partake in the accumulation of data for the counterworld. In a world of data transmitting things, more and more problems arise for people that want to decide about their data themselves. If companies make it to introduce RFID more broadly in the human environment, we face a counterworld, that can't be ignored by anyone. Through the huge concentration in the food sector, the global players can easily do what they want to. RFID is the effort to eliminate any self-defined data environment. This won't be total, but still troubling enough. To raise consciousness against any data transmitting environment is still a good move, as the business has just started. And as long as the promissary rhetoric of progress and a better living is being used by its promoters, it is fairly easy to expose the myths. The intelligent fridge, that notices a shortage on milk and orders two more litres is not a picture that convinces anyone to switch to this technology. But tracking of pets with GPS devices is a reasonable succesful attempt to introduce a complete surveillance scenario into everyday life. Improvement of security is the keyword of such interventions. But the same actors that are responsible for the condition of everyday life are not trustworthy at all. Some sources, that have been helpful writing this: A good introduction on the Trusted Computing project: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html How Microsoft describes its engagement with NGO's itself: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/citizenship/report/digitalinclusion.mspx The wikipedia page about RFID: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID The GnuPG site, email encryption software: http://gnupg.org/ One big source of (coorporate) information on RFID http://www.rfidjournal.com/ From anivar.aravind at gmail.com Fri Mar 4 08:13:45 2005 From: anivar.aravind at gmail.com (Anivar Aravind) Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 08:13:45 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: [Fsf-friends] Our response to the Patents (Amendments) Ordinance, 2004 In-Reply-To: <4227C7FF.3010707@gmail.com> References: <422668F8.70308@gmail.com> <876508d4wh.fsf@vaishnavi.localdomain> <4227C7FF.3010707@gmail.com> Message-ID: <35f96d470503031843658c58dc@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ramanraj K Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 07:59:19 +0530 Subject: Re: [Fsf-friends] Our response to the Patents (Amendments) Ordinance, 2004 To: Principal Support List of FSF-India Vijay Kumar wrote: >Ramanraj K writes: > >>http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=65640 >> >>Please post any links, articles, views or opinions that could help in >>voicing our concern against the proposed drastic amendments to the >>Patents Act. >> >> >Are we not too late? > Our response to the ordinance is enclosed below. It is now clear that the Patents (Amendment) Bill, 2005, to replace the Patents (Amendment) Ordinance, 2004 (No. 7 of 2004) promulgated on 26.12.2994, would be taken up during the first part of the Budget Session, 2005, and the same would be placed before a Standing Committee for further discussion upon the Bill. Please feel free to comment on the representation prepared earlier, so that we may send in better demands to the Standing Committee. Please confine this thread to the amendments proposed to Section 3(k) *only*, which is of immediate interest to the FSF India. The others amendments are more serious and will surely ruin life, but they have to be dealt with separately. Thanks, Ramanraj. __ ** Representation made by the Free Software Foundation of India to the Government of India to immediately withdraw THE PATENTS (AMENDMENT) ORDINANCE, 2004 (Ordinance No. 7 of 2004) with regard to amendments made to Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, 1970 Introduction: The Free Software Foundation of India is a non-profit organisation promoting the development, awareness, and use of free software in India. We are very concerned about the recent amendments made to the Patents Act, 1970, by the Patents (Amendment) Ordinance, 2004, amending the provisions with regard to computer programs as follows: "3. In section 3 of the principal Act, (a) in clause (d), for the words new use , the words mere new use shall be substituted; (b) for clause (k), the following clauses shall be substituted, namely: (k) a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; (ka) a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms;" Allowing patents over any kind of computation seriously harm and hamper the creativity, productivity and freedom of all, particularly software developers while writing code. Many organisations, including the Free Software Foundation have been campaigning against software patents the world over. We are shocked and surprised that amendments to the Patents Act, 1970, with regard to computer programs, should have been introduced so suddenty in India, by a Presidential Ordinance, without any public debate or prior announcement at all. We hope this memorandum would restore the status quo as quickly as possible, for all the following reasons: 1. Amendment is ambigious and capable of easy abuse and misinterpretation: Though under the amended clause (k), computer programs per se continue to be not patentable, the exceptions made thereto are not clear. All computer programs work in combination with hardware, and all computer programs have technical application to industry, particularly to the software industry. A literal interpretation of the amendment with regard to computer programs is dangerously misleading, creating the impression as though any computer program is patentable. However, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry has made a statement to the following effect at http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=6074 "In IT, the trend is to have software in combination with or embedded in hardware such as in computers or cell phones or a variety of other gadgets. Software as such has no patent protection (the protection available is by way of copyright); but the changing technological environment has made it necessary to provide for patents when software has technical applications in industry in combination with hardware. This has been a demand of NASSCOM." There are significant differences between the statement made by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and what the ordinance actually says, and the intentions are not apparent from the wordings used in the amendment. However, even assuming that the provisions of the Patents Act have been amended to enable and make provision for only embedded software, which is a very vague term, it would make in roads into the freedoms and liberties required by software developers to peacefully continue with their work and services. Any special provisions providing for patentability of computing or computer programs under the category "embedded software" is needless, and bad because: (a) The classification of computer programs into embedded software and others is very superficial. The key advantage in using computer programs is that logic can be re-written without re-wiring or physically modifying hardware. Invariably, it is easy to re-write, copy, improve, and modify computer programs, and it is quite possible to extend the life and productivity of hardware devices that are manufactured using scarce non-renewable resources, merely by modifying the computer program. People can, and often do, install new software on embedded computers particularly when the source code is available or to improve usability of hardware. (b) The classification is arbitrary and opposed to principles of equality, and the very objects of the Patents Act. Let us take an illustration, for example a computer program named `foo'. It is clear that foo is not patentable per se, under the amended clause (k). But then, foo, in its technical application to industry is made patentable. The classification, based on mere usage, making foo an invention only in "its technical application to industry", has no rational nexus to the object of the Patents Act, and plainly violative of Art. 14 of the Constitution of India. One of the avowed objects of the Patents Act is "to ensure more effectively that patent rights are not worked to the detriment of the consumer or to the prejudice of trade or the industrial development of the country". Introducing patents for any kind of computer programs is detrimental and opposed to the objects of the Act. The question how software patents are detrimental and harmful is elaborately analysed and discussed at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/industry-at-risk.html 2. Amendment is opposed to Article 39(c) of the Constitution of India: The Directive Principles enshrined in the Constitution of India, under Chapter IV. Article 39 reads as follows: "39. Certain principles of policy to be followed by the State.- The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing- (a) that the citizen, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood; (b) that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good; (c) that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment;" The software industry largely earns revenue by providing custom services, and by introducing patents for embedded software, the software service providers would be hampered by needless claims, litigation and other un-productive disputes that cannot be easily resolved. Patents for embedded software would lead to increasing concentration of wealth and means of production to common detriment. It is well known that Bill Gates of Microsoft is the richest man in the world, and the patent regmime would only go to promote the riches of the richest. We have no hesitation in saying that the needless hair splitting of computer programs into embedded/non-embedded will only entangle the Indian Software Industry in litigation, obstructing progress to common detriment. Other harmful consequences of the amendment: The amendment would disturb the peace prevailing in the software field, and may raise contentitious disputes between various hardware manufacturers, software developers and entities, resulting in loss of peace in the first place, coupled with loss of revenue and other damages. It would undermine the peace of mind required by software developers to write robust code, robbing and sapping energy away to indulge in meaningless patent searches and other needless exercises, that are totally not suitable for the software industry. The amendment would only increase the cost of developing software, and take away all the advantages that India has enjoyed so far in the embedded software field. Conclusion: Rabindranath Tagore, in his Gitanjali, wrote: "`Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?' `It was I,' said the prisoner, `who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invisible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip." It is trite to observe that the amendments imposed will without doubt chain and cripple the software industry in India, pushing the industry into the dark dungeons of doubt, confusion and chaos. It is very strange that NASSCOM should have invited the amendment, without taking into consideration the serious harm and danger patents for embedded software pose. We strongly urge the Government of India to immediately change its sudden reversal in policy, and withdraw the above Ordinance, as soon as possible, reverting to the more mature, and time tested policies and patent law in force before January 1, 2005, removing the hurdles on the way for the smooth continuance of our growth, progress and prosperity. Therefore, FSF India requests the Government of India to immediately withdraw THE PATENTS (AMENDMENT) ORDINANCE, 2004 (Ordinance .No 7 of 2004) under Article 123(2)(b), with regard to amendments made to Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, 1970. ====================================================================== _______________________________________________ Fsf-friends mailing list Fsf-friends at mm.gnu.org.in http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends From jeebesh at sarai.net Fri Mar 4 20:01:26 2005 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:01:26 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Letter from MSF, Paris Message-ID: <4228713E.1040701@sarai.net> I pass you some info about India and Patent Law (see below) . If you can circulate it, that would be wonderful. The letters to your President, Prime Minister and to Soniaji are public, you can find them on http://www.accessmed-msf.org/. We hope that an Indian newspaper will publish them... That's going to be a big, big challenge... If you have some advice - and some names (journalists, politicians, etc) that could help ?? thanks Laurence xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Indian Parliament to discuss Patent Law – millions of lives at stake February 25th 2005 -- As the Indian Parliament prepares to tackle the country’s implementation of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) agreement regulating patents on medicines, Médecins Sans Frontières is urging Indian decision makers to ensure that patients in developing countries will continue to have access to affordable medicines. MSF believes the proposed amendments to India's Patent Act of 1970 drastically restrict, perhaps even prevent, the production and supply of vital therapies by Indian pharmaceutical companies to other developing countries. MSF treats 25,000 people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and roughly 70% of our patients take Indian generic medicines. The low cost and user-friendliness of these WHO-recommended combination pills has allowed MSF to increase the numbers of people under treatment dramatically over the past three years. We fear that once these patients, and hundreds of thousands of others like them in developing countries, need second-line treatment, the lack of generic competition due to patents on new medicines in countries like India will mean that people and communities will no longer be able to afford the much-needed treatments. MSF has sent letters to Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, President of India; to Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India; and to Ms Sonia Gandhi (advisory council) asking them to ensure that people relying on Indian generic drugs -- not just in India but worldwide -- can continue using generic medicines. More info on http://www.accessmed-msf.org/ From hbs.law at gmail.com Fri Mar 4 23:15:36 2005 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 12:45:36 -0500 Subject: [Commons-Law] Comment On: Fwd: [Fsf-friends] Our response to the Patents (Amendments) (Anivar Aravind) (Hasit Seth) In-Reply-To: <20050304110007.BF26D28D908@mail.sarai.net> References: <20050304110007.BF26D28D908@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <8b60429e0503040945169befcd@mail.gmail.com> The amendment to patent act providing for "software related patent" is indeed badly drafted if the intent was only to grant patents for embedded software. I agree with the bad drafting comment completely because legislative intention should be clear in policy mattters. That said, it is amazing to contrast constitutional approaches to innovation. American constitution explicitly provides for patent and copyright protection to promote invention. And an argument below seeks to show that Art. 39 of the Indian Constitution seeks to promote socialism's goals and somehow that is anti-patent. I forget the article number, but there is a directive policy that states that state shall endeavor to increase scientific temper. I am yet to see an cohesive argument with economics that show that cumulatively patents in the broad fields of mechanical, chemical, electrical-electronics invention have somehow created a havoc on Indian society. Take agriculture for example, pesticides can be patented, seed manufacturing technology can be patented, mechanical inventions such as tractors, harvesters can be patented but there has been no large scale havoc caused by such patents. And we can all agree that agriculture is the most basic, pervasive economic activity in India affecting everyone. Why then will software patents create a catastrophy? There is an argument in the excerpt below that software industry is living in peaceful alice-in-wonderland and patents will "disturb the peace prevailing in the software field, and may raise contentitious disputes between various hardware manufacturers, software developers and entities". So what, big deal? Software is business like any other business, and if other business have patent regimes why should software business be any different? Does any one remember the Indian nationalized bank employees union agitation (in around '80s) against "computerization" that will destroy the labor rights? Nationalized bank union extorted money as compensation for allowing comptuers in banks!!! Then there was a stir in railways when computerized reservation was introduced. The scare tactic below is just one of those types. Where has computerization destroyed labor in banks? or in railway reservation. Sure computers mean less number of clerks are needed to transfer entries from receipts to general ledgers in banks, but look at the customer service you are getting in banks and railway reservations due to computerization. Just few examples of anti-technology and anti-innovation attitudes. I mention this because somehow there is a pervasive belief that innovation and invention in any form will destroy the exisiting social and economic structures in India. At the risk of making a sweeping genralization, if the hyperbole can drive home the point: There are more anti-innovation activists than innovators in India. (I am not speaking of European innovation - its opposition to software patents, because that has more to do with Europe's business competitiveness with US in software) Patents are a one policy tool to promote invention and innovation. There are many other policy tools that control, destroy and promote invention, e.g., subsidies, licensing, finance, taxation, moral issues, labor and so on. Patents are not the nuclear bombs they are made out to be of monopolistic control. While patents sound in theory to have huge monopolistic power (and they do in some fields like pharmaceuticals, no denying that) in most fields they have only marginal market control power. Two reasons: One, language restricts capturing patent rights. All said and done, patent is a piece of written document. It is just not possible to "own" a technology field through a single patent or patents for a substantial length of time. The more you claim in a patent claim, more chances you get a stupid patent with tons of prior art reading on it. Thirdly, any lawyer will tell you that a written document creating or transfering legal rights/obligations will have no guranteed interpretation by a court. Patents are no different. Statistics are available in US that show huge number of patents being invalidated in courts - day in and day out. Two, technology has always competitng alternatives. For far too many fields same result can be achieved by multiple and different techniques. For example, if LZW algorithm and GIF file formats were patented by Unisys, the free software community came up with its own format PNG, and not to mention there are zillion graphic file formats - TIFF, JPEG, PCX, DWG and so on - from standard groups, private companies, and so on. Same story with encryption. Most patenting is not simple as shown in WIPO's comic book about patents !!! But in some fields patents can be counter produtive, for example, if TCP/IP was patented then it would have taken some time for someone to come up with a competing alternative. Medicines are another example, developing a new competing molecule takes billions of dollars and years of clinical and chemical research. I would be first to say that innovation and invention can be very disruptive. Inventions (truly big ones) like most big social, economic and political ideas have power to change the human life in a drastic way. Particularly so, because science, technology and invention does not follow social rules or morality in evolving. Atomic science just developed without any connection with dangerous social effects as history showed. Industrial revolution in Europe wrecked havoc on small artisans in India. We can choose to remain in isolation, or we can join in innovation race. And first price to pay is shedding of anti-innovation and anti-invention bias. We have the capability and fire to be as innovative as Japanese, Taiwanese, American, European and other inventors. Do we want to become history or create history on our own terms? Hasit Seth ==================== Excerpt from previous email: .... The Directive Principles enshrined in the Constitution of India, under Chapter IV. Article 39 reads as follows: "39. Certain principles of policy to be followed by the State.- The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing- (a) that the citizen, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood; (b) that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good; (c) that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment;" The software industry largely earns revenue by providing custom services, and by introducing patents for embedded software, the software service providers would be hampered by needless claims, litigation and other un-productive disputes that cannot be easily resolved. Patents for embedded software would lead to increasing concentration of wealth and means of production to common detriment. It is well known that Bill Gates of Microsoft is the richest man in the world, and the patent regmime would only go to promote the riches of the richest. We have no hesitation in saying that the needless hair splitting of computer programs into embedded/non-embedded will only entangle the Indian Software Industry in litigation, obstructing progress to common detriment. Other harmful consequences of the amendment: The amendment would disturb the peace prevailing in the software field, and may raise contentitious disputes between various hardware manufacturers, software developers and entities, resulting in loss of peace in the first place, coupled with loss of revenue and other damages. It would undermine the peace of mind required by software developers to write robust code, robbing and sapping energy away to indulge in meaningless patent searches and other needless exercises, From prabhuram at gmail.com Sat Mar 5 17:43:10 2005 From: prabhuram at gmail.com (Ram) Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 13:13:10 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] Whose Patent Is It, Anyway? Message-ID: <68752c9f05030504136c8733f3@mail.gmail.com> >From New York Times Whose Patent Is It, Anyway? Howard French Each shift, 200 workers, most of them women in smocks and bibs, labor in a factory tucked away in hilly farmland outside this city assembling a single product, one-inch hard drives. As China's emerging industrial centers go, Guiyang is an obscure outpost, bearing little resemblance to the booming factory towns of the east coast. And yet, as much as any other place in China this hard drive assembly may be at the front line of an intense global struggle to dominate high-tech manufacturing. The tiny storage device this factory churns out is the heart of one of the world's hottest consumer electronics items, the mini version of Apple Computer's iPod. Sales to Apple represent a huge triumph for GS Magic Stor, an offshoot of a struggling state-owned carmaker that is so obscure that even in China few are familiar with the name. The problem with this ringing success story, according to a better-established rival, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which has factories in China and also supplies miniaturized drives to Apple, is that the Chinese company stole crucial elements of the design. GS Magic Stor denies this charge, which Hitachi has made in a suit filed in Federal District Court in Northern California. In a recent online forum the company's president ridiculed Hitachi's claim, likening it to someone's asking carmakers to pay design rights to the inventors of the horse and buggy. A Hitachi official, who refused to comment further, said that GS Magic Stor could characterize the Hitachi patents however it wished, "but the plain and simple matter is they haven't expired." Hitachi's highly technical complaint specifies several areas where it says its designs were infringed by Magic Stor. Apple, which was not named in Hitachi's suit, would not comment. Even if Hitachi wins the suit, that would do nothing to stop Magic Stor from continuing to produce its miniature hard drives in China, although some analysts say that Apple would be forced for image reasons, if nothing else, to drop Magic Stor as a supplier. For Western companies competing with China as well as those doing business here, the issue goes well beyond the fate of one obscure company or of a single technology, however valuable. In one sector after another, companies warn that China's swift industrial rise is being greased by brazen and increasingly sophisticated theft of intellectual property. The issue of intellectual property theft has been a fixture on the trade agenda between the United States and China for years, with visiting American officials routinely stopping at the famous Silk Market in Beijing to highlight the sale there, like all over China, of cheap knockoffs of toys, clothing, software and DVD's. The Chinese government has recently razed the market, but the counterfeit activity has been moving relentlessly upscale, with General Motors, Cisco, Sony and Pfizer, just to name the most high-profile companies, complaining that their designs or formulas for everything from cars and PlayStations to routers and Viagra, have been violated. "Until recently, when China began putting intellectual property laws in place, for the past 40 years, all patents were owned by the government, and could be shared by any company that was willing to use them," said Paul Gao, a Shanghai-based expert on consumer electronics and automotives at McKinsey & Company. "The Chinese government actually encouraged this, and that has left a deep impression on companies that intellectual property is there for anyone to use it." Experts say the practice of copycat production is also fueled by the fierce competition among Chinese companies and provinces to join the global economy. "With the extreme fragmentation of industry, you see a lot of subscale players that are trying to survive in the market on their own," Mr. Gao added. "They don't have the budget for research and development or the scale to compete. If they pay a licensing fee, they consider they are essentially imposing a death penalty on themselves." Like many people on the receiving end of accusations of intellectual property theft here, GS Magic Stor's president, Zhu Baolin, fiercely denies his company has done anything wrong, and goes so far as to say that the lawsuit is an act of desperation by a foreign enterprise unable to compete with his Chinese company. "We don't blame Hitachi for what they are doing," said Mr. Zhu, a 25-year electronics industry veteran. "We just want Chinese people to know we created our own product, and that we face a lot of pressure. This will happen a lot in the future in the knowledge industry, but we will still work hard to grow." Beyond the case of Hitachi versus Magic Stor, many Chinese legal experts simply deny there is any special problem with theft of intellectual property in China. "It may look like it's a China problem, but it's a worldwide problem, just like piracy on the Internet, and it exists in America as well," said Zhang Ping, a law professor at Beijing University, and one of China's leading experts on intellectual property rights. "There are many problems with fake products, with low levels of technology. These can't be counted as intellectual property violations. They are just cheap fakes." Like many people professionally involved with this issue here, Ms. Zhang denied that China was a leading violator of intellectual property rights, which she acknowledged was still a relatively new concept in China. She also said that the country's efforts at improving enforcement, though steady, would require more time to reach the standards of intellectual property rights in many advanced industrialized countries. Lawyers who represent Western companies embroiled in intellectual property disputes in China, however, point to major loopholes in Chinese law and in the country's trademark and patent system as parts of the problem. Many Chinese patents, for example, are granted without any examination of their originality, making it easy for local companies to claim others' innovations as their own. While foreign experts also point to progress in the country's courts and especially in the richer provinces along the country's east coast, they say that local and provincial governments, eager to bolster their economies, sometimes subsidize patent filings for local companies and provide pointers to them on how to beat foreign claims of infringement. Even the Shanghai government speaks of building a "great wall of patents" to protect local companies. "Once upon a time, the counterfeiters in China ran away when you came after them," said Xiang Wang, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights at White & Case in Shanghai. "Today, they don't run away. Indeed, they stay put and they sue us. More and more Chinese companies are taking a so-called legal approach, taking advantage of serious weakness in the Chinese legal system." One of the most problematic areas, experts say, are joint ventures between foreign and Chinese companies, which are legion. When the joint venture dissolves, or sometimes even while it remains active, the Chinese party makes use of the technology or manufacturing processes illegally. A perennially told war story in business circles here involves the foreign factory owner who makes a wrong turn while driving to his plant only to discover an exact copy of his factory on the other side of the mountain. Although this story might be apocryphal, Mr. Wang said he saw cases all the time that are not so different in their details. "We have a client in the power business who found that one of his key employees had quit and joined a competitor, revealing confidential information to him straight away, and filing patents of these materials which were literal copies of the original technology," he said. "When our client warned he would sue over patent infringement, the Chinese company said it was also planning to sue. 'And by the way,' they asked, 'what patent are you talking about? This is our patent now.' " From paivakil at yahoo.co.in Sat Mar 5 21:28:46 2005 From: paivakil at yahoo.co.in (Mahesh T. Pai) Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 21:28:46 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Comment On: Fwd: [Fsf-friends] Our response to the Patents (Amendments) (Anivar Aravind) (Hasit Seth) In-Reply-To: <8b60429e0503040945169befcd@mail.gmail.com> References: <20050304110007.BF26D28D908@mail.sarai.net> <8b60429e0503040945169befcd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20050305155846.GA6462@nandini.home> Hasit seth said on Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 12:45:36PM -0500,: > That said, it is amazing to contrast constitutional approaches to > innovation. American constitution explicitly provides for patent > and copyright protection to promote invention. I am not sure if patents are involved; but the US constitution certainsly does provide that copyright is protected. I may be wrong; I am not strong on the US constitution. > Why then will software patents create a catastrophy? There is an People who know classical music know about taala, raga and the lyrics. Lyrics are copyrightable. Every considered if Saint Thayaraga (or any body else) patented the taalas and ragas?? This is precisely what software patents do. If you do not understand the above, and want to discuss software patents, learning a bit about Indian classical music will help. > and entities". So what, big deal? Software is business like any > other business, and if other business have patent regimes why > should software business be any different? (snip) > receipts to general ledgers in banks, but look at the customer > service you are getting in banks and railway reservations due to > computerization. Just few examples of anti-technology and > anti-innovation attitudes. As somebody who has availed services of Indian and Foreign banks ove a loooooooooooooooooooong time, i may say that mechanisation has taken away the human touch. I have serious trouble dealing with a bank which is not [interested in|capable of] having permanent staff on its rolls. And, afaik, most banks outside India charge a fee if a customer wants to deal with a human - even for clarifying an erroneous entry. > innovation and invention in any form will destroy the exisiting > social and economic structures in India. At the risk of making a > sweeping Software is certainly, at the moment part of the `social and economic structure'. It is slowly going that way; and we need to keep that infrastructure free. > patent is a piece of written document. It is just not possible to > "own" a technology field through a single patent or patents for a > substantial length of time. The more you claim in a patent claim, Oh. patent a raga, and you control a significant proportion of Indian classical music. Patent a taala and you control a major share of *all* music - indian, classical, non clasical, wester, and all. > it. Thirdly, any lawyer will tell you that a written document > creating or transfering legal rights/obligations will have no > guranteed interpretation by a court. Patents are no different. I *am* a lawyer and am looking forward to the day the patent bill becomes the law. I am looking forward to the day when evey user of a digital system (include mobile phones, fuel injectors, every form of LCD display, etc) is exposed to patent litigation. D**n users and software engineers. They are filthy rich already; lawyers too have a right life. I hate everybody opposing software patents. > Statistics are available in US that show huge number of patents being > invalidated in courts - day in and day out. heh. heh. Please, Indians, do not oppose patents on software. I am a lawyer. I have a family to feed. Oh, please. I need the money. And I am looking forward to the day a US like patent system is in place here. (golly golly did you know that using your computer as a typewriter is patented??? > techniques. For example, if LZW algorithm and GIF file formats were Ah. The submarine patents. In future youc can have lawyers specialising in enforcement of patents against lusers and and a few specialising in litigating against people creating software. The law school administrators should immediately start considering new courses in these areas. > I would be first to say that innovation and invention can be very > disruptive. And patents can be obstructive. > social effects as history showed. Industrial revolution in Europe > wrecked havoc on small artisans in India. Assisted in no small way, by a document coincidentally named a ``Letters patent''. The present patent system owes its origin to the ``latters patent'' of the colonial days. -- Mahesh T. Pai <<>> http://paivakil.port5.com Distributing free copies of non-free software is -- -- like advertising drugs. From prabhuram at gmail.com Mon Mar 7 14:39:41 2005 From: prabhuram at gmail.com (Ram) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 10:09:41 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] NYTimes: AIDS Drugs Threatened Message-ID: <68752c9f050307010933f123f5@mail.gmail.com> Another timely reminder to Indian MPs on the gravity of the issue that they are grappling with...from Tina Rosenberg, NYTimes. R -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- March 5, 2005 EDITORIAL AIDS Drugs Threatened India's Parliament is about to take up a bill that could affect sick people the world over. India is the leading supplier of low-cost generic AIDS medicine. The country's huge generic industry has been able to copy antiretrovirals and other medicines because India grants patents for the process of making drugs, rather than for the medicines themselves. But the Patents Bill that India is considering, at the behest of the World Trade Organization, would change that. Parliament must make sure that it protects India's ability to make these crucial drugs. While the W.T.O. requires its members to respect product patents, it allows them to put public health first. Unfortunately, the Patents Bill would fail to do this; some of its provisions would go far beyond what the trade organization requires. The bill bears the heavy footprint of multinational and Indian pharmaceutical companies that are eager to sell high-priced drugs to India's middle class, which is larger than the population of the United States. Lobbying by these companies has produced a bill that would sacrifice public health. For example, as current AIDS drugs become ineffective, India will be asked to make cheap, easy-to-take combination versions of newer antiretrovirals. To do so as a W.T.O. member, the government will have to issue something called a compulsory license, which allows a generic manufacturer to copy a patented drug. The patent holder gets a reasonable royalty, but does not have to consent. But India's compulsory license process is very slow and lets pharmaceutical companies tie up such licenses in court for years. Moreover, India's laws do not allow it to export medicines made under these rules to countries where they aren't patented, which includes most of Africa. Indian lawmakers must reform the Patents Bill to cut the red tape that can block compulsory licenses. They should also eliminate the loophole that prevents medicines from going to the poorest countries. India needs to allow challenges to patents before they take effect, and to remove a provision that could allow a company to extend a patent by simply finding a new use for a drug. Instead of passing the flawed government bill, lawmakers should refer the bill to a committee for public testimony about possible reforms. Seldom has India's Parliament considered anything of such global import. If Parliament can preserve India's ability to provide generic versions of these medicines, it will make the difference between life and death for millions of people at home and abroad. From anivar.aravind at gmail.com Mon Mar 7 14:46:29 2005 From: anivar.aravind at gmail.com (Green Youth Moderator) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:46:29 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: A Call to Action in OASIS In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <35f96d47050307011645d40c2f@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: DAVIDE MERONI Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:54:01 +0100 Subject: A Call to Action in OASIS To: Nettime-l A Call to Action in OASIS The free and open source software community has long demanded that industry standards be freely available to all to implement without patent or other licensing encumbrances. Open standards are essential for free software and open source to thrive. Now OASIS, a major industry consortium that produces e-business and Web services standards, has adopted a patent policy that threatens to undermine our development and licensing model. This patent policy (available, grouped together with other unrelated legal issues, in http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php) permits standards to be based upon so-called "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent license terms--terms which invariably and unreasonably discriminate against open source and free software to the point of prohibiting them entirely. It would lead to the adoption of standards that cannot be implemented in open source and free software, that cannot be distributed under our licenses. While the policy includes a provision for royalty-free standards, it is a secondary option, which will have little effect if a few OASIS members with patents can ensure it is not used. The OASIS patent policy will encourage large patent holders to negotiate private arrangements among themselves, locking out all free software and open source developers. This is not a new issue for us. We fought hard for a royalty-free patent policy in W3C and encouraged that standards organization to commit its members to open standards. But some W3C member companies, steadfast opponents of software freedom, moved their efforts to OASIS. Without consulting the free software/open source community, they produced a patent policy designed so that we cannot live with it. We ask you to stand with us in opposition to the OASIS patent policy. Do not implement OASIS standards that aren't open. Demand that OASIS revise its policies. If you are an OASIS member, do not participate in any working group that allows encumbered standards that cannot be implemented in open source and free software. Please send email to open at rosenlaw.com to indicate your support. We will forward your comments to the proper authorities at OASIS. If we stand united in opposition to this unacceptable patent policy, we can persuade OASIS to change it. /signed/ Lawrence Rosen Bruce Perens Richard Stallman Lawrence Lessig Eben Moglen Marten Mickos John Weathersby John Terpstra Tim O'Reilly Tony Stanco Don Marti Michael Tiemann Andrew Aitken Karen Copenhaver Doug Levin Dan Ravicher Larry Augustin Mitchell Kapor Russell Nelson Guido van Rossum Daniel Quinlan Murugan Pal Stuart Cohen Danese Cooper Eric Raymond Mark Webbink Ken Coar Doc Searls Brian Behlendorf # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net ~regards Anivar Aravind Global Alternate Information Applications (GAIA) From ganasairam at yahoo.co.in Mon Mar 7 18:33:02 2005 From: ganasairam at yahoo.co.in (gana pathy) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 13:03:02 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Framing IPR - Policy Message-ID: <20050307130302.35235.qmail@web8408.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear Friends, I shall be thankful to know about availability study materials for development and framing IPR Policy- (particularly patent policy) for Small /Medium sized pharma industry, Or links to model IPR Policies. Thanking you in advance. with best regards ganapathy ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partner online Go to: http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony From admin at lead-journal.org Sun Mar 6 20:43:18 2005 From: admin at lead-journal.org (LEAD Journal) Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 23:13:18 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Call for submissions, Law Environment and Development Message-ID: <38255-22005306151318809@francois> Dear Subscriber, The Law Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – University of London and the International Environmental Law Research Centre (IELRC) are delighted to announce the launch of the Journal of Law, Environment and Development (LEAD-journal), a peer-reviewed academic publication published at www.lead-journal.org. LEAD-journal seeks to fill the need for a comparative approach to environmental law. LEAD will be the only journal to adopt such a comparative perspective on environmental law issues from a North-South perspective. LEAD will also be the only international law journal to provide a forum for analysis of environmental regimes in developing countries and for examination of North-South dimensions in the development and implementation of environmental law. It will provide perspectives from both developed and developing countries. Bearing in mind the principles of 'sustainable development', LEAD solicits writings which incorporate related concerns, such as human rights and trade, in the study of environmental management, thus adopting a contextual approach to the examination of environmental issues. LEAD is pioneering in its attempt to lay equal emphasis on both theoretical and practical approaches to the study of environmental law and practice. We would like to invite you to contribute articles to this new publication which builds on the expertise and experience of two premier institutions in the field of environmental law and policy, SOAS and IELRC. The first issue of LEAD will be published in the second half of 2005. We encourage authors to provide their articles on the basis of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 License. Periodically, articles published in LEAD will be further refereed for publication in a collected volume in book format, with permission from the authors. For further information, please contact the editorial office by email at info at lead-journal.org or by mail. You may also contact the managing editors: Dr Philippe Cullet at pcullet at soas.ac.uk and Dr Usha Ramanathan at uramanathan at ielrc.org. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LEAD-Journal c/o International Environmental Law Research Centre International Environment House, 7 Chemin de Balexert 1219 Châtelaine-Geneva, Switzerland Tel/fax: + (41) 22 797 2623 info at lead-journal.org www.lead-journal.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20050306/9aff08fd/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 7432 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20050306/9aff08fd/attachment.gif -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 138 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20050306/9aff08fd/attachment-0001.gif -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 141 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20050306/9aff08fd/attachment-0002.gif From kat at nls.ac.in Tue Mar 8 10:00:41 2005 From: kat at nls.ac.in (kat at nls.ac.in) Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 10:00:41 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-Law] VoIP Regulation in India Message-ID: <1814.61.246.61.249.1110256241.squirrel@61.246.61.249> Can someone point me to resources on VoIP regulation in India. I am looking for TRAI Reccomendations/Applicable Statutes/Articles on the subject etc. Anything would be welcome. If someone has done work on the issue, please do let me know. Its really urgent. Thank you. Best, Karthik From sunil at mahiti.org Tue Mar 8 13:38:22 2005 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 16:08:22 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] Open-Source Software - Viable Alternative or Risky Venture? Lessons for Singapore Message-ID: <1110269302.4630.13.camel@morph> Open-Source Software - Viable Alternative or Risky Venture? Lessons for Singapore Date & Time : 09 March 2005, from 3.00pm sharp to 6.00pm. Registration starts at 2.30pm Venue : Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) 51 Bras Basah Road #06-01 Plaza By The Park Singapore 189554 Programme Synopsis : Like many other issues in the intellectual property arena, public debates relating to proprietary versus free & open-source software have been both lively and emotional with proponents of both camps fiercely committed to the merits of their respective systems. Undeniably, the free & open source software movements have caused a seismic shift in developments in the ICT industry. This forum is not intended for participants to air philosophical issues. It seeks to explore, from a business and legal perspective, whether open-source software can be a viable alternative or potentially a risky venture for Singapore companies because of the current ambiguities and unresolved issues, especially pertaining to intellectual property. The forum will shed light on the current concerns, salient issues and explore possible ways of resolution. A panel of representatives from industry, government and academia will share their views on: * Applicability and commercial viability of open source versus proprietary software * The IP issues underlining open source and proprietary software * Looking into the future for open source and proprietary software Moderator: Associate Professor Daniel Seng, Faculty of Law, NUS Programme 2.30pm – 3.00pm Registration 3.00pm – 3.10pm Overview by Assoc Prof Daniel Seng 3.10pm – 3.45pm Discussion:- Applicability and commercial viability of open source versus proprietary software * Dr Cheok Beng Teck, Director, Mindef, CIO Office * Dr Chong Yok Sin, COO, NCS- * Mr Goh Seow Hiong, Director Software Policy (Asia) Business Software Alliance 3.45pm – 4.00pm Q&A 4.00pm – 4.45pm Discussion: - The IP issues underlining open source and proprietary software * Mr Lau Kok Kheng, Partner and Head of iTec Practice Group, Rajah & Tann * Dr Stanley Lai, Partner, Allen & Gledhill * Mr Chris Laughton, Legal Counsel, Novell 4.45pm – 5.00pm Q&A 5.00pm – 5.45pm Discussion: Looking into the future for open source and proprietary software * Mr Chris Sharp, Director, Platform Strategy, Microsoft Asia Pacific * Mr Sunil Abraham, IOSN (International Open Source Network) 5.45pm – 6.00pm Q&A 6.00pm Close -- Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 51150580. Mob: (60) 1-2205-3895 From abhayraj at nls.ac.in Tue Mar 8 13:34:56 2005 From: abhayraj at nls.ac.in (Abhayraj Naik) Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 13:34:56 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-Law] Call for Submissions, Literary Magazine Quirk Message-ID: <1117.219.64.156.1.1110269096.squirrel@219.64.156.1> Apologies for cross-posting. Please do circulate in possibly interested channels. fundraising/sponsorship nuggets are hugely welcome :) regards Abhay QUIRK ESTD. 2005 A Slice of Literature, Society, and the Law Call for Submissions for the March 2005 Edition January 2005 saw the birth of an ambitious new venture at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore through the publication of the first edition of ‘Quirk’- a student-run literary magazine that seeks to provide an exciting new forum for student writers while helping create a community of articulate, expressive and socially-conscious youth across India and South Asia. With a modest 1000 print copies promotionally distributed in select locations across Bangalore, Baluchistan, Calcutta, Chennai, Colombo, Delhi, Mumbai, Lahore, and Trivandrum, Quirk has created quite an initial impact – with several writers, artists, and collaborators evincing interest in forthcoming editions. The online version of the January edition of Quirk is available at http://www.nls.ac.in/students/quirk/Index.htm In its ongoing effort to include increasingly diverse voices of literary merit from the student community across South Asia, Quirk seeks submissions for its second edition in March 2005. The Second Quirk Edition: March 2005 Featured Theme Contributions: 'The Indifferent College Student' Also Looking For: Poetry, Short Stories, Articles, Opinions, Reviews, Visual Art, Cartoons, Cool Quizzes, Puzzles, Wacky Undefinable Submissions, and So On.... Think Big, Think Different. Anything That’s Good and Fits our Quirky Quality Standards - We're Good to Publish. No Restrictions on Length, Content or Style. Email: quirk at nls.ac.in Or Write In: The Quirk Team, C/o Abhayraj Naik, National Law School of India University, PO Bag 7201, National Law School of India University, Bangalore – 560072, India. Flexible Deadline: March 18th, 2005. From srinivas at southcentre.org Tue Mar 8 15:16:34 2005 From: srinivas at southcentre.org (srinivas at southcentre.org) Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 10:46:34 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] software patents-india Message-ID: I think this issue deserves a detailed scrutiny. Are the patent offices in India are equipped enough to ascertain the prior art in software patents. The possibility of unddserving too broad patents blocking further innovations and making inventing around difficult cannot be ruled out. The implications of the same for open source software in india have to be examined.Will any one enlighten me about the position of the software industry in this.Are the big players like TCS,infosys, WIPRO keen on software patents. K.Ravi Srinivas Post Doctoral Fellow IPR Policy Research & Development Program South Centre 17-19 Chemin Du Champ d'Anier 1209 Petit Saconnex Geneva Switzerland Postal Address K.R