EFF India

What's EFF ?

EFF was found in America in 1990 much before the internet got famous. It was found to protect free speech, right for privacy, consumer rights, technology which was under heavy attack by business. EFF is a blend of lawyers, analyst, activists, technologists and volunteers. It's main motto is to protect the rights (mostly digital) of citizen. EFF has been defending a lot of lawsuits which are against the technologies (like p2p file sharing) or consumer rights (like time shifting the programs). Since 1990 EFF has major victories in court. Few of them are really interesting and relevant to us.
MGM v/s Grokster.
Where the movie company (along with other 28 large entertainment) argued; the peer to peer file sharing software is violating the copyright. EFF defended Grokster on the lines of the technology is not be blamed but the people who use the technology for such purpose. And the company which that creates the technology can't be blamed for the copyright violation. Since the technology can be used for both legal and illegal issues. And 9th circuit stood along with EFF.
Apple v/s Does
December 2004 Apple sued the bloggers of www.appleinsider.com and www.powerpage.com. The alleged bloggers published an article about a Firewire audio interface for Garage Band, code named "Asteroid". Apple filed a trade secret suit against them.
Apple tried to contact the email service provider of powerpage to get the mails to get the name of the source for this leak. This is when EFF got into this case. EFF along with others are trying to protect the online journalists to protect their anonymous sources.

What's happening in India?

With the introduction of broadband, the number of internet users in India is growing. The companies have started to take the internet seriously. Which means they have started to snatch the rights of citizen (or Netizen)? Here are the few incidents which suggests what is happening in India

Mediaah (http://mediaah.blogspot.com/) v/s Times OF India
Mediaah was started by Pradyuman Maheshwari, a journalist and media commenter. He started the blog mediaah to comment on media. He wrote articles on newspapers, tv, radio etc. Some of his articles where he criticized TOI ( Times Of India) was not really liked by legal boses at TOI. So Mediaah was issued a notice to delete the all 19 articles (posts) related to TOI. People at Mediaah didn't like the idea of deleting posts. And hence they closed down the site.

Gaurav (http://gauravsabnis.blogspot.com/) and Varna (http://absurdiav.blogspot.com) v/s IIPM
Here the bloggers were issued notices for questioning the ranking/claims/advertisements of an institute (IIPM)
Check my previous article here for complete story. This became famous because the whole Indian blogosphere started writing against it. But Mediaah's case went unnoticed.
This shows Indian netizen' are getting aware of their rights. But still they have to come together under one name to fight against biggies.

Time for eff.org.in

With india growing as an IT super power and broadband revolution, by the end of this decade most of the indians will go online. Nothing online will go unnoticed.Most of the business from grocery,movie tickets to selling of cars will go online. The internet will become most depended infracture. With Chaina censoring (filtering) its internet people will look at India, the biggest democracy in the world for more online/digital rights.
But will the present biggies will allow this to happen. Because internet gives a chance to layman to stand against biggies. Hence the business/companies try to curb the digital rights of the people. The cyber laws in India are are still in infant stage. The future laws can be influenced by money.
We need right people (lawyers, technologists, political analysers, reportses, consumer right experts) to come together and influence the law making. This can happen only when all of them come together.We need a strong group of people who beleive in rights of citizen.
Now don't we need eff.org.in ?



cross posted at TechMag