EFF India

Lawrence liangs interesting post about the structure needed for eff-india

Hi all
mahesh and badri have posted a range of interesting
question. I will try and respond to the institutional
question of whether we can have an EFF equivalent in
India. My sense is that these debates are still in
theior infancy in india at the moment though over the
past few years we have seen a lot of momentum, and it
may be a little early to speak of a formal
institutional structure in place. There are many
things that one has top think throuigh before taking a
decision at creating an institutional framework, it
hink we have dont even have a very good record of
'civil rights' organizations, leave aside electronic
rights.

There is of course a strong tradition of critical
legal practise in india but very dispersed groups etc.
And those who can be counted as forming a aprt of the
history of critical legal practise in india have
always remained very suspicious of new technolgy etc
(kind of in the old tradition/ modernity debate) etc,
while the younger lot of practitioners/ scholars
interested in issues of electronic freedoms etc do not

necessarily come from a poltical practise of law.

Given these circumstances aprt from what badri has
also identified in terms of resources etc, I think it
would be more important to initiate a discussion /
ideas etc on how we can think of collaborative models
where we pool in various peoples/ organizations
strenghts in forming a colation which can start taking
on issues of free speech, privacy, public domain etc
proactively.

This coalition need not have a formal institutional
structure to begin with but could move towards it int
he future , but i can easily think of lawyers,
techies, media practtitioners, academics, students
etc who would be willing to start a group like this.
Even within commons-law, cyber-law india etc i think
we would have the tentative begining of a group.

We can even begin with mapping out some of the
individuals. groups etc who are already working on
various asoects of what ane EFF-India wouold do and
think of a meeting etc where we can figure out how we
start working in a more networked manner.


I am sure fred noronha of bytes for all could help
with this. The idea has a lot of potential and glad
that this debate has opened up


Lawrence

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