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My good chum
Bandwidth Bandit
lives in Jayanagar,
Bangalore. Over the
last two years he has
used his broadband
connection to amass
4 Gb of music in
MP3 format from
the ’60s and ’70s. He
says that he will name his first child Napster
out of gratitude for the infamous file swapping
software. Sometimes, the Bandwidth
Bandit hosts his uncle from Tuticorin affectionately
referred to as the Old Fox.
I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the Old Fox the other day. He is 80 years old and is an incurable Carnatic music afficionado. Since his youth he has been a classical music teacher of great repute. On hearing of my fetish for information technology, he began revealing details of his modus operandi. He has a digital radio receiver hooked up to a Pentium II with 256 Mb RAM. The software on his computer has been configured by a teenage accomplice to encode and compress the music to MP3 format. He then cuts over twenty CDs a day, each containing over 120 songs or ten whole albums. All strictly Carnatic with the occasional digression into Hindustani and Fusion. These CDs are distributed for free or at cost to family, friends, colleagues and his many disciples across the years. Let us estimate the value of music that the Old Fox pirates per year. 20 CDs per day x 10 albums per CD x 300 working days per annum x Rs 150 per album equals Rs. 90,00,000 per year. Single handedly the Old Fox has caused over one Crore of copyright damage. Comparatively the Bandwidth Bandit is small fish. Scary! I wonder how many 80 year old men the Indian music industry will have to hunt down, arrest, prosecute and jail to stop illegal sharing of music. Music is one of life’s greatest joys, only surpassed by the joy sharing it. The trouble is, an intellectual property regime makes criminals out of normal citizens like you and me for activities that we have long taken for granted. Ideally an intellectual property regime should protect the interests of all four parties involved. The innovator, the entrepreneur, the consumer and society at large. Unfortunately consortia of large corporations have infiltrated the government and the legislature. Their powerful lobbyists have skewed copyright laws to suit their appetite for unlimited profits. This is not an India specific phenomena. It is the result of a sustained global corporate campaign. Consequently the rights of ordinary consumers and the average citizen have eroded away, leaving them with the terrible choice between an empty wallet or a life of so-called crime. Digital music is just a form of software. Computer software is another domain where the consequences of Intellectual Property Rights are horrifying. By conservative estimates we have 1 million computers in India. If we were to install a legal version of the default operating system and office suite on each of these machines. India would have to pay a single American company approxi- mately $400 million every two years. This excludes client software for desktop publishing, web design, 3D modeling, drafting, animation, audio and video production, integrated development environments, accounting and finance, enterprise management and planning. To this, add the cost of mail, web, file, print, chat, database, application server software which are usually more expensive that client software. Therefore putting legal software on a million odd Indian computers will result in the total value of software imports far exceeding software exports. Or put more bluntly, India’s software business is profitable only because it pirates software. The net effect of the global intellectual property regime is that it impoverishes developing countries like India. Clear evidence is available on the United States Patent Office website. In the report titled ‘Patent Counts by country/State and Year All Patents and All Type’ for the period 1977 to 2001, the number of patents granted to United States is 14,35,712. Number of patents granted in the same period to India is 992. So how many years will we need to catch up? Carnatic music, television, medicine, software, books, seeds, products, processes, ideas, gestures. Intellectual property pervades every aspect of our lives. Practitioners working in the domain of ICT for Development must understand the key role that IPR plays in defining and perpetuating the Digital Divide, just as private property defines the Economic Divide between landowners and landless. However, the global intellectual property rights regime that exists today cannot be wished away. Nor can we afford as a nation not to participate. But alternatives do exist such as the General Public License [www.gnu.org]. We must as a nation learn from the manner and method of the global free software movement. Extreme corporate privatization of intellectual property must be countered by protecting and building the public domain. The Indian voluntary sector must recognize this as as part of its mandate. Otherwise we will end up making criminals of well intentioned citizens such as the Old Fox. I then asked Old Fox if he would ever tire of this. He smiled sheepishly and said ‘I really like this illegal stuff, I say’. He then shut his eyes and sunk back into a lesser known MS Subbalakshmi. © Sunil Abraham 2003. License: GNU Free Documentation License |
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