Announcing the third issue of Wikipatrika!
WikiPatrika/2011-06/Free culture news
Licensing, Open content
In January 2007 IIT-Bombay launched India-specific versions of the Creative Commons licenses and at the launch, the focus was on centres of higher education being able to use these licenses to keep their content share-able.
The open content and licensing movement is in its infancy in India and it will slowly gather momentum as diverse groups of people come to appreciate the value that it offers and the possibilities that it offers. Indeed, Pratham Books, a non-profit children's book publisher, has made many of it's books available under a Creative Commons license. A challenge before us, as a community, is to help organisations and individuals appreciate the power of open licenses - in particular, the lessons from the Kerala community are important.
OER
In November 2007, the National Knowledge Commission released its set of recommendations on Open Educational Resources and sought to spur action in this direction – however, there was precious little mention of copyright and the challenges it posed to the system. Another report, Report of the Working Group on Open Access and Open Educational Resources, continued this discussion but as with the previous one, spoke mostly of matter that was out of copyright.
Copyright
As Wikipedians will doubtlessly know, there are many challenges with regard to copyright in India and the use of Government materials owing primarily due to the notion of 'Government Copyright' or 'Crown Copyright' as defined in The Copyright Rules, 1957 and lasts for sixty years from when it is published. This is different from the experience in the United States, where, in general, copyright is not available for government works. This makes a big difference in the availability of seed content not just for Wikipedia but for similar such projects. However, this is not to say that the landscape in India is barren – there are some highlights worth noting. National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) “is an initiative by seven Indian Institutes of Technology for creating course contents in engineering and science.” However, while access is free, re-use is not and in the FAQ it states that “The copyrights are owned jointly by the MHRD, IITs/IISc and the faculty. MHRD has encouraged faculty to convert their electronic content to text books in various engineering and science subjects (which will not affect what is freely available). The rest of the issues are being studied carefully at present. Barring a few courses, the rest of the materials are likely to be distributed under a Creative Commons license in the future.” Similarly, there is eGyanKosh which aims to be “a National Digital Repository to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources developed by the Open and Distance Learning Institutions in the country.” As expected, “items in eGyanKosh are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved by IGNOU, unless otherwise indicated.” The National Council Of Educational Research And Training (NCERT) makes available, for free, all textbooks from Classes I to XII in Hindi, English and Urdu that they publish. However, they too state that “NCERT textbooks are copyrighted [and] while copies of these textbooks may be downloaded and used as textbooks or for reference, republication is strictly prohibited.”
It's clear to see that in India, there is a push towards making content available online but that does not always imply that it is free to use. Hearteningly, the Government is taking baby steps to moving the discussion from a one way read-only method to a read-write method as well.
Government Initiatives
The Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects recently submitted its recommendations and it included language about the relevance of open standards, open data, and open source. In the Executive Summary, it opined that “The Government should not only be a consumer, but also strive to produce and facilitate open standards, open data, and open source. It also suggests the creation of an open source foundation for open sourcing software from Government projects.”
A recent draft of a National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy was shared for comments and while it does mention “Data access arrangements should consider the applicability of copyright or of other intellectual property laws that may be relevant to publicly funded databases.” it is open to change as it is still a draft.
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