WikiPatrika:WikiPatrika/2011-06-06/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. 