by sflc_admin | October 5, 2015 Mishi Choudhary on FOSS and the sharing economy Mishi Choudhary says that Free and open source software (FOSS) is a technical and political movement that will make it possible that every brain on earth will have a chance to be educated and not just those who can affor...
Technology, Media & Telecommunications
By Shalini S. The past week has seen news reports in the Indian media, proclaiming the rise of a new computer-related crime , “cyber extortion”. Cyber extortion is a term generally understood to refer to a category of cyber crimes, where stolen, sensitive and private data is withheld or threatened t...
The National Draft Encryption Policy which was released for public comment, and subsequently withdrawn by the Union Government within a span of three days after its release, has been a subject of much discourse. The clarification issued by the Ministry on 22nd early in the day, stated that mass prod...
Earlier in this blog I had written at length about the legal backdrop in which any mobile Internet shutdown may be grounded and the constitutional questions surrounding Gujarat’s repeat application of this strategy as a public disorder shield in the Patidar reservation agitation. Three days back, th...
by sflc_admin | September 15, 2015 SFLC.in, along with several civil society organizations and citizens, penned a joint letter to the Prime Minister of India on September 15, 2015 expressing concerns over the “Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs)” issued by the Office of ...
The WSIS+10 non-paper is finally officially available here . The key themes are addressed under the following categories: ICT for Development Human Rights Internet Governance Cyberspace The comments that have been distilled to produce this non-paper include inputs from around 20 governments and 26 c...
by sflc_admin | September 4, 2015 Croatian policy encourages open source adoption Earlier this year, Croatian political party Sustainable Development of Croatia ( ORaH ) published a new policy that encourages the government to pursue open source solutions, addresses the dangers of vendor lock-in, an...
In the last post we discussed the panoply of laws surrounding internet shutdowns in India and concluded that though there might be indirect regulatory connections to justify such shutdowns, they appear to be flimsy at best. In this post, we shall discuss the current internet shutdown in Gujarat in p...
by sflc_admin | August 31, 2015 Indrani Mukherjea is on the cover page of every news website today, in pictures where she is hugging her husband, Peter Mukherjea, or posing solo, or in a selfie. Her entire virtual life is flashing on news websites alongside the story of murder allegations against he...
For the past four days, news reports have been flowing in about the shutdown of internet services in Gujarat. With the tense law and order situation prevalent over the Patirdar reservation protests, state government authorities have decided to block access to internet for citizens in Gujarat. Howeve...
Following India’s splash in the global internet governance scene with the statement made by the Hon’ble IT Minister at ICANN53 , the recently held 4th United States – India Cyber Dialogue is yet another key event in India’s internet governance landscape. India and the United States have committed to...
by sflc_admin | August 19, 2015 New Version of FreedomBox Offers private, secure, Fault-Tolerant Internet Access At a time when privacy in internet is becoming a concern world over, free software pioneer, futurist and activist Prof Eben Moglen says a convincing answer to privacy issues will be ready...
By Shrutanjaya Bhardwaj Background The information in this piece had originally been collected for an awareness session hosted by JaagoTeens for college students in DU, for which I had gone with CCG Fellow Aarti Bhavana. While preparing for the same, I had reached out to all my friends and relatives...
by sflc_admin | August 14, 2015 You want to build a business and Software Law for you, seems to be about avoiding danger. Could the law of software really be a subject that could make you save money instead of cost you money? On August 17, from 2.00 pm to 5.00 pm, Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia l...
The CCG team recently wrote a memo on the privacy implications of the WHOIS database, which is available here . Document Summary Background The WHOIS service is a public, unrestricted database on which anyone can find out the real world identity, business location and contact information (including ...
I have put a draft of my paper titled ‘Gatekeeper Liability and Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution on SSRN. You can read it here. It will eventually be published in the NUJS Law Review. Alternatively, this essay (written for a UPenn/ CIS/ ORF publication) based on the paper sets out my argu...
by sflc_admin | August 11, 2015 SFLC.IN in association with Open Invention Network is organizing the Second Asian Legal Network round-table at the Oberoi Hotel, Bangalore on Wednesday, 12th August 2015 from 12:00 PM to 6:30 PM. The event will be structured as a round-table between 40 to 50 participa...
By Pushan Dwivedi and Joshita Pai, Research Fellows at the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi Highlights from the Court’s ruling The Supreme Court bench constituting J. Chelameswar, S.A. Bobde and C. Nagappan has decided to refer the challenges to the Aadhar program...
The Kamlesh Vaswani matter that has asked the Court to direct the Government to block all pornography over the Internet and was used conveniently by the Government to order the disablement of over 850 website last week came up before the bench headed by the Chief Justice today. Mr. Mukul Rohatgi, th...