We covered and interpreted the relevant Indian Copyright laws: Sec 52(1)(aa),(ab),(ac),(ad), Sec 63, Sec 65A,Sec 65B, Sec 66, Comparing them to their American and International cousins in USC DMCA 1201 and WIPO Copyright Treaty Article 11. We covered quite a few international cases and examples of technical circumvention and how they were handled/interpreted by their respective laws.
A big point of discussion was regarding a German court case, where it was ruled that using ad-blockers wasn’t copyright infringement.
After a big legal summary/interpretation of the laws, We mostly agreed that India’s existing copyright laws are quite good with respect to guaranteeing users the rights to personally modify with and tinker with their devices for non-infringing usecases, compared to something like the DMCA 1201.
There were a few big, main issues of note we identified with the state of jailbreaking and interoperability in India:
- Consumer Awareness: Many consumers are not aware of respectful software alternatives, and don’t know how to seek them out and install them. There’s a big technical and awareness barrier there. Typically the big platforms are seen as the default choice. Issues of interoperability rights or choices in platform are simply not known by most consumers.
- Dominance Abuse by Big Tech: Incumbent companies like Facebook and Youtube use their vast userbase and market share to unilaterally take decisions on policy, or user capabilities, often without any reproach from the users. The users have nowhere to go because there simply is no alternative.
Toward the end, when most people left off, me, @prk, and another few participants had quite a long discussion on how we could take this movement forward. We discussed previous similar successful movements in India like the backlash against Facebook’s Free Basics push in India. Ultimately we decided there were basically two effective ways to getting this change:
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Regulation: Antitrust, competition regulation for markets that would possibly allow startups to dislodge incumbent tech corporations using interoperability, and banning corporations from implementing onerous, anti-interoperability forms of TPM. One participant compared this idea to that of India’s current stance on medicine patents, where you are allowed to patent a medicine if you can produce it for cheaper, as an example of India promoting a hyper-competitive, consumer friendly market for essentials, via market and IP regulations.
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Litigation: A public-interest litigation effort could be launched, targeting specific consumer grievances regarding TPMs, software locks, or anti-consumer behaviour from companies. To do this we would need to compile a specific list of instances where consumer rights could be said to be violated by onerous TPMs, or platform abuse by tech companies, and then discuss whether it could be turned into a viable case that would set a good pro-consumer precedent. This would be quite a far reaching document to compile and I’d have to streamline it down to specific viable examples.
We agreed that should definitely hold one more meeting to clarify and explain the doubts raised in this discussion at a deeper level, though did not specify what time or date.
Would you guys be interested in seeing another such talk held? And is there any topic you guys would be interested in covering a bit more in depth? I’d like to cover competition law in India to see if there’s any precedent for this in history. We could also discuss a strategy for taking this forward whether by any regulatory channel or litigation/advocacy.
If you have any more thoughts on the policy/law we discussed, or any examples to add, feel free to add them here.
I’ll try and add the full summary of the meeting later when I get time. Unfortunately the recording of the meeting on my end completely lacks audio for some reason I don’t understand, so I’ll have to go off of the chat messages/memory. If anyone else took notes during the meeting share them here and I’ll link them.