Recently, Tim noted that, for some strange reason, politicians don't like having the same level of surveillance applied to them as they wish to inflict on the public. Here's a nice case from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, found via Evgeny Morozov, where politicians aren't being given any choice:

UP [Uttar Pradesh] chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has decided to install CCTV cameras at the residences and camp offices of all the ministers in his cabinet.

As usual, the politicians are up in arms:

But a minister told Mail Today on the condition of anonymity that many of his colleagues including Raja Ram Pandey, khadi and village industry minister, Paras Nath Yadav, animal husbandry minister, Awadhesh Prasad, social welfare minister and Durga Prasad Yadav, stamp and registration minister, have opposed it.

The reasoning behind the move is interesting:

'the CM [Chief Minister] found the idea exciting mostly because he could boast of this action during Lok Sabha election campaign to claim that his ministers were observing complete transparency in their activities,' a source close to the CM said.

It's clear from this that there are some ulterior political motives behind this extreme form of governmental transparency. But equally, assuming that Uttar Pradesh's Chief Minister goes through with his plans, there's no denying that it would give politicians a unique insight into the reality of surveillance, and that can't be bad thing.

Indeed, what we need is a general rule that politicians anywhere who are contemplating increased snooping on their citizens must be put under 24x7 surveillance in their homes and offices before they are allowed to enact any such laws. If that were the case, I predict their enthusiasm for spying might well evaporate.

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As we noted a couple of weeks ago, when we wrote about India's moves to issue compulsory licences for the production of generic versions of expensive, patented drugs, the big fear for Western pharmaceutical companies was that other countries might follow suit. It looks like that's happening in Indonesia, where the country's president has signed a decree authorizing low-cost versions of key HIV drugs:

the measure would introduce widespread generic competition and generate major cost savings in the world’s fourth most populous country. The decree licenses patents for a slate of HIV medicines, and represents one of the most robust uses of pharmaceutical patent licensing power by a country since the World Trade Organization 1995 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (WTO's TRIPS).

Again, the concern for the major drug manufacturers must be that this latest move will encourage even more countries to start granting patent licenses for drugs needed by their populations, but which are currently unaffordable thanks to Western-level pricing. Indeed, it's hard to see what can stop that happening now that India and Indonesia have shown the way by invoking the right of countries to issue compulsory patent licenses, as enshrined in TRIPS.

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Techdirt has been following the important story of the kidney and liver cancer drug marketed under the name Nexavar since March, when India granted a compulsory license for the first time since re-instating patents on pharmaceuticals. Naturally, the patent holder, Bayer, fought back, and appealed against that decision. Now we learn from Intellectual Property Watch that Bayer has lost:

Last Friday (14 September), the Chennai-based Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) which is responsible for hearing appeals on patent applications, rejected a petition by German pharma major Bayer AG, seeking a stay on an order of India’s Controller of Patents granting a compulsory licence (CL) to Indian generic drug maker Natco Pharma Limited, for a drug used to treat liver and kidney cancer.

It's quite possible that Bayer will try to appeal to a higher court, but what's noteworthy is that this is just one of several other important pharma cases in India at the moment. For example, the Delhi High Court held that Roche’s patent on the cancer drug Tarceva was valid, but that an Indian generics manufacturer had not infringed on it because it had only been selling a variant of the drug. Another high-profile case concerns the blood cancer drug Gleevec, sold as Glivec in India, whose manufacturer, Novartis, is fighting India's refusal to grant it a patent. Here's the background:

The legal dispute in the Glivec case centres around a provision of India’s 2005 patent law, called Section 3(d), which states that "the mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that substance or the mere discovery of any new property or new use for a known substance or the mere use of a known process, machine or apparatus unless such known process results in a new product or employs at least one new reactant." The dispute brings to the fore a fundamental question: what is an "invention"? Or more precisely, how much innovation is required to obtain a patent in India?

Novartis insists that it is not fighting in order to get more money, but to vindicate its "honor". What this probably means is that it is trying to establish the principle that patents can be given for new forms of drugs, even if they provide no enhancement over earlier versions. If it loses the Gleevec/Glivec case, that could have serious repercussions for future patent applications by the company in India.

More generally, this current round of high-profile drug patent cases may well have major knock-on effects in other regions of the world. Western pharma companies are probably worried that their recent failures in India to gain certain patents or block local manufacturers of generics could be repeated elsewhere as emerging countries wake up to the flexibilities within the TRIPS agreement that India is currently exploiting. The Intellectual Property Watch article mentions three nations that are already considering this -- Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland.

An article in the leading medical journal The Lancet agrees that India's growing success might well encourage others:

In trying to limit compulsory licences and avoid efficacy tests on products, the Bayer and Novartis cases are seeking to undermine public health considerations aimed at improving access and therapeutic advantage. The TRIPS Agreement does not limit the grounds on which compulsory licences can be granted, and does not prevent patent applicants from having to demonstrate enhanced efficacy for their allegedly new and useful inventions. There are many problems facing access to and rational use of medicines in India but the provisions within the country's patent laws, if more extensively and properly applied, should help rather than hinder such access. India's laws and experiences could provide a useful example for low-income and middle-income countries worldwide.

Watch this space.

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Techdirt has written about earlier moves by India to block Web sites and censor Twitter accounts. The central concern seems to be that inflammatory online activity might stoke or provoke local outbreaks of violence of the kind seen recently in Assam. Now The Times of India is reporting that the Indian government wants to go further, and actively monitor who's saying what by setting up a new agency:

"The agency will have an effective monitoring system, comprising duly tasked and technologically empowered cyber monitoring and surveillance agencies, which can report build-up in time and forewarn government of any malicious use of the internet and social media," said an official. Such a central agency will, however, be set up only after putting in place a legal regime to take care of the issue of individuals' privacy and citizens' freedom of speech/expression.

Although it's good that legal safeguards will be put in place to safeguard privacy and freedom of expression, the devil is in the details: the fact that the Indian government has already shut down Web sites and Twitter accounts suggests that political fears are likely to override concerns about human rights if tensions begin to rise. The same story's quotation of a comment from a recent government meeting on the subject, with its references to "graded response and graded penalty to perpetrators", does not augur well:

"This will introduce predictability with regard to what kind of content is liable to be regulated and for how long, the structure and process for such regulation, proactive dissemination of information to counter false propaganda as well as a system of graded response and graded penalty to perpetrators," the minutes of the meeting said.

Meanwhile, Rebecca MacKinnon points us to news on the Net Prophet blog that Kyrgyzstan also wants to ramp up its censorship:

The only parliamentarian republic in Central Asia -- Kyrgyzstan -- has become the scene of a growing attack on Internet freedom. In the beginning of September, parliamentarians and security services proposed two new measures which, according to opinion leaders and experts, would increase censorship in an already restricted Internet landscape.

The reason -- of course -- is to "protect the children":

Online media and television often contain information accompanied by scenes of violence, pornography, and the promotion of drugs. That can affect the outlook of a child and lead to disastrous consequences. Such rules have been in place for a long time in other countries and have been known to work efficiently.

In particular, the Kyrgyz proposal seems modelled on the Russian approach, as the Net Prophet story notes:

the information portal Kloop cites human-rights activists emphasizing the similarities between the current law and the one passed a few weeks ago in Russia. The activists have found many similarities between the two laws.

This is the law that Techdirt reported on back in July. What this underlines is the way that bad laws have a habit of spreading, as successive countries bring in similar laws. That's not least because, rather than being able to take the moral high ground by offering clear examples of how to preserve freedom of speech on the Internet, Western countries are now widely perceived as hypocritical when it comes to censorship.

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We've argued for a while that the US's effort to censor websites at home while talking about internet freedom is hypocritical and takes away any moral high ground the US might have had with other countries concerning their efforts to censor the internet. What's stunning, unfortunately, is how rarely US officials seem to recognize this problem. When confronted on it -- they always revert to a "but that's different!" claim, missing that this is exactly the excuse that other countries use to justify their own censorship efforts.

Case in point: there's been significant concern in India, as the government has been censoring Twitter accounts of certain journalists and political groups, as well as blocking certain websites (sometimes just blog posts, other times, full websites). As that last link explains, the content targeted for censorship tends to have to do with content around "communal issues and rioting," and thus there's an argument to be made that the censorship is for the benefit of the public, to prevent riots. Even so, of course, one can question whether or not such censorship is even effective, let alone the rather obvious temptation for those in power to overblock for their own benefit. Indeed, that last link explains that there have been "egregious mistakes" in how the blocks have been carried out.

And what about the US? With plenty of attention being paid to the debate over this Indian censorship, the US State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, was asked her thoughts about what was happening, and trotted out the standard line about internet freedom:

"On the larger question of Internet freedom, you know where we are on that issue, and we are always on the side of full freedom of the Internet," she said.

Which sounds great, of course, but if Nuland thought that such a blanket statement would let her off, she was mistaken. Reporters immediately hit back, pointing to examples of the US fighting against internet freedom in its own back yard. And Nuland apparently wasn't happy, and pulled out the "but that's different!" excuse:

But when she was probed on the issue of WikiLeaks, Nuland snapped: "WikiLeaks didn't have to do with freedom of the Internet. It had to do with the compromise of US government classified information."

To be fair the US government has not "blocked" Wikileaks. It has blocked it on certain government computers and has used public pressure to have its hosting and payment processors cut it off. Whether or not that's to the same level as to what's happening in other countries may be debatable, but it certainly opens up the US to criticism on that point. And that's the real issue here. Even if you argue "but that's different," just the fact that the US has opened itself up to such an easy retort any time it argues for internet freedom in countries that espouse censorship, it makes it that much harder for the US to seriously push an internet freedom agenda abroad.

We've written a couple of times about Indian ISPs overblocking websites in response to vague court orders to try to prevent copyright infringement of a particular film. The responses seemed like massive overkill, such as blocking complete access to certain sites -- including sites like Vimeo -- that have perfectly legitimate reasons for existing. It seems that this overkill may be coming back to haunt some ISPs. Airtel has now been penalized by a Consumer Forum in India for going too far with its blocks. Airtel was ordered to pay one of its customers 20,000 rupees (or about $360) for "deficiency in Internet service, thereby causing mental anguish to the complaintant."

The order said that Airtel misinterpreted the original court order, and couldn't justify its actions by hiding behind it.

“By misinterpreting the Madras High Court order, Airtel blocked entire websites. It is needless to say that the company’s actions amount to deficiency in service as well as unfair trade practice,” said the forum.

Of course, the article goes on to note that there has been some confusion over what was originally asked to be blocked. The anti-piracy company, Copyright Labs, who asked for the block order, claimed that it had only asked for specific infringing URLs to be blocked, but a freedom of information request revealed that it had actually asked for blocking of entire websites.

All in all, this highlights some of the many problems that occur when you give copyright holders the power to order outright censorship. It's good to see some push-back. If other customers in India file similar complaints, perhaps ISPs will think twice before engaging in widespread censorship.

The European Union has been secretly negotiating a free trade agreement with India since 2007 that is worryingly similar to ACTA. Intellectual property rights enforcement would include border detention and seizure measures of goods being imported by India, exported by India or in transit via India's ports or airports. This could affect the generic drugs that India produces for its people, as we noted last month. The European Union is eager to wrap the agreement up by the end of the year, according to Belgium's Deputy Prime Minister and Trade Minister Didier Reynders. He wants to gain access to public procurement, chemicals and pharmaceutical products, health care, technologies, life sciences, renewable energy, and urbanization. This sounds peachy till the matter of India's arbitration notices is considered. As public interest NGO Madhyam states,

All Indian IIAs (International Investment Agreements) contain a broad asset-based definition of investment stating that investment means every kind of asset. This broad definition is then followed by an inclusive or non-exhaustive list of assets, which includes direct investment, portfolio investment, intellectual property rights, rights to money or to any performance under contract having a financial value, business concessions conferred under law or contract. Such a broad definition of investment expands the jurisdiction of IIAs to virtually cover almost all areas of investment.

Fair and equitable treatment (FET) has emerged as one of the most litigated issues in investment treaty arbitration. At the heart of this controversy is the meaning of FET. Almost all Indian IIAs contain the FET principle without providing much guidance regarding its meaning. Thus, determining the content of FET is left to the discretion of investment treaty arbitration tribunals.

This is the problem: foreign corporations go in with promises of investment opportunities and exploit the people till the government pushes back, then the foreign investor takes them to an international trade court.

The stumbling block at the moment is that India wants the EU to ensure free mobility of professionals without restrictions such as experience whereas the EU wants greater commitment by India to allow foreign investment in services such as retail, legal and postal. Allegations of the existence of a 'Kashmir center' run by anti-India elements in Brussels aren't helping. Meanwhile, opposition to the treaty is mounting from unions, international NGOs, and David Martin MEP, rapporteur for the European Union's International Trade Committee, whose recommendations helped to pull ACTA down in July.

When will they learn to stop negotiating treaties that only benefit big business in secret? Opposition to this treaty will continue to grow as more details emerge.

The successful landing of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars will hopefully be followed by several years of fascinating data collection about our planetary neighbor. The mission has already gathered tons of useful radiation measurements on its journey that will give scientists a better idea of what kind of radiation levels a future manned mission would face on a similar trip to Mars. Here are just a few other interesting Mars-related missions to peruse while Curiosity performs its self-diagnostics before roaming around the surface of Mars.

• Last year, Opportunity found some "slam dunk" evidence of water having existed on Mars. There may have been an ancient "wet" Martian surface that was hospitable to our own biology, and Curiosity may find additional geological evidence to support a watery history on Mars. [url]
• NASA also recently tested an inflatable heat shield, capable of withstanding hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 10. The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment 3 (IRVE-3) could help designers create spacecraft that can land on Mars without the use of fancy rocket cranes. [url]
• India is planning its own mission to mars in 2013 at an estimated cost of $70-90 million. But India's Department of Science hasn't fully approved a Mars mission with full funding, so these plans could be delayed. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

There have been plenty of artists inside and outside the system recognizing that, yeah, it sucks to not get paid for every copy of your work, but on the bright side, at least people are watching/listening/reading. Hit children's book Go The F**k to Sleep built buzz with unpaid copies roaming the internet. A former WB record exec claims "File sharing leads to more sales." Canadian rap star Drake leaking tracks all over the internet to get fans listening and talking. Why? Because the more people you can expose to your art, the better. But if you ask Hollywood about file sharing you get the alphabet in response: SOPA, PIPA, E-PARASITE, TPP, ACTA. Piracy is killing the motion picture industry, full stop.

Contrast that with this statement from Indian filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who works in a country where piracy is omnipresent, rather than just an over-inflated set of numbers to wave at easily impressed Congressmen:

While chatting about his experiences in Kanpur, where he's spent some part of his life while he was studying for the IIT entrance test, the topic veers to the menace of piracy in Indian cinema. But surprisingly, Anurag is one of the few filmmakers who feel that piracy is justified. "Main aaj jo kuch hoon, piracy ki wajah se hi hoon. It was through pirated versions of my movies that people got to see my work," he says and goes on to elaborate, "I feel that cinema is something that should reach the maximum number of people. If the audience does not get to see affordable cinema, it will turn to cheaper, pirated entertainment."

Unlike the hysteria we're used to, often conflated with knockoff fire extinguishers and child pornography, Anurag views piracy as more than simply a necessary evil, but an actual necessity. That is, if your aim is to have your work seen by as many people as possible. Obviously, if your aim instead is to do everything in your power to make sure that every set of eyeballs that come in contact with your work have paid upfront, then you'll take a much dimmer view of file sharing.

Anurag's not done yet, either:

"If we want to see a successful Hollywood today, often we have to take the help of piracy because it's not necessary that that film is legally available in your city. That's why filmmakers need to understand that their work should reach more and more people, because today cinema is not all about entertainment. In fact, I feel that we filmmakers should use cinema as a tool to make a strong impact on society. And if people are watching such meaningful cinema through piracy, I believe it only helps to deliver the filmmaker's message to the masses."

All very good points. First and foremost: sometimes you don't have a legal option because of licensing issues, regional blocking, "you people are all pirates," GEMA wants its cut, etc. But beyond the logistics is the fact that if you're an artist and you want to have an impact on people, it behooves you to get your creations in front of as many people as possible.

Here's a filmmaker working in a country where piracy is an absolute given, so much so that the government has taken some very surprising steps in an effort to curb it, including blocking file lockers and video sites at the ISP level. And yet, despite massive infringement, all he sees is the upside. He's doing this for a living and yet he's not loudly wondering where his boom mike operator will get his next meal or saying something asinine about a future full of cat videos, all the while attempting to recast record box office receipts as the Fifth Horseman of the Creative Apocalypse.

And before you write off Kashyap as just some dude you've never heard of from somewhere else, here's a brief recap of his work (via the Wiki):

As a filmmaker, he is known for Black Friday (2004), a controversial and award-winning Hindi film about the 1993 Bombay bombings, followed by No Smoking (2007), Dev D (2009) Gulaal (2009) That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011) and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012).

As a screenwriter, he wrote the scripts for the Filmfare Award-winning Satya (1998) and the Academy Award-nominated Canadian film Water (2005).

In 1999, Kashyap won the Best Screenplay award for Satya at the Star Screen Awards. The next year, his short film Last Train to Mahakali won the Special Jury Award at the same awards. His feature film debut Black Friday won the Grand Jury Prize at the 3rd Annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (2005), and was a nominee for the "Golden Leopard" (Best Film) at the 57th Locarno International Film Festival (2004).

He was listed on the The DNA power list: Top 50 influentials, a list of 50 most influential Indians in 2011. Kashyap currently serves on the board of Mumbai-based NGO, Aangan Trust, which helps protect vulnerable children around India.

It seems that those who value their own work as art over commerce are the ones who see how file sharing can pay dividends in the long run. Those who tend to view their work as a P&L sheet can only see the negative. You don't have to like or condone piracy to see the possible upside. Kashyap almost seems to view it as a distribution system that reaches places he can't, free of charge. Hollywood, however, seems to be too busy playing the victim to draw that same conclusion.

Back in 2008, we wrote about how the Indian government was demanding that RIM let it snoop on encrypted messages from Blackberry users. RIM's response was that it was simply impossible to snoop on its enterprise customers' messages, since they set their own encryption keys. A few months later, the government claimed to have cracked RIM's encryption, though the whole claim was sketchy. In 2010, the government again demanded the right to spy on Blackberry users (raising more questions about that encryption cracking claim). RIM apparently offered up a "solution" that the Indian government rejected, because it didn't let them snoop enough (basically it allowed snooping on consumers, but not corporate accounts).

Now, however, there are reports that RIM has come up with a "solution" to let the Indian government spy on enterprise users as well:

RIM recently demonstrated a solution developed by a firm called Verint that can intercept messages and emails exchanged between BlackBerry handsets, and make these encrypted communications available in a readable format to Indian security agencies, according to an exchange of communications between the Canadian company and the Indian government.

If you're a RIM Blackberry customer, and you bought into it because of the security features, now would be the point where you get pretty pissed off and start seeking alternatives. The report from the Economic Times suggests RIM did this because of the "importance" of the Indian market. RIM is clearly in trouble. Its failure to keep up on the innovation front means that the company is clearly struggling. But kowtowing to a government by allowing it to spy on users is hardly the sort of thing that's likely to get you more customers. It seems like it should do exactly the opposite.