hi,
On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Venkatesh Hariharan <[email protected]> wrote: > To sum up, we have been largely successful in "opposing all software patents > as a whole" at the policy level. However, at the level of the Indian Patent > Office, there is still some work to do. I do have some concerns in the above point. I have seen a quite a strange thing in a project(i should say set of projects) funded by ministry of communication information technology. As a student of one of the institutions getting a part of the funds, i have some first hand information of related discussions. Ministr of Communication Information Technology(MCIT) was advised by their legal consultant to do defensive patenting. Then professors and institutions who were developing the softwares were convinced by a set of meetings and brainstorming sessions. MCIT decided to take defensive patents for all the work and set up a separate fund for covering the expenses(majorly because when the project was conceived in 2006 and later there were no heads accounted for patenting expenses). How they got convinced? Patents from Microsoft, IBM and Google in different subjects where cited as samples on how industry like to restrict access to knowledge by a group from CDAC. As far as i know, all the hungama started from fear of many companies waiting for fruits of govt. funded research to pick ideas. That actually happened when a group in IBM invited a professor to share his latest experiences and thoughts on some subjects related to language technology. There actually he talked about something in the back of his mind and the company took a big initiative to patent the idea as their own in such a way that, any thought on the line is illegal :)(this is information from a reliable source for me, but i dont have any evidence for it). This actually shocked the professor and he inquired MCIT about their thoughts on new ideas or approaches explored as a part of crores of ministry funds and their legal protection(which is quite unnecessary). Any information on the projects, funding, plans all should be available under RTI i believe(Anyway, all these projects are MCIT projects and not any kind of sensitive information). The problem is a little bigger in another sense where, a part of govt. itself is doing an illegal thing(patenting software) which will give a bigger standing ground for anyone who is for software patenting. Regards Jinesh K J -- My Feelings,Expressions- http://logbookofanobserver.blogspot.com My scribblings- http://logbookofanobserver.wordpress.com SMC : My computer, My language http://smc.org.in സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ്, എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിന് എന്റെ ഭാഷ _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
