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"As the world economy increasingly centers on "memes, genes, and bits," new technologies permit new production models that threaten entrenched interests. As a consequence, we face a looming political battle that could reshape the information society. There are three main barriers to democratic participation in setting the rules of the information economy that bias the playing field in favor of entrenched interests and old models. The first is that the harms of bad A2K policy often take a long time to manifest themselves, making it difficult to instill a sense of urgency in the body politic and among policy elites. The current experience of "information overload" obscures increasing regulation of the use of knowledge. The second is that information policy issues tend to be highly technical and esoteric to the uninitiated, and difficult even for the initiated to analyze effectively. The third is that the promises of a world where knowledge is free as the air we breathe seems ephemeral in the face of the concrete harms claimed by those who would fence off the information commons."

How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination, and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate, and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life, and collective wisdom as a species?

In general, discussions at the conference covered four main points. The first is that official free access to law is not enough. Full free access requires a range of different providers and competitive republishing by third parties, which in turn requires an anti-monopoly policy on the part of the creator of legal information.... Second, countries must find a balance between the potential for commercial exploitation of information and the needs of the public. This is particularly relevant to open access to publicly funded research. The third point concerns effective access to, and re-usability of, legal information. Effective access requires that most governments promote the use of technologies that improve access to law, abandoning past approaches such as technical restrictions on the reuse of legal information. It is important that governments not only allow, but also help others to reproduce and re-use their legal materials, continually removing any impediments to re-publication. Finally, international cooperation is essential to providing free access to law. One week before the Florence event, the LII community participated in a meeting of experts organised by the Hague Conference on Private International Law's Permanent Bureau; a meeting entitled "Global Co-operation on the Provision of On-line Legal Information." Among other things, participants discussed how free, on-line resources can contribute to resolving trans-border disputes. At this meeting, a general consensus was reached on the need for countries to preserve their legal materials in order to make them available....

The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 was passed by both the Houses of Parliament on 23.12.08. The Act was notified after the assent of the Hon'ble President on 5.2.2009. The Depertment has prepared following draft rules under the IT(Amendment) Act., 2009 : 1. Section 52 - Salary, allowances and other terms and conditions of service of Chairperson and Members. 2. Section 54 - Procedure for investigation of misbehaviour or incapacity of Chairperson and Members. 3. Section 69 - Directions for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information 4. Section 69A - Blocking for public access of any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in a computer resource 5. Section 69B - Monitoring and Collecting Traffic Data or information 6. Section 70B(1) - Appoint an agency of the Government to be called the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team 7. Section 70B(5) - The manner in which the functions and duties of agency shall be performed. Your comments/feedback may be forwarded to Dr. Gulshan Rai at grai@mit.gov.in

"The six classes of works are: (1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances: (i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students; (ii) Documentary filmmaking; (iii) Noncommercial videos (2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset. (3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network. (4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if: (i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and (ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation

"Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has not issued any orders/guidelines in respect of ban of mobiles manufactured in China and operating in the country for want of valid International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. However, Department of Telecom (DOT) has issued instructions to Telecom Service Providers that calls from mobile handsets with any IMEI number which is not available in the latest updated IMEI database of Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA) alongwith without IMEI or all zeroes IMEI are not processed and rejected with effect from 24 Hrs. of 30th November 2009. This information was given by the Minister of State for Communications & Information Technology, Shri Sachin Pilot in written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today. "

Google Street View, the controversial website that shows 360-degree street views of many of Britain's cities does not breach the Data Protection Act, the information commissioner ruled today. Hundreds of people complained that their privacy was breached by the service, which launched last month for 25 cities and towns. Today the Information Commissioner's Office rejected those complaints but said it would watch Google closely to ensure that it responded quickly to requests for the removal of images that identified individuals.

"First of all, keep in mind that it's not only stickers-or, for that matter, PCs and dishwashers and insurance policies and designer coffee-that become commodities. Every organization faces the challenge. IBM is discovering that even its traditional discrete consulting services are slowly becoming commoditized, a term IBM itself uses. Companies like Wipro-based in Bangalore, India-are replicating some of IBM's consultative offerings at much lower prices, which is why, to IBM's chagrin, companies like Louis Vuitton and Target are turning to Wipro for basic information technology and data-management expertise."

There is a growing debate about the best successor model to commercial newspapers, with many contending proposals. I will mention three, each of which assigns a large role to an electronic public sphere: (1) private foundations or donors either provide endowment for newspapers or for nonprofits that employ political journalists (Propublica is the leading example, with editors and twenty-eight journalists who provide content to print and online media); (2) a public system that would extend the public broadcasting model to print media; and (3) a national endowment for journalism, with support tied to audience size (proposed by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres). This is not the time or place to explore these alternatives. But in this fourth arena, cyber-utopianism-a celebration of the dispersed, decentralized, egalitarian, Jeffersonian, participatory, deliberative electronic public sphere-is not only misplaced but dangerous.

Privacy advocates urge people who want to set up a personal health record online to read the fine print. Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, said sites like the Mayo Clinic Health Manager aren't currently covered by national laws that specify cases in which health care systems can access and share information without patients' consent.

Handa (26) was arrested late on Saturday after the police traced the internet protocol address from which the profile was created to his residence at Four Bungalows in Andheri. Booked for breach of trust, forgery and under the Information Technology Act, 2000, he has been remanded in police custody. During interrogations, Handa admitted to the police that he had created the fake profile whom "he was interested in". Handa first met the victim two years ago when the latter had just started to make a career in astrology. The two became friends and for a while, they even shared an apartment in Andheri, the police said. However, the two subsequently fell out when the friend brushed aside Handa's "advances".

EFF's Teaching Copyright curriculum was created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way. Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: * Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. * See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. * Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. * Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior.

References to the concept of hyperlinking and other futuristic ideas in this 1945 article from The Atlantic.

The Act contains some contentious provisions - such as Clause 79, which has been widely criticised as being "draconian". Some provisions recommended by the Parliamentary Committee had been rejected by the Union government - particularly Clause 73 relatin g to cyber cafes maintaining a registry of persons and Web sites logged into. The Bill has been passed in some undue haste, for reasons not very clear. In this regard, the points raised by the Opposition are valid because the Act lacks clarity in many re spects, and seems to have been drafted without adequate legal and, more important, technical inputs. It must be emphasised that the optimistic projections by organisations such as NASSCOM (the National Association for Software and Service Companies), that the Act would boost the volume of e-commerce in India from the current Rs.450 crores to over Rs.2,5 00 crores and to Rs.10,000 crores by 2002, are quite misplaced. First, in the Indian context, much of the e-commerce involves neither business-to-client (B2C) transactions nor business-to-business (B2B) transactions but largely revenue from advertising o n the Web. Therefore, it becomes difficult to term precisely what e-commerce is and to quantify its value. Secondly, the Act itself is not going to alter greatly the situation because, for one, as legal experts point out, even in the absence of the Act t he judiciary would not have dismissed an evidence just because it is in the nature of an e-mail or an electronic document. It would have been treated as circumstantial evidence to the case at hand, and the provisions in the Indian Penal Code and the Crim inal Procedure Code have sufficient interpretative room to provide for prosecution if such evidence is conclusive.