Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre of Internet and Society
Over the last three years, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India has studied sub-100$ mobile phones that sold in India and China along with researchers from Beijing Normal University under the Pervasive Technologies Project funded by IDRC. The project is investigating the hardware, software and content on these devices through copyright, patent and competition law. For the very first time, a patent landscaping exercise has been carried out for mobile phone in India. During this exercise we discovered that many software patents have been applied for and many have also been granted at the Indian Patent Office. This is a travesty, because India like the European Union has refused to give legal sanctity to software patents. But over the last eight years the patent rights-holder lobby in India has been try to change this through both the legislative and executive route. However, more recently the government had continued to demonstrate its intent to protect access to knowledge with the Department of Industrial Planning and Promotion publishing a consultation paper on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) earlier this year. CIS has proposed a “device level patent pool” and a “compulsory license for the pool” to protect innovation and affordability of sub-100$ devices. This we believe is an optimization solution which will keep most stakeholders happy with the regulatory outcome.
RSVP
To register your interest, RSVP to ea.commarts@uq.edu.au by Friday 14th April 2017.
All welcome, but places are limited.
It is recommended that participants attend the lecture, “Digital India”, which Sunil Abraham will deliver on Friday 28th April, 5:30pm in Room 212, Sir Llew Edwards Building (#14), St Lucia Campus.
Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director of the Centre of Internet and Society. He is also a social entrepreneur and Free Software advocate. He founded Mahiti in 1998 which aims to reduce the cost and complexity of Information and Communication Technology for the Voluntary Sector by using Free Software. Between June 2004 and June 2007, he managed the International Open Source Network, a project of the UNDP's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Between September 2007 and June 2008, he also managed ENRAP, an electronic network of International Fund for Agricultural Development projects in the Asia-Pacific facilitated and co-funded by International Development Research Centre, Canada.