Indian Copyright Bill Declares Private, Personal Copying "Fair Dealing" 192
asp7yxia writes "India's new copyright bill sounds like a pretty good piece of work: it declares private, personal copying to be 'fair dealing' (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright."
Love love love! I'm in love with lovely Johnny! (Score:1, Insightful)
Well there goes Bollywood.
watch India get put on an american copyright watch list now.
honesty
now a dance number
Re:SuddenOutbreakOf... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't want to respond, but I thought a bit of a perspective might help.
You know, there is a constant attempt to try and get rid of this problem. The solution to this problem is education and education is only now showing signs of improvement. As the GP mentioned, India has a very old culture and only in the last 50 years or so the country has been trying to get rid of this problem. Looking at the progress we made, we should be able to eradicate most of it in another 50 years.
Can you say the same of other countries ? It is not that long ago that the U.S. managed to mostly solve apartheid. How long did that take since the country gained its independence ? 200 years ? The U.S. by and large was made of immigrants. That means those guys went through hardships and came to the U.S. You would think they would have minimum common sense of how to treat other people. That didn't work out very well for colored people, did it ?
Humans are by and large animals. The only solution is education. Education takes time.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:1, Insightful)
You might be able to make the case that Indians work hard, but are they actually productive. I read one anecdote after another about terrible performance from Indian web designers, programmers, call center workers, etc.
I am very reluctant to believe that Indians are somehow inherently "better workers" than Americans.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Even now, any Indian would wet themselves at the prospect of being able to work in America.
producing little creative output(in before Slumdog)
I take that you do not know too much about India. I think it is short sighted to talk about a country you have not lived in for atleast few years. Whatever you think as true, might not be, you know.
I am an Indian, and I have lots of friends who went to USA, came back and do not want to go back there. Lest you think it is just anecdotal evidence, Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel has quite a bit of literature specifically set for this scenario. His finding was that, even though living in developed countries provide you better healthcare and even better security, the overall quality of living actually is same or even lesser in developed economies compared to developing economies*.
The overall quality of life is determined by lots of factors - one of the most important being relations. Humans seems to be most happy with very close and extended families and lot of friends, which is usually lost in western cultures. Most of my friends are back here because they want to be home.
Regarding creative output, I would have to say that you are quite wrong in that aspect. Also it is not correct to calculate creativity based on how many hollywood movies that country has come up with.
We have our own genres of music, two of the most popular being Carnatic [wikipedia.org] and hindustani [wikipedia.org], we have our own genres of dances, the most important eight being Kathakali [wikipedia.org], Bharatanatyam [wikipedia.org], Kuchipudi [wikipedia.org], Odissi [wikipedia.org], Manipuri [wikipedia.org], Sattriya [wikipedia.org] and Kathak [wikipedia.org].
Please note that these are only the major ones known throughout India. Each state has completely different set of dances and music associated with it which people follow widely. In addition to these we have good literature movement, very good drama movement and each state has their own movie system too. India has more than 20 major languages, so the movies are usually made for one language only - i.e. why it is not appreciated much outside the country.
What I would suggest is do not go just by what best sellers and media portray - the actuality might be very different. Also, please consider that what you consider as happiness might not be the only scale with which others measure theirs.
* Unless they are in poverty.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:1, Insightful)
According to the article, there is at least one freedom that India now has that the USA doesn't.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
You fail an Internets. Bollywood "creates" nearly twice as many films as Hollywood, which are watched by many more people [timesonline.co.uk]. I guess you wouldn't class them as real movies, since they haven't figured out that the real business is in marketing and moichandising [wikiquote.org].
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a false dichotomy. You make it sound like there's only two choices, live there or move to the US and they'd pick the US. What about the UK or Australia? Or (aside from the language barrier) Germany, France, or anywhere else in the EU for that matter? And I know plenty of Americans that drool of working in UAE for the high pay and tax-free status.
The only ones that want to go to the US are the ones that buy the lies that it's easier to start a business of your own in the US and make a fortune from it. But for anyone that wants to "work" somewhere for a paycheck, the US should be somewhere in the top 20, but not the top one, unless you have specific requirements for language and other things (like climate, I'm not a fan of the UK climate). How would you list the top countries to work if you could work anywhere without regard to language and such?
Re:SuddenOutbreakOf... (Score:2, Insightful)
Disclaimer : I am an Indian.
I didn't want to respond, but I thought a bit of a perspective might help.
You know, there is a constant attempt to try and get rid of this problem. The solution to this problem is education and education is only now showing signs of improvement. As the GP mentioned, India has a very old culture and only in the last 50 years or so the country has been trying to get rid of this problem. Looking at the progress we made, we should be able to eradicate most of it in another 50 years.
Can you say the same of other countries ? It is not that long ago that the U.S. managed to mostly solve apartheid. How long did that take since the country gained its independence ? 200 years ? The U.S. by and large was made of immigrants. That means those guys went through hardships and came to the U.S. You would think they would have minimum common sense of how to treat other people. That didn't work out very well for colored people, did it ?
Humans are by and large animals. The only solution is education. Education takes time.
Wow, this is when I wish there was a special +6 rating for comments. Very well said.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not going to argue that the GP is right or wrong - I haven't talked to many Indians, I have no clue.
However, I will say that being politically active is not necessarily being politically effective. The U.S. has two major parties. Two major candidates compete for the Presidential election, getting anywhere from 95-99% of the total popular vote. You have two choices: right or left? And most of the rest of the world doesn't consider your left-wing choice to even fall left of centre of their respective political spectra. Where's your choice? Where's your freedom? Where's your free market? Politics in the U.S. is a duopoly. It's certainly better than a monopoly, no doubt about that. But how much better is it? How effective is political activism when you only have two real choices?
(Aside. Granted, the nature of the American republic allows for markedly different governance at the level of states. I'm painting an overly broad stroke, and the degree to which there is separation of powers between federal and state levels is a significant advantage that the American republic has. But at least on the federal level, where copyright law resides to the best of my understanding, there are only two real choices. Actually, come to think of it, you might have less choice than you think: the American constitution is written in such a way as to oblige - in theory with considerable exceptions that would take too long to discuss here - the federal government to follow international treaties that it has ratified.)
I won't pretend to speak for other nations, with the exception that I know that there are at least several [wikipedia.org], to put it mildly, political parties in India. However, in Canada we have four (foreseeably five in the next election) parties that may prove to have a significant share of seats in Parliament. While the NDP [wikipedia.org] and Bloc [wikipedia.org] (failed at figuring out how to directly link due to /.'s encoding) are generally not in the running to form government, they sometimes find themselves with the balance of power during minority governments when the two dominant parties (Liberals [wikipedia.org] and Conservatives [wikipedia.org]) are in a power struggle. Granted, this doesn't happen very often, but because of the significant minorities that they hold, they generally have at least a bit of political clout.
Tommy Douglas [wikipedia.org] is an important example. He was a social democratic (first leader of the NDP) politician who had, arguably, one of the greatest impacts in Canada's political history. He was the first leader/head of any government in Canada to propose that we constitutionally guarantee certain inviolable rights, which ultimately led to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (since our Charter is part of our constitution, it is - again, in theory and with exceptions - supreme over other laws). He's also now widely recognized as the "father" of universal health care in Canada. He helped to accomplish and realize these two important (and many would consider essentially Canadian) feats without his party ever forming government at the federal level.
This is the power of choice in politics. This is an illustration of effective political activism on the part of social democratic supporters in the mid-90s. In Canada, at least, our expectation is that government will step in place to address the power asymmetry that arises between the industry and the consumer when competition in the markets fails.
(Aside. What happens when competition in government fails and there's a significant power asymmetry between politicians and citizens?)
Finally getting to my on-topic points. Now, again, I have little k
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
You were 100% correct to put the scare quotes there.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fairly sure that, having seen what the Mumbai slums look like, that they're about as awesome as being homeless.
Look at that little footnote indicated by the *. "Unless they are in poverty."
That's the footnote that swallows the rule. Mumbai slums are already being excluded.
Of course developing countries are great if you're not in poverty--the problem with developing countries is that there is a lot more poverty in the first place. And if you're not part of it, you can take advantage of it via cheap prices, cheap labor, etc.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, if my previous mail looked too nationalistic. I am a person who wants to be a global citizen in my views; even though I dont succeed all the time.
I completely agree that it sucks to live in most places - esp if you are quite poor. What I was just trying to say in my original post was that there are many other things which people do not consider when they ponder about happiness. I myself was not aware of it until I read Jared. So, I was just trying to put it forward.
Again, sorry if my mail looked like I was being too nationalistic. I myself wants to come to US for Ph.D in say 4-5 years, because I consider the educational institutions in US much better than that of India. So, as you can see, my intent was not to disparage US or not to put India in a pedestal. Just that different countries have different positives and negatives.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:3, Insightful)
I take it you have never lived in Western Europe... where it is standard to have university payed for, 6-8 weeks mandatory vacation, national strong unions, free health care, and a social safety net large enough to hold a blue wale if you do in fact get fired.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:1, Insightful)
i suspect people like you are in the minority.
no he's not .. I'm with him and I'm an Indian too. That makes two of us and you are just one :P
I say that after having lived in the US for 3 years. Sure it's good money.. and life is just easy out there. But man does it get lonely... made me realize something must be wrong with me. No .. I was just in the wrong place.
Americans are just different. Unless you are brought up there, you can't be happy with people there...do you know what I'm saying? Or maybe you'll get used to it after living for 10 years. I've always wondered why there are lot of depressed people in America. Now I know.
Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think we yanks rose to world power status so quickly, relatively speaking?
A clean-slate advantage, vast tracts of relatively unpopulated land and natural resources, coupled with a rapidly advancing technology base?
and it doesnt exist in united states ? (Score:4, Insightful)
in your country, top 5% of the society has 74% of financial wealth. similar applies for income and total wealth. note that, financial wealth is much important because they are major tools for generating more wealth (investments, interest, instruments) and getting even richer.
so you live in this country, where 80% of society does with approx 15% of wealth. and in that country EVERYthing costs money. education costs money. a lot, so that if you dont find a scholarship, you start life deeply in debt. if you do find a scholarship you probably start life as an indentured servant. to start life without being bonded or indebted you have to be in the very, very tiny genious margin of 1/1000 of society. how many people are in there ? are you ?
staying alive costs money. getting a nose patched can cost an arm and a leg. (until the recent healthcare bill of yours), it was possible that you could be denied treatment even if you were able to pay your insurance payments, even if you were a kid.
rents cost arm and a leg. everything is sold from exorbitant prices despite being manufactured in china for dimes.
so. tell me.
are you fool enough to believe that a caste system in a country which 5% has 74% of wealth and 80% of society does with 15%, does not exist ? it was better in medieval code for fuck's sakes - serf was legally and customarily entitled to 33% of the produce from the farm they tilled for their lord