Copyrights and Copywrongs

Copyrights and Copywrongs

Why the Government Should Embrace the Public Domain 

When copyright doesn’t serve public welfare, states must intervene, and the law must change to promote human rights, the freedom of expression and to receive and impart information, and to protect authors and consumers  

Each of you reading this article is a criminal and should be jailed for up to three years. Yes, you. “Why?,” you may ask.

Have you ever whistled a tune or sung a film song aloud? Have you ever retold a joke? Have you replied to an e-mail without deleting the copy of that e-mail that automatically added to the reply? Or photocopied pages from a book? Have you ever used an image from the Internet in presentation? Have you ever surfed the Internet at work, used the ‘share’ button on a website, or re-tweeted anything on Twitter? And before 2012, did you ever use a search engine?

If you have done any of the above without the permission of the copyright holder, you might well have been in violation of the Indian Copyright Act, since in each of those examples you’re creating a copy or are otherwise infringing the rights of the copyright holder. Interestingly, it was only through an amendment in 2012 that search engines (like Google and Yahoo) were legalized.

Traditional Justifications for Copyright

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Domestically Manufactured Electronic Goods

Giving Preference to Domestically

Manufactured Electronic Goods

 

 

Domestically manufactured electronic products are expected to be more secure because effective monitoring processes can be put in place for manufacturing processes of security

sensitive electronic products

 

 

With increasing deployment of electronic devices and Information Technology applications in various sectors, the critical applications and associated infrastructure are becoming vulnerable to cyber attacks including espionage, financial theft and cyber terrorism. The forms of attack include backdoors, malicious code, identity-theft and information warfare. Instances of malware and other cyber attack tools pre-loaded on to electronic hardware equipment have been detected world-wide. Imported software and hardware IT products are often shipped with maliciously embedded malware. There have been concerns about supply chain security as computers, portable devices and other electronic devices pass through several suppliers before the final product goes on sale and somewhere along line someone could compromise a component or design a capability that could enable cyber attacks. Backdoors are not necessarily limited to software applications as hardware components, such as Embedded Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips or hardware encryption products could be compromised. Even critical infrastructure in civilian sector like Power System is being targeted with targeted attacks on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems (SCADA) emerging.

Using modified hardware provide attackers with a fundamental advantage compared to software based attacks. Due to the lower level of control offered attackers can more easily avoid detection and prevention. Hardware encryption products have also been found to be embedded with malicious software to enable leakage of encryption keys and reduction of encryption strength. In all these instances, the attack code is found to be hard coded in hardware.  
 

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