Srijan

Live Mint, the Wall Street Journal and HT venture in India, recently issued a notice to CSE to remove all its articles from its website, and called it "theft" at their blog: http://blogs.livemint.com/blogs/romanticrealist/archive/2008/10/18/whose-ipr-is-it-anyway.aspx.

I am not an expert on IPR issues, but being promoters of open source philosophy for promoting "equity" and "justice" I believe that IPRs can be regressive.

So, a little bit infuriated by the use of strong words such as "theft" and "steal", I wrote this comment on their blog post.

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I think the author needs to move away from the use of words like "steal" and "theft", for the simple reason that CSE has been giving references to all articles it sources from news magazines and journals for its portal, clearly and with links to the sites from where it sourced them. In that sense CSE's portal is actually "driving traffic" to Mint's own site, just as it is doing for other sources, and "making them" "earn money".

Let me also mention that the intended readers of this portal are environmentalists and researchers, who have been extremely under-served in this country, in terms of digitally available research content which mostly gets hidden behind IPR and payment/password protected information. CSE has released its 20 years of "Down To Earth" content, on the portal, with a clear intention of serving this community, and thus enabling the community to help create a paradigm shift in environment research and policy making.

I can say this with some confidence as I have worked very intensely over this year in building the environment portal with Sunita (we're the development company; and I was leading the project from our end;). People who want to see vested interest in my post here will ofcourse see it, but really I have no business making this post this and defending CSE and Sunita - as we've been paid and our 'job' on the portal is done. I've seen the passion with which she and her team have invested time and energy in minute details of the portal, with the motive of enabling a change in India and this ignored space.

It must have been a big decision for a non-profit which earns nearly all its revenues from its premier magazine (Down to Earth, and related compilations), to release all the content of 20 years on the portal. Ofcourse they want to earn money from the portal (and I suspect they are doing that now, as the author has suggested, as there are no commercial ads running), and should. They must earn well, and carry on their cause of environmental and societal change.

Any such discussion, I believe, if revolves only around rules and policies without considering "motivation" and "intention", then it ends up becoming inhuman - more like the world we live in today. And isn't this that we're all looking to change - all the mess that we've created in our world?

I have asked some key people at CSE who've been involved in this portal, as to why they are there with CSE, and the answer often has been "this is more meaningful". Mind you, they are there even while compromising on the higher salaries that they can potentially get at publications like Live Mint. You hear these people's voice tone change when one talks about Anil Agarwal, the founder of CSE. This motivation and inspiration runs throughout CSE, and is visible in day-to-day interactions with them.

I believe these aspects of an organisation and people, must be taken into account before passing strong judgments on them, specifically with strong words like "theft" and "steal". I must mention that being a promoter of the "open source" movement in India, we people hate proprietary stuff and promote knowledge and information (and money/wealth for that matter) to be shared among the world's people for fulfilling a larger purpose of our lives.

Ofcourse, it maybe difficult for people with a pure capitalist (and profiteering only) mindset, to relate this thought process of "sharing" and "equity", to which most of us in the FOSS community, and according to me, CSE and Sunita, relate quite easily and instinctively.