Red Hat, IIT to host summit on IP reform

What do open source, seed saving, traditional music and medicine, and patent policy have in common? They're all things on which policymakers in India want better international deals.

By Frederick Noronha, LinuxWorld.com, 08/10/06

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NEW DELHI, Aug 10: If copyright doesn't work in the less affluent world, try copyleft. A wide network of corporates, campaigners and senior officials are to meet this month-end in the national capital to look at new paradigms of creating and sharing knowledge. Titled "Owning the Future: Ideas and their role in the digital age", this symposium is being jointly organized by the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Red Hat, on August 24-25.

This 'invitee only' event is expected to bring in some 150 technologists, policy makers, legal experts and leaders from the Free Software and Open Source communities "to examine whether our current policies on copyrights, patents and the like promote or hinder innovation". In last year's World Intellectual Property Organization meetings, India was among the countries calling for a slowdown in the trend towards more exclusive rights in inventions and content.

"All the speakers have confirmed," Red Hat India's Mumbai-based head for Open Source affairs Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan told this correspondent.

Organisers said the meet "will seek to examine the notion of intellectual 'property', the emerging philosophy of 'copyleft', and 'Free and Open Source Software'. Dropping a hint of where they stand, they said these issues could have a "significant impact on the 21st century"

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright and is the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on the distribution of copies and modified versions of a work for others and require the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. Examples include the GNU General Public License (GPL) for software and the Creative Commons licenses for non-software content.

Growing via the Internet, copyleft has been applied to fields like software, documents, music, and art. In some cases, the application has been immensely successful, as in the case of computing where an entire operating system has been built through this means.

This is the second such symposium organized by Red Hat. The first was held in Raleigh, along with the University of North Carolina.

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