On Tuesday 17 Jun 2008 07:05, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

hi,

we would appreciate comments and feedback on this:

http://nrcfosshelpline.in/playing/

"Hence, even though the Standards adopted by a country should be aligned to the international standards but they need to be adapted for local requirements and should ensure that there are no unfair royalty payments made."

Fair and unfair are very subject. If a piece of technology is required to implement a standard it must automatically be free of cost and IPR encumbrances. Such technology will automatically be allowed to propagate without any attached IPR.

"Even if its made open, it cannot be used to create a competing solution because of the size of the standard."

Wrong focus.

"6.7. Security

Black box proprietary software makes the detection of viruses in code impossible. There have been instances where the privacy of the users has been compromised while using proprietary softwares. The case where Australian agency pushed hacker code into mostly used proprietary software is an example of this."

Should read "Black box proprietary software makes detection of malicious code impossible.There have been instances where the privacy of the users has been compromised while using proprietary softwares. The case where Australian agency pushed malicious code into mostly used proprietary software is an example of this."

"9. Purpose of a Standard

14.10.2. Desirable Characteristics of Open Standards

4. Open Standard shall make specification documents available freely or at a nominal small charge."

Should be changed to

4. Open Standard shall make specification documents available freely from a public accessible website or at a nominal small charge in the case of hard copies.

On Wednesday 18 Jun 2008 09:56, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

On 17-Jun-08, at 8:29 PM, jtd wrote:

...

On Tuesday 17 Jun 2008 07:05, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

...

hi,

we would appreciate comments and feedback on this:

http://nrcfosshelpline.in/playing/

"Hence, even though the Standards adopted by a country should be aligned to the international standards but they need to be adapted for local requirements and should ensure that there are no unfair royalty payments made."

thanks for taking the trouble to go through the document and give feedback. It *is* a bit time consuming, but if academia, industry and the community can create something for the governement to measure its actions, maybe good will come of it.

The least the community can do is support those spending time.

Also the article focuses on the need for standards and the related problem of keeping them free of IPR encumberances. But it does not effectively address the root cause of encumberances - software and business methods patents. The "per-se" term must be removed from Indian patent law with a clear single line statement Software and business methods cannot be patented. Attempts to obfusicate this by describing hardware in terms of HDL (or hardware with some software in rom / cpld / pgas etc) should also be clearly cited as not patentable. Thus a piece of hardware maybe patented however it's description (which is what an HDL is essentially) or the resultant output from a piece of hardware (actions of a piece of hardware controlled by a piece of software) cannot be patented.

Essentially electronic machines are mathematical processing machines which result in some output. There are very large number of element permutations and combinations which could produce the same result. Thus the only way a patent could work would be to patent the result and the process. In short one would have to patent 1+1=2 cause someone else can do 1+.5+.5=2. The whole idea of software (or even electronic device) patents is so utterly ridiculous it's a wonder that the law permits that.

Rgds JTD