My the best memories of Cricket are of course that of Sachin’s. His batting is the only thing that makes me watch cricket. I can not also forget those awesome innings which Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly played together. No doubt most of the Indians enjoyed Saurabh Ganguly’s glory days. Then came the time when he slipped down in performance (and team spirit as well I believe). Anyways, it was his last inning 2 days back. A test match against Australia. His performance was good in first inning. But in second inning, he got out duck. Zero runs in last inning of his test cricket life. Surely a sad story. But then Bradman also got Duck in his last inning. Anyways, of course his fans and his rivals put that video of his last inning on youtube. Since I don’t watch TV, I turned to youtube to watch that final moments, but it so seems that BCCI has made google remove those videos. Why? Well, I don’t know. BCCI doesn’t even have the copyright on those videos. This is what youtube says about those videos “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Board of Control for Cricket in India”. No, I do not understand. First of all, BCCI doesn’t own any copyright on these videos. Second of all, even if they were afraid that people will insult Ganguly, where is the freedom of expression. Didn’t they insult Ganguly by kicking him out of team for sometime. And didn’t they insult him by making him play under a junior’s captaincy who once played under Ganguly’s captancy. And what about the fans? The fans who couldn’t watch his last inning. BCCI simply snatched the freedom of expression. And of course Google supported them.

There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything: (more…)

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

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So, I was going through some links talking about IPR situations in India. In India people usually do not know what “copyright” is. Copyright is not even enforced to normal people. I guess its limited to large scale industries. The main reasons for this are mainly 2. 1: that people are not at all aware of it. 2: that India is a developing country, and enforcing copyright here will mean enforcing them to choose alternatives. I remember talking to an employee of this big firm (name/company-name compressed) who said that “we” know about piracy. Rather people sell pirated CDs in ground floor our office. “We” do not stop that, “we” encourage it.

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2007 was overall good. I got to learn lots of things, and got to do lots of things. Got to talk to lot of cool people. Though I wouldn’t forget that it also brought 7th semester which was like the most difficult semester I ever had. This semester probably took my anxiety level to top. Some of the highlights of 2007 are below:

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I have been thinking about business models for open source softwares. Though I couldn’t come up with proper answer. Lets see, let me try to start with different software people make and use.

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1 : Zeropage initially released its tracks under CC by-nd-nc. Their tracks are really cool. I specially liked Ambient India. So, I talked to them, and asked them if they could remove the nd-nc clauses, and indeed they did. It’s under CC by-sa now. :))

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So, with the inclusion of nd and nc in the different licenses that CC offers, we can actually define Creative Commons License as a license which (at least) allows others to use the work for personal purpose, to distribute the work, to get the work free of cost. “No derivative allowed” basically didn’t (doesn’t?) make sense to me because I usually prefer Free Culture in the sense that I think people should be allowed to use others product in their own product so that the creativity will work upon the existing work rather than to build already existing work. So, with the same thoughts I contacted pornophonique, (Kai basically) and asked him if they could release their songs without nd clause. Well, he was aware of the issues ( I was impressed by that) and gave a good reason for that, quote from his mail
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Parikrama is an Indian Rock band. And they are pretty good. They played in Antaragni, and since then I like this band. And beauty is that they allow their songs to be downloaded for free, free as in they don’t charge any money . Its good to see that some Indian band is doing something like this. I have contacted them asking to release these songs under CC, but lets see what they want.

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I started writing some quotes that I use sometimes as my status messages. my_status_messages . Then I got a hint that even using quotes can infringe copyright laws. Here are some links : (more…)