Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Knowledge-sharing and the public domain in India

Public Domain in India, World-Information.Org, December 12, 2004. An interview with Lawrence Liang, a researcher with India's Alternative Law Forum. Quoting Liang: 'One thing that the first generation of research does not do is address the larger problem of the ecology of knowledge, which is a much larger debate about how knowledge is produced, distributed, shared, etc. We address this question following three different avenues. The first refers to a response to the public domain problem, especially as configured through the liberal US constitutional discourse. The second is the emergence of the entire free software and open source movement, and the challenges that it throws up in terms of models of production of knowledge. The third avenue concerns the globalization of the media industry, and the emergence of a highly vibrant grey economy. We feel that the earlier model of IP protection does not capture these three parts. It does not address the public domain question, the collaborative knowledge production question, and the question of the grey economy.'