When it was first launched, India’s identity project faced stiff opposition. Fifteen years later, it looks like the dystopia we were assured would befall us has not come to pass. To the contrary, there is widespread acknowledgement that in an increasingly online world, digital identity is a necessity.
Given how widely OTPs are used for a range of different purposes, it has become the focus of attention for malicious actors. While that might be the case, the system that the Department of Telecommunications is building to crack down on these abuses, will excessively centralise data and exceed its authority.
Even though it is framed as an author’s right, copyright law was originally designed to protect publishers. This is why, to this day, authors rarely make enough from their books to earn a living. What authors want, most of all, is to be read. If AI does that, shouldn’t we rethink copyright?
Laws have always evolved in response to technological change. We’ve had a long tradition of this sort of change ever since the Industrial Revolution. We are standing on the threshold of a similar technological shift, and our legal system is likely to change yet again.
Most rare diseases are had to treat because the economies of scale just aren’t favourable. However, since they are of genetic origin, it should be possible to leverage the breakthroughs we’ve made in genetic engineering to find effective solutions. Since India has a number of endogamous communities, the data we can contribute could be extremely valuable.
The open source sustainability crisis refers to the fact that many of the foundational open source applications on which all of us depend are maintained by small teams of volunteers in their spare time. Since the DPGs are also open source, do we run the risk of facing a similar challenge as we build DPI solutions using them?
India’s new data protection law introduced the concept of age tokens as a means to obtain verifiable parental consent. If this concept can be adapted to apply to online content, it should finally be possible for us to ensure that online content is delivered in an age-appropriate manner without violating personal privacy.
It might appear as if AI is ingesting copyrigjht material - text, images, videos, etc. - and regurgitating it out in response to prompts. But if you peel back the layers, the underlying process looks a lot more like learning than copying.
As anyone who lives in India knows, it is really hard to get aroundon your own. Our addressing system is broken and while GPS gets you to vicinity of where you need to be no trip is complete without making a phone call to navigate the last mile. We need a better system. And we might just have got one.
Copyright law must strike a fine balance between incentivising creators and ensuring that new creative works can be built on the back of existing works. In the context of modern online content distribution this may call for an amendment of existing laws.
