How long before the Supreme Court puts forth something similar in India?

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39249601,00.htm

After the UK court order to a few ISPs to open up their records to facilitate the arrest and trial of some British citizens involved in sharing software using P2P, I wonder how long it will be before this trend sets foot in Indian shores as well.

Maybe not so soon, considering that in the grand scheme of things, this is probably a very small thing for the government to worry about, but a few software majors can start putting pressure all the same. And given the importance of the money these guys pour in to improve IT-related infrastructure here, we might just see the government take a few steps in this direction.

IIT-K making rail journey more secure

IIT Kanpur is developing a software for rail safety which will make journey on a train less risky. SIMRAN, a satellite imaging software for rail navigation system, may lessen the number of collisions. More news here at EFYTimes.

IT Act may come up in Winter

IT Act, which is being amended to include a wide range of cyber crimes like 'Salami Attack', 'Phishing', 'Identity Theft', 'Video Voyeurism' and 'Denial Of Service (DOS)' besides cracking down on child pornography on the Net, is expected to be introduced in the Parliament during the winter session. More news at Times of India.

Software Patents in India Stopped.

From Slashdot article

Indian parliament deleted the section from the patents bill regrading the software patents as left parties prevailed over the Government on the issue. This may be a major victory for free software foundation(fsf) which has been lobbying hard against the bill.

What next? A dozen Information Technology Research Goals

This seems to be an old document (June 1999) but it is by Jim Gray (Turing Award Winner; did lots of work on distributed systems and scalability). He outlines the future trends of the information technology space for the coming years and explains how research plays an important role in it. A very nice piece of visionary work. I recollect seeing many interesting articles like these and will post them the moment I find out their URLs.

India's R&D: Reaching for the Top

"There is a silent scientific repatriation taking place in India"
-- Raghunath A. Mashelkar, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research

Full Sory at: Science magazine

BHEL,TCS develop software for power stations

`POWER Pack' — a software jointly developed by Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to aid in asset management of power generating stations, is proving to be a hit with power developers both in the country and abroad.

Full story at: The Hindu Business Online

To Open Source Or Not?

Today I attended a one day workshop on IPR organized by the SIDBI center in IIT Kanpur. The workshop was taken by a SanShadows(tm) - a consultancy firm in the IPR field.

There was a lot of talk about Patents, the WTO-TRIPS, trademarks, copyrights, design registrations, etc. After the entire affair was over I got into a discussion with the lady who was speaking on patents about the issue of software patents in India.

It so seems, that India has opened up to software patents - where a software having (a) novelty (b) uniqueness and (c) industrial application is patentable. There is this other clause which deals with software + hardware, more towards the firmware/embedded systems domain.

Anyways, with the whole discussion I reached a dilemma, tomorrow if someone in Inda was to open a software company based on a new idea:

1. Should he enter the market with his product open sourced - or should he first patent his software and then enter the market?

2. In the long run which of the two options will be harmful for the company? Remember this is a small inventor I'm talking about. One or two people who want to startup their venture.

3. In the long run which of the two options will be harmful for the Indian society?

4. Should he patent the software, thus prohibiting other players from entering into the market, and then open source it too - so that other people may develop his software and it is he, who benefits in the end? Is this possible/legally allowed?

What do you think?